Posted on 11/16/2018 6:12:12 AM PST by artichokegrower
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
They do. That would explain my distaste. And then there’s the smell
Last night it warmed up (local euphemism) into the 40s, felt nice, but it is not that way right now. And from the look of the clouds, old man winter appears to be on the way to taking a power dump on us. OTOH:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3705386/posts?page=16#16
With a decline in food production over decades, this could have increased the conflict between tribes of Jews, Pagans, Christians that would have stimulated Mohammad to invent his new religion. Certainly his fights with some of those groups was clearly happening.
We had a privy at our summer cottage. My late husband, from Iowa, used to like sitting there in the summer. One year bees built their honeycombs on the underside of the seat board. If either of us had to sit, we were VERY nervous, especially in the late afternoon when the bees were all coming home. We were never stung. Perhaps they considered the smell of our deposits and ourselves as belonging to the hive???
Read Justinian’s Flea the accompanying plague (believed to be Europe’s first introduction to Bubonic & Pneumonic plague!) as it swept the urban centers of the Empire it also did the same to the Persian (Pre-Islamic) Sassanid Empire. Arabia was somewhat spared because if its low population density and few large urban centers. By the time the Muslims came out of Arabia they punched two empty bags Roman & Persian. Both were very weakened to properly contest the invasion.
First of all, if you have not read Winchester’s book on Krakatoa you have missed a good read. Several world wide effects were recorded including changes in atmospheric pressure. Also tidal effects were world wide I seem to recall. I read separately that Atlantic City’s Salt Water Taffy was created when high wave(s) flooded a building where taffy was stored/sold. I think these were the same date as Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption. Needs checking. If I remember correctly Turner’s sunset rich paintings were attributed to a volcano, also needs checking.
Regarding diameters and power—I calculated the area of a circle of 4 miles and one of 3 miles using pi r squared. Figures were 12.5 sq. mi. and 7.065 sq. mi. I did not know how to factor in the greater square volume. Thus Tambora was certainly greater than Pinatubo, and I remember observing at the time that weather conditions in North America certainly seemed to be affected by Pinatubo, although not to the extent experienced from Tambora.
Taffy? Nah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_water_taffy#Origins
I love Turner’s paintings, but there’s no citation in the wikipedia page (or one of those undermining “who sez” disclaimer links as are found in so many other wikipages) for the claim that the “year without a summer” influenced some of his paintings. The claim is often found on sites that promote the global warming hoax. Turner had a notable painting of 1815, Crossing The Brook, nothing about the sky suggests volcanism:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N00/N00497_9.jpg
In 1817 he painted or unveiled “Eruption of Vesuvius”, the subject of which was, of course, a volcanic eruption, it could hardly look differently than it does. It’s his conception of the 79 AD eruption:
While his work evolved, he really got into skies as if they were landscapes, and did so quite early:
Tambora’s eruption was about ten times larger than Mount Pinatubo (when I looked it up the other day, the source said “an order of magnitude”), but that would be (probably) in three dimensions, so, approximately the cube root of ten. Pinatubo’s sulfur dioxide output was large, so, some contribution to acid rain, but 1991 doesn’t stick out in memory as a period of worldwide crop failures, famine, and panic in agriiculture. Krakatoa created some pretty sunsets, and produced some tsunamis, but those waves didn’t kill all over the Earth, just in the region.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/krakatoa-erupts
[snip] Krakatoa in 1883 date to May 20 when there were initial rumblings and venting from the volcano, which had been dormant for about 200 years. Over the next three months, there were regular small blasts from Krakatoa out of three vents. On August 11, ash started spewing from the small mountain. Eruptions got progressively stronger until August 26, when the catastrophe began. At noon, the volcano sent an ash cloud 20 miles into the air and tremors triggered several tsunamis. This turned out to be just a small indication, however, of what would follow the next day. For four-and-a-half hours beginning at 5:30 a.m. on August 27, there were four major and incredibly powerful eruptions. The last of these made the loudest sound ever recorded on the planet. It could be heard as far away as central Australia and the island of Rodrigues, 3,000 miles from Krakatoa. The air waves created by the eruption were detected at points all over the earth. [/snip]
Years ago I read that the big boom was heard by some people in Japan, at that distance it is amazing, but wouldn’t have been load any longer. Any kind of big eruption noise could cause fluctuations on the barometers, with the effect being much stronger near the eruption. I’m glad the formation of islands by volcano are easy to avoid where I live. :^)
One year bees built their honeycombs on the underside of the seat board.
Yow. Sounds like they had a lot to do. Ad sounds like some trailer trash bees, building inside the wrong side of an outhouse. ;^)
Mad Mo was just a sociopath, the middle ages' version of Jim Jones or Charles Manson.
The author posits that a volcano erupted in Indonesia (Java) that year. This was not a bad hypothesis when the book was written (around 2000), but today we know (e.g. from this news article) that the eruption happened in Iceland or North America. In any case, the volcanic eruption of 536 literally re-ordered the world and forms an inflection in world history.
 "Ah, yes, I remember it well. It was my very first election, and we didn't have the printing press yet, so we had to vote by putting clams into baskets. (And it wasn't easy to sneak clams out of one basket, into another basket, let me tell you!)" "537 wasn't too great either!" |
Nothing says they didn’t both erupt.
That was a great book. I read it as a kid. Perhaps I should dig it out and re-read
.
I decided to look up “turner, english artist” and found a bunch of his paintings with dates on them. It appears that the brightest skies he painted were between 1835 and 1845, so I will have to check to see if there was significant volcanic activity in those years, especially Iceland which would be more likely to affect English skies. Cheers and happy Thanksgiving.
Thanks, and a Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. I may eat out that day. One of the volcanic skies claims about Turner is that there were three big eruptions during his career, if that helps.
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