During the last few days, a publication commenting on the year 536 is the worst year in history went viral, however, why experts mention that, you can find out here.
In 2020, the pandemic locked the world in its homes, something that continued for part of 2021. This 2022 inflation does not let up, that is why they are classified as the worst years in history, however, they fail to reach the level of year 536.
This is because despite the fact that we are experiencing a pandemic, armed conflicts, government collapse, natural disasters or economic problems that afflict the entire world, the level of bad news that occurred in 536 has not been reached.
But how do you know that the year 536 was the worst in history? The answer is given by historian Michael McCormick, who provided the details of the events of that time.
The situations that made life not so sweet for those who lived through that decade and who encountered more than one problem on a daily basis.
What happened in the year 536?
Can you imagine that this night lasted 18 months? What we tell you is not fiction, but it is something that actually happened in a part of the world in the year 536.
The medieval historian from Harvard, Michael McCormick, rescues the history of those years indicating that an enigmatic fog spread through Europe, the Middle East and some parts of Asia, which plunged the world into 18 months of darkness, rescued ABC.
According to his account, summer temperatures were between 1.5 °C and 2.5 °C, something that currently only occurs in the winters of the areas closest to the northern and southern hemispheres, although always in the period of winter.
This generated the coldest decade of the last 2,300 years, so that crops did not prosper and people went hungry, in addition to motivating conflicts in the population.
The historian, who published his study in the journal Science, highlighted “Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; starving people. The Irish chronicles record “a bread failure of the years 536-539.”
However, not everything would end here, for 541 the bubonic plague would spread through the things of Europe, which plunged the continent into an economic crisis that would last until 640.
But how did a historian manage to find out all this information from a time when there were almost no records?
Advancement and innovation to discover history
A cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland, which spewed ash into the northern hemisphere at the beginning of the year 536, is to blame for this eternal winter and darkness in these years, as clouds covered the skies with ash.
Although it is not the only eruption that was recorded in those years, in 540 and 547 these eruptions would have been generated again.
According to what it indicates National GeographicIn order to understand these moments in history, they used advanced techniques, such as dendroclimatology and the analysis of ice cores.
Dendroclimatologist Ulf Büntgen discovered the eruptions by studying the growth patterns of trees.
But something more incredible was done by Michael McCormick and the glaciologist Paul Mayewski, who found evidence of climate change in those years in the ice of a glacier in Switzerland.
This is the ultra-precise analysis of the ice of a Swiss glacier, in which the eruptions in Iceland and what they generated in the world in those years were identified.
These types of advances allow historians to discover events through the remains left in trees and ice, a new way of finding information when there are no physical records of the time.
The remnants of history frozen
Kyle Harper, a medieval and Roman historian at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, noted that detailed records of natural disasters and human pollution exist.
“Ice provides us with a new type of record to understand the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire and the first signs of this new medieval economy,” the researcher said.
UM graduate student Laura Hartman noted that to understand what happened in the year 536, she investigated the Northern Hemisphere spring ice of that year, finding two microscopic particles of volcanic glass.
According to publish Science, “By bombarding the shards with X-rays to determine their chemical fingerprint, she and volcanologist Kurbatov found that they closely matched glass particles previously found in lakes and peat bogs in Europe and in a Greenland ice core. Those particles, in turn, resembled volcanic rocks from Iceland.”
With this evidence, geoscientist David Lowe mentioned that the core of the Swiss glacier probably came from the same volcano.
Not only the year 536: There were other terrible
Although history mentions that the year 536 was the worst to live on earth, there are other years that were just as bad.
In 1349, the plague known as the “black death” wiped out half the population of Europe. Then, in 1918, the flu killed between 50 and 100 million people in the world.
In 1816, “the year without a summer” was lived, since in the northern hemisphere in the summer season snow fell, rain and cold took over that season.
Finally, in 1914 it was not the best either, the assassination of the Archduke of the Habsburgs generated two world conflicts that caused the deaths of millions of people.
After all this, you still think that these last three years were really bad.