The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when".
Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine.
It's less than 30 years since we had a much, much larger eruption than Eyjafjallajökull. Mount Pinatubo erupted one June 12th 1991. That was a VEI-6 eruption.
Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.
Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..
> To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom
I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments.
If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them in space or on other planets.
I'm with you on the dangers of all these things, but I'm going to disagree that they're civilization reset events - although they could spark one.
A massive global famine could kill a billion humans or more. But if the 1 in 10 of us (likely the poorest, most vulnerable people) died, would civilization end? I don't think so.
However, if that leads to all out nuclear war, then we have two enormous correlated shocks to the system. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough, but some number of such shocks could push us over the brink.
Just like an economic meltdown or a plane crash, it's never one thing that goes wrong, it's a sequence of failures.
Yeah, UK kept harassing Iceland because of that mess with Icelandic banks. Then suddenly, volcano erupted, airplanes started having difficulties landing in Heathrow, and the harassment suddenly stopped.
> (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova)
My understanding is that the current leading theory is a drastic shift in outflow of Lake Agassiz (an expanded version of Lake Manitoba in Canada).
Supposedly there's an associated "black mat" visible in the soil at ~12ky depth. Since I live in the middle of North America and I own an excavator, I'm tempted to see if I can find it..
If you haven’t read “Magicians of the Gods” you might enjoy it. There’s some stuff that’s a little “out there” but the general idea of a cyclic cataclysmic event with a ~12K year periodicity seems to have some merit.
I know this is pedantic, but based on the order of events in the article wouldn’t 543 be the worst year to be alive? By then you would have experienced the cumulative horror of starving and freezing through two volcanic events and watching a third to half of your friends and family die of plague. 536 would have a been frightening and confusing as the volcanic fog began to roll in, but you couldn’t know the terror of what was to come.
I agree with you, but I also think 536 could be considered worst because of the initial shock. But as other events roll in with time, people may become used to expecting the worst.
I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.
Objectively you are right, subjectively I think what matters is short term contrast. 535 vs 536 has a much steeped drop in quality of life than 542 vs 543.
How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption?
After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months?
Forecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination.
I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.
I'm going to plug a charity here, Allfed, working to develop technologies to let us survive the loss of conventional agriculture for a period of years by working out efficient and economical ways to convert things like, e.g., dead trees into digestible calories and the plans to deploy them in the event of a large volcanic interruption or asteroid strike or nuclear exchange.
In what sense have we “recovered” from supply chain disruptions? I go to the store and still routinely see empty shelves where TP should be; have experienced meat shortages in recent days; and stores are still rationing things like hand sanitizer (when you can find it), canned goods, meat, and rice.
In our recent past, we experienced some disruption from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
On a less likely and more extreme level, Yellowstone has erupted 3 times over the past 2.1 million years [2] and there are other known supervolcanos [3] on Earth.
How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? We're apparently not very susceptible to a few degrees of global cooling, so at least we have that going for us.
I’ve recently gotten through this period in the “History of Byzantium” podcast series. Justinian had just recently retaken many of the old western Roman provinces, not least of which was Rome itself, and the breadbasket of North Africa. Things were finally looking good for the Romans again when the plague hit. The armies were unfortunately overextended and now half their ranks were dead or dying. It was an irresistible target for the Persians, the steppe horsemen and the Goths which ultimately weakened them all just in time for the Arab invasions.
I listened to this years ago but could still remember Procopius' quote. I just looked it up and apparently the consensus at the time of recording (2013) was a meteor strike rather than a volcanic eruption. Interesting.
I don't mean to be too precise, but the article is slightly undermined by the claim in the graphic that the 543 Justinian plague hurried the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The 'Eastern' Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the walls of Constantinople were breached by the Ottomans. Very difficult to claim that the Romans fell in the 6th Century. I mean nearly 500 years later Basil is rolling back into Syria on the back of repeated victories over the Bulgarians. Always feel let down by these sorts of overblown claims that are easy to slap into an info-graphic.
The precise date of the fall of the Roman Empire -- and the point where it became Byzantium -- is a subject of debate. There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman". Whatever your personal views may be on this matter, there indeed are some scholars that date the fall of the Roman Empire on the failure of Justinian's restauratio imperii, which coincided with the plague. [1]
Technically you're correct, but IMHO the Eastern Roman Empire fell at the end of the 6th - the beginning of 7th century when the Danube "limes" fell in front of the incoming Slavs and Avars. Yes, there was a renaissance between let's say ~850 and the late 1100s (with the Eastern Roman Empire getting back to the Danube, among other things), but I think that at that point they were actually a Greek empire, nothing Roman left about them.
> 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months
I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1].
> 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size.
Historical consensus favors the plague as quite significant, even if the city of constantinople managed to survive independently for several more centuries. The weakened mediterranian presented opportunities for the gothic tribes to take territory in gaul and italy in the decades following, and the economy nor the manpower of the empire never recovered. By the fall, Constantinople was a hollow shell of what it was, controlling hardly any territory and partially in ruins, ultimately abandoned by its few remaining allies in the face of the Turks.
While an 18-month fog sounds terrifying, I'm absolutely fascinated by the amount of clues we can gather from geological formations like glaciers. The universe has encoded information in so many neat ways, and our ability to cross-reference these measurements with written histories is pretty cool.
Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)
Yep. Personally, I think the steady proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to snap at some point with some nut using them.
God help us all.
Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.
"How Are Things? Better. Better Than Tomorrow, Of Course—Worse Than Yesterday" - Credit to Eugene Volokh who posted this old saying from Soviet Europe this morning.
I imagine there will come a time when the earth is just on the cusp of no longer being able to sustain the massive population that it has grown to or human life at all. Since the earths human population will be so high even a 5th of people dying off will be drastically more deaths than any worldwide catastrophe of the past. Maybe within another 1000 years.
Hmm, well we saw something like it recently and it mostly just stranded people in Europe from what I recall. Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland about 10 years ago and there wasn’t anything we could do but wait it out, and it was a lot less severe than what’s described in this article.
Edit: don't take my word for it, apparently this is a popular myth
Read up on Yellowstone, for example -- AFAIK it's "due for a big one" but it blows up so infrequently and so catastrophically that there's no real plan other than "maybe think about not living in North America."
But hey, volcanic ash is a coolant for the climate -- a few well-placed eruptions could do some good, on a global scale (sorry about the locals)...
one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans.
in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.
humans are really bad at conceptualizing the risk from such events. we are also overdue for another major solar geo storm (ie. like the carrington event).
> What's.......our intended process for dealing with this?
The extent of the USA's preparedness, from the federal agency in charge handling Emergencies, is a website with a bullet point list of what you should have in a first aid kit in your house:
I'm being only partially facetious. There are of course multiple agencies at the federal, state, county, and local level with their own plans and processes in place for this kind of thing.
But! We can look to the past for what would happen.
Katrina taught us that the US federal government doesn't have the resources, means, or disposition to rescue people from disaster zones. It also taught us that as an individual or family, the best thing you can do is take evacuation warnings very seriously, and be ready to be able to provide for yourself and your family for the short and long term. So, ready.gov build a kit, and stuff it full of cash while you're at it. Keep the cars gassed up.
Katrina also taught us that the US government will choose to enforce "property rights" before it will ensure people in disaster zones have shelter, water, or food. You could flip from one channel with a helicopter view of people waving for help on a roof, and another channel would be showing National Guard soldiers with rifles chasing off "looters." Hm.
The COVID pandemic also taught us that partisans and capitalists are motivated to prioritize the wellbeing of the stock market over humans lives - all the more reason to prepare to protect yourself and family rather than count on the Gov coming to your aid.
I'm not saying the homesteaders and preppers aren't a little crazy, but I'm also not saying they don't have the right idea...
How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.
I hope this pandemic has opened everyone’s eyes to the benefits of disaster preparedness. If more of us get into the habit of stocking up in advance, we would experience less of a spike in demand when the next disaster strikes.
Also consider that you need a community with weapons to defend your "years worth of food" from those who did not have that. You can see that even in peaceful times when nothing really happened, government collapsed and left their citizens to defend themselves from bandits. Imagine a global disaster.
IMO that's the main issue with those hoarders. You can hoard as much as you can, but local gang will expropriate everything.
So may be it's better to stock guns and bullets...
I'd just point out that keeping a year's worth of food for a rapid and unexpected event is nuclear bunker level prep. It also requires spending a lot of money and storage space on something that's going to have to be rotated out every few years. And while some things can last pretty much indefinitely, other things have shelf lifes and you're probably not going to use all those canned goods during normal times.
So there's a very significant annual cost to maintaining that perpetual one year supply of necessaries.
Forgetting macro/micro and focusing on calories, using a cheap food source, I'd need 0.75 metric tonnes of oats to do this, for 4 people. Probably doable for $750 say, I am guessing at a bulk price. Most years I'd need to chuck it.
Probably could slim down and live off half that. Or 500 cal/day for adults with more for the kids. It is survival situation after all.
Many people have proposed putting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. It looks relatively easy and could potentially be within the means of even poorer countries like Bangladesh which have a lot to loose from rising sea levels. But we can't predict exactly how it would turn out and it would certainly make ocean acidifcation worse so it's very much a desperation play.
> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
It did. Justinians gains in italy were lost not long after the plague to the lombards, who saw a power vacuum. The empire had just spent quite a bit on wars and capital expenses, and the tax base never recovered. It hobbled the economy and manpower of the empire and left it susceptible to attacks from enemies virtually on all sides, and territory shrunk by the century until Constantinople was merely a city state, mostly abandoned within its rotting walls which it no longer had the manpower to fully defend, with a few Grecian possessions and vassal states by the time it succumbed to the Turks.
I had the same reaction. Constantinople fell in 1453. That's 917 years later. Justinian maybe represented the high water mark, but the empire continued to contract and expand in the centuries to follow.
So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
And this is why we, as a species, need to embrace science and technology, and engineer solutions to ensure our survival and prosperity.
We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.
"What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says."
Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?
Not being familiar with the history, the dates that I found seem to support your point.
> The Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD)
> The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire..[was] in 555 under Justinian the Great, at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
> It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
Don't disagree with the facts but the suffering of humans depends as much on the content of their thoughts as it does on material conditions. A civilisation at the apparent height of its power and security can eat itself from the inside and decline rapidly. A wealthy individual living a privileged life can be beset by anxiety, and so on. Both of these things are strongly affected by the ideas that predominate in a given era. These include subtle ideas which can't readily be identified and which nevertheless spread and cause harm. So those ideas are a relevant part of the environment when considering which was the worst year so far.
Note, that after this period (536-600), there were huge swaths of Europe that was depopulated, and or decimated, and this enabled major migration movements...
Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas....
So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events....
I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history....
The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....
"indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history"
I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.
It's interesting to imagine that the ramifications of this were still felt in the 620s when Mohamed united the Arab tribes and he and his successors pretty much overran the Byzantine and Persian empires.
Obvious, yet still interesting to imagine IMO ... all of us here had ancestors who suffered and survived that year and we're all, in some way, a result of what they went through in 536.
> Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.
I couldn't help but notice an ambiguity in the phrase
> Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C
While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536).
Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the graphic shows the years increasing downwards, where if you take this to graphically depict the ice core dug out of the ground, going down is decreasing in years (going back in time, earlier)? Things lower in depth were laid down earlier.
Maybe not for Americans :) The eruption was hypothesized to have occurred in North America but did the team try to cross reference with native accounts of that time period?
North American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.
Given that ~90% of native Americans were killed over the first decades of European contact by smallpox, measles, and war, it's entirely possible that there had been a worse year for them.
What are the estimates for those volcanic eruptions on the volcanic explosivity index? Was it an VEI-8?
If it wasn't, what would a VEI-8 eruption cause?
Christian 'revolution'? What nonsense. The missionaries were never interested in revolution (not in the modern sense at least), but converting people to Catholicism. St. Bede's History of the Church in England is a good example. Or the life of St. Boniface. The term "Dark Ages" was coined by anti-Christians to undermine the conversion of Europe to the Catholic faith.
I noticed there are a number of popups/stickies/banners on this site. How do folks feel about blocking them with uBlock considering it's a nonprofit, and one of those banners was asking for a donation?
Personally I find them obnoxious, if they weren't glued to the bottom of the screen it'd be better. In fact if they weren't already being blocked by ublock I would have immediately added them to my filter list manually.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
lgl|5 years ago
Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
yummypaint|5 years ago
arcade79|5 years ago
Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.
Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..
EDIT (forgot link): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
ativzzz|5 years ago
I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments.
If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them in space or on other planets.
eloff|5 years ago
A massive global famine could kill a billion humans or more. But if the 1 in 10 of us (likely the poorest, most vulnerable people) died, would civilization end? I don't think so.
However, if that leads to all out nuclear war, then we have two enormous correlated shocks to the system. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough, but some number of such shocks could push us over the brink.
Just like an economic meltdown or a plane crash, it's never one thing that goes wrong, it's a sequence of failures.
SomeoneFromCA|5 years ago
f_allwein|5 years ago
jcranmer|5 years ago
My understanding is that the current leading theory is a drastic shift in outflow of Lake Agassiz (an expanded version of Lake Manitoba in Canada).
dboreham|5 years ago
nemosaltat|5 years ago
MannishMan|5 years ago
yesplorer|5 years ago
I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.
TrainedMonkey|5 years ago
kanobo|5 years ago
afterburner|5 years ago
pureliquidhw|5 years ago
After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months?
Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/forecast.html) How often do geologists cry wolf?
chrisco255|5 years ago
One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic eruptions is: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano_news.html . It provides real-time updates on volcano advisories.
I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.
Symmetry|5 years ago
https://allfed.info/
pmiller2|5 years ago
divbzero|5 years ago
On a less likely and more extreme level, Yellowstone has erupted 3 times over the past 2.1 million years [2] and there are other known supervolcanos [3] on Earth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyjafjallajökull
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
quotha|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Inferno_(film)
fsckboy|5 years ago
bwanab|5 years ago
datenhorst|5 years ago
koheripbal|5 years ago
If you haven't listened to it, the one on the Siege of 717 deserves it's own bowl of popcorn - super super entertaining.
I loved the original The History of Rome podcast that goes through to the fall of the West, but I think I've come to prefer this one even more.
The first few episodes require a little patience as the author gets his footing - but it pays off. Awesome podcast.
LukeEF|5 years ago
indigo945|5 years ago
[1]: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=F33DA79F872937C22C8...
paganel|5 years ago
runarberg|5 years ago
> 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months
I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1].
> 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size.
1: https://kvennabladid.is/2018/11/20/ekkert-bendir-til-ad-risa... (Icelandic)
asdff|5 years ago
mikhailfranco|5 years ago
but there is not yet a smoking hill in Iceland identified for these events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...
sprainedankles|5 years ago
Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)
chadlavi|5 years ago
koheripbal|5 years ago
God help us all.
Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.
aksss|5 years ago
izzydata|5 years ago
glup|5 years ago
cs702|5 years ago
"The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640."
Imagine the kind of horror and suffering that a century of global economic stagnation inflicts on generations of people.
bhaak|5 years ago
deanCommie|5 years ago
What's.......our intended process for dealing with this?
Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere?
I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.
SllX|5 years ago
klyrs|5 years ago
Read up on Yellowstone, for example -- AFAIK it's "due for a big one" but it blows up so infrequently and so catastrophically that there's no real plan other than "maybe think about not living in North America."
But hey, volcanic ash is a coolant for the climate -- a few well-placed eruptions could do some good, on a global scale (sorry about the locals)...
kjs3|5 years ago
Same as other existential threats like asteroids. Spend a relative pittance on monitoring, not much else.
castis|5 years ago
in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.
nopzor|5 years ago
humans are really bad at conceptualizing the risk from such events. we are also overdue for another major solar geo storm (ie. like the carrington event).
quotha|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Inferno_(film)
thaumasiotes|5 years ago
Seems like the dispersal of the ash is the problem, and you'd want to be collecting it.
unknown|5 years ago
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komali2|5 years ago
The extent of the USA's preparedness, from the federal agency in charge handling Emergencies, is a website with a bullet point list of what you should have in a first aid kit in your house:
https://www.ready.gov/kit
I'm being only partially facetious. There are of course multiple agencies at the federal, state, county, and local level with their own plans and processes in place for this kind of thing.
But! We can look to the past for what would happen.
Katrina taught us that the US federal government doesn't have the resources, means, or disposition to rescue people from disaster zones. It also taught us that as an individual or family, the best thing you can do is take evacuation warnings very seriously, and be ready to be able to provide for yourself and your family for the short and long term. So, ready.gov build a kit, and stuff it full of cash while you're at it. Keep the cars gassed up.
Katrina also taught us that the US government will choose to enforce "property rights" before it will ensure people in disaster zones have shelter, water, or food. You could flip from one channel with a helicopter view of people waving for help on a roof, and another channel would be showing National Guard soldiers with rifles chasing off "looters." Hm.
The COVID pandemic also taught us that partisans and capitalists are motivated to prioritize the wellbeing of the stock market over humans lives - all the more reason to prepare to protect yourself and family rather than count on the Gov coming to your aid.
I'm not saying the homesteaders and preppers aren't a little crazy, but I'm also not saying they don't have the right idea...
hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago
subsubzero|5 years ago
divbzero|5 years ago
vbezhenar|5 years ago
IMO that's the main issue with those hoarders. You can hoard as much as you can, but local gang will expropriate everything.
So may be it's better to stock guns and bullets...
ghaff|5 years ago
So there's a very significant annual cost to maintaining that perpetual one year supply of necessaries.
unknown|5 years ago
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quickthrower2|5 years ago
Probably could slim down and live off half that. Or 500 cal/day for adults with more for the kids. It is survival situation after all.
swader999|5 years ago
Avalaxy|5 years ago
Symmetry|5 years ago
harryh|5 years ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/solar-geo...
stuff4ben|5 years ago
More seriously though, I think there are better and more economical ways to combat global climate warming.
ummonk|5 years ago
Hastening its collapse several centuries later?
asdff|5 years ago
jkingsbery|5 years ago
So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
01100011|5 years ago
We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.
iomind|5 years ago
Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?
lioeters|5 years ago
> The Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD)
> The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire..[was] in 555 under Justinian the Great, at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
> It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
duxup|5 years ago
The article indicates that the plague killed 35%–55% of the population.
contrapunter|5 years ago
opwieurposiu|5 years ago
ardit33|5 years ago
Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas....
So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events....
I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history....
The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....
restalis|5 years ago
I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.
avibhu|5 years ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
_kst_|5 years ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/12/02/maybe-first-plague...
throw3fj43|5 years ago
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-%E2%80%98Justinian...
datenhorst|5 years ago
emptybits|5 years ago
dang|5 years ago
twic|5 years ago
afterburner|5 years ago
I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.
ardit33|5 years ago
tromp|5 years ago
> Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C
While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536).
Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?
hnuser123456|5 years ago
For your interpretation: "drop by X, to Y"
For author's intention: "drop by X-Y"
supernova87a|5 years ago
kazinator|5 years ago
Yikes! What can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Oh, right, nevermind.
chromaton|5 years ago
danharaj|5 years ago
jandrese|5 years ago
vkou|5 years ago
chrisco255|5 years ago
mark-r|5 years ago
Synaesthesia|5 years ago
Tepix|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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suryabeep|5 years ago
totorovirus|5 years ago
shoes_for_thee|5 years ago
freetanga|5 years ago
tus88|5 years ago
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Synaesthesia|5 years ago
AnimalMuppet|5 years ago
Ascetik|5 years ago
umaar|5 years ago
The page in incognito: https://i.imgur.com/EHhGjJ9.png
The page with uBlock, sticky elements removed, and the sidebar removed: https://i.imgur.com/mNJFMyj.png
yesco|5 years ago