Posted on 08/05/2012 5:20:32 AM PDT by Renfield
When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.
Scientific evidence including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years.
Such was the size of the eruption that its sulphurous gases would have released a stratospheric aerosol veil or dry fog that blocked out sunlight, altered atmospheric circulation patterns and cooled the Earth's surface. It caused crops to wither, bringing famine, pestilence and death....
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The eruption of Kracatoa in 1883 is deemed responsible for a volcanic winter that reduced temperatures worldwide by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius for the next 5 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa
That’s it!
Everybody knows it was caused by SUVs.
What's more scary is the ease of how many believe in the scientific value of that prediction.
From the models it comes from, the beat scientists on this admit that there is a 40%-70% uncertainty in the projections of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheet behavior, and that's without attempting to factor any uncertainty about what nature is doing on its own that may affect climate, atmospheric and ocean temperatures and weather.
If their worst case scenario was likely, coastal areas would have looked much different than they did when the Norse sailed an ice free north Atlantic and settled what was suddenly "green" Greenland. London would have been under water - it wasn't.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.
Human's best survival tool has consistently been our ability to adapt and our ability to overcome.
In the 1950s people built home bomb shelters, because of things the popular media convinced them of. Today it's "climate change", or "an EMP attack".
Due to some recent questionable articles touting Africa’s great but undocumented cultures, I can’t help commenting on the total lack of useful contributions via written or oral acounts from the southern hemisphere generally, and Africa particularly.
In 1258... Mexico, Ecuador and Indonesia... most likely... evidence in ice cores from the northern hemisphere and Antarctic and within a thick layer of ash from Lake Malawi sediments. The ice core sulphate concentration shows that it was up to eight times higher than Indonesia's Krakatoa eruption of 1883...Lake Malawi sediments? Sulfate concentration eight times higher than 1883 Krakatoa?
Odd distribution pattern. Thanks Bernard Marx.
That Volcanic eruption and the subsequent die-off was George Bush’s fault!
So their authoritative pronouncements in the 1990s were completely wrong. I'll have to remember that the next time they make one.
I agree. Initially I suspected an Icelandic event because the U.K. is directly in the "fall-out" path. That (or some other source) may ultimately prove to be the villain but Rinjani really rang the old planet's bell. Indonesia is a very scary place tectonically. Of course I grew up carefree as a bird almost inside the Yellowstone caldera. Great fishing!
While Africa appears to stand out, the truth is that pre-history over most of the world is full of question marks.
North America, South America, Africa, Australia, big chunks of Asia, often more is not known than is known.
One of my favorites is that prior to the European arrival, the northern and southern US tribes had a war so ferocious and extended that they ended up making what is now almost the entire state of Kentucky a “neutral zone”. And yet archeologists have just hints of what could have been comparable to the 30-Years War.
And, for another example, satellites have recently revealed that there is the equivalent of Hadrian’s wall in Africa, surrounding an ancient kingdom perhaps the size of Germany.
I’ve had the pleasure to hoof around the ancient city of Tikal in northern Guatemala, that they have been restoring now for a little more than 100 years. And those folks took engineering seriously. The tour takes about 4-1/2 hours of mostly walking.
The bottom line is that the preservation of knowledge in Europe was really the exception instead of the rule. And even there is pretty modest.
Zero Preparations is a serious issue. Saying have 3 or even 5 days easy to use food and water is just so inadequate. Why we had some people with no electricity for 6 to 8 days after that big Derecho storm in the mid-Atlantic. The Mormons require their followers to have a one year supply of food. Seven years ago when I was caring for my husband who was dying at home with Alzheimer’s I built up a 3 month supply of food as I anticipated a period when it might be very hard to go out to food shop. I still maintain that supply.
Now we have this super heat and over half the country with serious drought problems. If we had even a much smaller volcano event like Tambora (the year with no summer, 1816 fame), our food prices would soar through the roof. There would be a lot of starvation in the rest of the world. We really need to give thought to supporting population limits throughout the world. And no, I don’t mean abortions, I mean supporting pregnancy prevention help.
The accomplishments in Mexico and Central America are impressive. I spent hours walking around Teotihuacan near Mexico City, and Monte Alban and Mitla near Oaxaca, Mexico. The ruins further south are equally impressive. No wonder we have so many illegal immigrants from those areas in the construction trades. It is in their blood and heritage.
I was no fan of Romney during the Primary season (to say the least), but just maybe some of the Mormon thinking is in him. There has to be some degree of prepping by the government also, just to keep the zombies at bay. If he does actually think that way, it would be a first at that level of government (with some minor exceptions).
gleeaikin, hammer to nail clean through board with the first sentence (imho), and done in one stroke.
When the lights go out, as was with the storms, those asleep awake. When one is prepared (a non-sleeper) if one did prepare, the sleepers who slept or those who were like the grasshopper, while the ant prepared, the ant is ready, and the sleepers are not. Good for you, not to be a grasshopper.
They like fighting too. We Anglos were simply better prepared the first times. Now is now though and the present is the present. Have always thought, once I saw the invasion start to gain steam, there was something in play I could not lay my finger onto. A prayer to be wrong in my thoughts, though I would think there have been lessons learned. I hope Anglos do prep for the threats are extreme and real.
After centuries of living there they abandoned the city.
There is a theory that the regular rise and fall of such kingdoms was because they lacked any theory of conservation.
The exception to the rule was Egypt, because unlike most everywhere else, they had only one great agricultural season a year, starting with the flooding of the Nile river. This both restored and fertilized the farmland, and they knew with some accuracy how much to plant. And the rest of the year they did other things.
But the rest of the world would over time deplete the area around a kingdom of lumber, crops would deplete the soil of nutrients, irrigation would salt the soil reducing yields, etc. The end result was that over time, everything had to be transported from further and further away.
In Mexico and central America, the ruins of former cities were so evident later kingdoms became very fatalistic and apocalyptic, just assuming that sooner or later they would fail as well.
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