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Why Was 536 One of the Worst Years to Be Alive? · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Beyond Infographics. You know, this is the show
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: where we're try to dig beneath the surface of history
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: to really extract those pivotal.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Moments and we'll show you the cataclysmic forces that can
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: you know, truly shape human civilization exactly.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: And today we're attempting to reconstruct something that a lot
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: of scholars, well they're now calling it the worst year
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: to be alive.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: It's a bold claim, isn't it right. I Mean, when
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: you think of history as great catastrophes, your mind usually
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: jumps to a huge war, or a plague, maybe a specific.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Famine, right, something we can name.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: But we're looking at a single year, five thirty six
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: CE that didn't just have one bad event. It kicked
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: off this period of global darkness, famine, and geopolitical upheaval
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: that just went on and on for over a century.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: And we're not talking about a local event. This is
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: the incredible imagine. You have chroniclers and observers scattered across
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: three massive continents Europe, Asia, Mesoamerica.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: People who had absolutely no idea the others even existed.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: None, and they are all writing down the exact same
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: terrifying observation. The sun turned dark and it's stayed dark.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: The sheer, overwhelming consensus of that experience is just it's
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: genuinely chilling.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: And to really grasp the profound shock of this, we
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: kind of have to set the scene a little bit. Yeah,
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: we're in the mid sixth century, so in Europe, we're
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: only about sixty years past the final official collapse of
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: the Western Roman Empire. Things are messy, it's politically fragmented,
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: you know, into these successor kingdoms like the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: There's constant localized warfare.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: But and this is important, life hasn't completely disintegrated yet,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: has it.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Not at all? There's still a viable framework of governance
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: in a lot of places. The infrastructure of the Roman system,
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: you know, however battered it is, it's still providing some stability.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: And you've still got the Eastern Roman Empire Zantium as
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: a major superpower. They're even trying to reconquer the Lost West.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: So there's this this faint promise of a comeback almost
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: there is.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: But that existing level of social stress made the world
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: incredibly vulnerable. War was common, yeah, but total systemic claps
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: hadn't hit.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: And then March five point thirty six CE.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: The environmental floor just dropped out. This event initiated what
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: scientists now call the Late Antique Little Ice Age or
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: l EEA, a period of intense global cooling that had
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: consequences stretching from believe it or not, inspiring the Norse
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: myth of Ragnarok no Way, all the way to accelerating
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: the collapse of the mega city of Toyota Wakin in
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: central Mexico.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: So that is our mission today on beyond infographics. We're
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: going to take those terrified eyewitness accounts and marry them
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: with the absolute scientific certainty that we now have from
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: modern paleoclimatology, ice cores, tree rings, all of it.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: We're bridging that gap.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: We're going to understand how one colossal natural event caused
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: a geoplaolitical, and social shockwave that effectively remade the entire world. Okay,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: let's unpack this. The first inkling of the disaster comes
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: in early five thirty six, and the descriptions are so immediate,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: so vivid. They tell you exactly what it felt like
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: to live under this this atmospheric veil.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: The sources are remarkable for their specificity. We have the
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: ecclesiastical historian John of Ephisos, and his work was later
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: preserved by Michael the Syrian. They recorded that in the
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: year eight hundred and forty eight of their calendar, which
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: corresponds to five three six three seven CE, there was
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: a sign in the sun the like of which had
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: never been seen and reported before.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: So right away they knew this was completely outside the
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: realm of normal experience.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Completely And the detail that really jumps out is the duration.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: This wasn't some sudden fleeting eclipse. No, they said, the
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: sun became dark, and that darkness lasted for a staggering
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: eighteen months, a year and a half, a year and
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: a half, a full eighteen months where the light was
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: just profoundly diminished.
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  Speaker 1: That's unimaginable.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: And they even explain the quality of that light. They
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: wrote that each day the sun shone for only about
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: four hours, and even that light, it was only a
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: feeble shadow.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: A feeble shadow, What a phrase it is.
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  Speaker 2: The chroniclers recorded widespread distress. People genuinely feared the sun
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: would never recover its original light. They thought, you know,
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: maybe the world itself was coming to an end.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: And at the same time, you've got Procopius writing from
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, and he's seeing
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: the exact same thing he is.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: He echoes the observation perfectly. He notes that the sun
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: gave forth its light without brightness like the.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Moon, so it wasn't just dim, it was diffuse, hazy, dirty, exactly, it.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: Was like constantly looking through.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Smoke, and that pervasive haes had immediate, devastating physical consequences
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: that they all started listing.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, the most consistent complaints were all rooted in agriculture,
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: for obvious reasons. Forcopious Again, he noted that the seasons
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: were entirely confused and people were suffering from a want
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: of necessary food.
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  Speaker 1: This cooler haze see weather, it just screams that photosynthesis
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: was being severely reduced.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: It has to be. They mentioned that fruits just didn't ripen.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Grapes in particular were noted for tasting like sour unripened grapes.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: And if the basic mechanism of plant energy conversion fails,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: everything else follows.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: The ripple effect was immediate and it was widely documented.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: We see it in the Irish documents, the Annals of Ulster.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: They record a failure of bread right there in five thirty.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Six, a failure of bread so direct and alarmingly again
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: in five point thirty nine, which confirms this wasn't just
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: a simple blip.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: It was a persistent, recurring problem of failed harvests because
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: of this prolonged climate stress.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Now what's truly astonishing to me is the confirmation of
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: this crisis in regions that were totally unconnected to the
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Mediterranean world. China got hit, and it got hit hard.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: What were the Chinese sources telling us?
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Well, Chinese imperial records are famously meticulous. They mentioned widespread
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: drought and dust storms in the north, but also these
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: highly unnatural, surprising phenomena like why like snow, hail and
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: hard frost occurring in southern China during the summer of
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: five thirty six and five thirty seven summer frost. Summer
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: frost that is a signature sign of a massive sudden
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: global cooling event. You just don't get that otherwise.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: And wasn't there actual physical evidence of the plume itself?
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: There was the Nanshee the official history of the Southern Dynasties.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: It describes a yellow ash like substance from the sky
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: falling in Jiangsu province. So this global consistency, the Mediterranean
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: observing a dim sun, the Irish logging famine, the Chinese
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: seeing ash in summer frost. It's definitive. It means there
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: was a singular global driver poisoning the entire atmosphere.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: So for centuries these apocalyptic reports were they were fascinating stories,
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: but they lacked a firm explanation. Was it a dust storm,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: a weird commet? How did modern science finally confirm the
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: actual physical mechanism and turn these accounts from historical curiosity
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: into hard climatological fact.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: That's where the climathological detective came in. They started using
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: what we call proxies. These are natural records that hold
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: physical data about the past to confirm the historical timeline.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: And the first big tool was dendro chronology tree ring
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: analysis Clila's concept. You're essentially reading the diary of a tree.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: A wide ring means a good, warm, wet year with lots.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Of growth, and a narrow, thin ring means a bad year,
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: a drought, or in this case, a cold, dark year
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  Speaker 2: with very little growth.
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  Speaker 1: So the tree rings provided the precise dating and the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: physical conformation of the cold.
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  Speaker 2: They did Irish oak rings, which are extremely well preserved
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: and dated, show an abnormally small amount of growth in
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: five point thirty six, But critically, they show another sharp
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  Speaker 2: drop in five point forty two after only a partial
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: recovery from that initial shock.
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  Speaker 1: And this wasn't just an Ireland. This is where the
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: scale of the disaster really becomes visible when you look
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  Speaker 1: globally exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It's not a local problem. Siberian tree show a severe
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: twenty year decline in growth throughout the five thirties and
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  Speaker 2: five forties. In fact, the researchers called it the most
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  Speaker 2: serious declar and growth for Siberia in nineteen hundred years.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Nineteen hundred years, and.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: If you jump across the equator, Fitzroya trees in Chile
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  Speaker 2: recorded their greatest drop in summer growth in sixteen hundred years.
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  Speaker 2: This just confirms the truly hemispheric synchronous nature of the event.
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  Speaker 1: And my favorite piece of evidence from the tree rings,
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the microscopic analysis. It's just so clever, it's amazing.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Scientists looked at the cell structure within that specific five
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: point thirty six ad Irish oak ring and they found
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  Speaker 2: cells that are normally indicative of harsh winter conditions.
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  Speaker 1: Appearing during what should have been the summer growth period exactly.
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  Speaker 2: This confirms it. There was a hard frost and a
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: growing season failure. It wasn't just a reduction in sunlight.
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  Speaker 2: It was a catastrophic cold snap in the middle of summer.
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  Speaker 1: So now we go from the slow, steady growth of
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  Speaker 1: wood to the chemical timeline that's trapped in ancient ice.
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  Speaker 1: This is the real smoking gun, the thing that identified
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: the culprit.
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  Speaker 2: This is it ice cores, which are pulled from high
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: altitude glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. They provide this layer
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  Speaker 2: of by layer chemical record of the atmosphere, sometimes going
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: back hundreds of thousands of years.
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  Speaker 1: And what did they find for five hundred and thirty six.
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  Speaker 2: The layers confirmed the historical haze. They showed major sulfate
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  Speaker 2: spikes around five thirty six CE.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: And sulfates are the key here, right. We're not talking
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: about dust from a meteor impact. This is aerosol chemistry precisely.
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  Speaker 2: Sulfate aerosols are injected high into the stratosphere by immense
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: explosive volcanic eruptions. Once they're up there, they spread globally
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  Speaker 2: and they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. This
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  Speaker 2: causes surface cooling, what we call a volcanic winter. The
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  Speaker 2: five thirty six sulfate spike was the unmistakable proof of
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: a colossal eruption.
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  Speaker 1: But the science revealed something that the chroniclers, who were
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: just focused on the misery right in front of them,
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  Speaker 1: they completely missed it. How did the ice cores confirm
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the prolonged agony of this period?
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  Speaker 2: That is the critical scientific finding. This changed our entire
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: understanding of the sixth century crisis. The ice cores showed
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: a second distinct spike in sulfate aerosol in a five
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: forty A second one, a second one. It wasn't just
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: one volcano. It was a devastating double punch.
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  Speaker 1: So you have an eruption in the northern hemisphere in
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: five thirty six, and that's followed by a second, probably
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: tropical eruption in five forty.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, and that explains it. It explains why the slow
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: climatic recovery we see in the tree rings was interrupted
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: in five point forty two, and why the whole climate
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: system just stayed depressed until around five fifty CE.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It was a one two punch that knocked the global
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: climate system down and.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: Then prevented it from getting back up for over a decade.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: So to stay aloft for a full year and affect
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: the entire globe, that volcanic plume had to be absolutely immense.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: How high are we talking?
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: This is where atmospheric physics comes in. For the sulfate
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: haze to persist for so long, the model suggests the
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: explosive plume must have reached an attitude of about twenty
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: five kilometers and.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: That's well past the tropopause, right. It has to cross
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: that critical thirty hectapascal line and get into the stratosphere.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: It has to because the stratosphere is extremely stable. If
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: the plume stayed in the lower atmosphere, the troposphere rain
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: and weather systems will just wash the sulfates out within
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: a few months.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: But once it punches through into the stratosphere, there's no rain.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: And the aerosols are free to circulate globally for years,
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: causing this widespread, persistent cooling.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: And the effects of that haze, according to the models,
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: were immediate and staggering.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Shortly after the five point thirty six eruption,
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: climate models predict sunlight was reduced by about sixty five
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: percent in some northern areas. Even by the end of
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: the year, global sunlight was still down by a third.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And above sixty degrees latitude, so Scandinavia, parts of North
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: America production was even worse.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Much worse. Yeah, which just crippled any kind of high
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: latitude agriculture.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So the search for the exact mountain responsible it's been
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: this fantastic piece of detective work given the scale. Why
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: is it so hard to pinpoint the culprit, Well.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: It's difficult because the evidence is fragmented. We need a
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: perfect fingerprint. Scientists look for tephra, those tiny fragments of
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: volcanic glass embedded in the ice. Right some Greenland ice
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: core tephra has suggested a North American source, but without
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: a specific mountain. Then in twenty eighteen, fragments with an
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Icelandic signature were found in Alpine ice, which led some
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: to propose an Icelandic volcano.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: But a lot of the famous largest candidates have been
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: ruled out.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: They have Earlier theories proposed these massive events like Rabol
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: or Krakatoa, but detailed geological drilling and dating projects have
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: pretty firmly redated those eruptions to other centuries.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: And what about Yulapango, the huge.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Ilopango eruption in El Salvador, which would have been a
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: massive tropical candidate for that five forty event. That's also
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: been pushed back in the timeline.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: So who are the current suspects for the northern five
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: thirty six event?
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Right now, researchers are looking mostly toward Kumchotkin volcanoes, places
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: like sudac or Opala. They're known for producing these huge
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: sulfur rich plumes. But the point remains, regardless of the
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: precise mountain, two colossal, consecutive explosions poisoned the global eye atmosphere.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: And they did so right when human civilization was already
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: stressed to the max. Exactly if you are finding the
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: scientific synthesis, you know, connecting ancient texts with deep sea
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: drilling as fascinating as we do, please consider leaving us
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: a five stars rating wherever you listen. It genuinely helps
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: us to keep bringing you these deep dives into the
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: forgotten forces of history. So we've established the scientific reality
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: of this decade long chill. The crucial question now becomes,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: how would society's cope. I mean, how did they handle
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: this sudden, unrelenting environmental pressure. This catastrophic cooling truly became
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: a global socioeconomic tsunami, and the effects, I imagine, very
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: dramatically based on who was already vulnerable.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: That's the key. Let's look at Europe first. It was
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: already politically fragmented. So did the volcano just push these
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: vulnerable areas past a breaking point or did it affect
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: even the stable regions just as badly?
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: It seems like it amplified the existing stress. The highly
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: centralized Eastern Roman Empire fared better at least initially, but
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: the famine was just catastrophic in the west. We see
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: this acutely in Ostrogoth Italy, specifically the northern central regions.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the reports indicate that fifty thousand people died in
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Italy in five thirty eight alone, and the death toll
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: was specifically attributed to the land not being cultivated during
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: the previous year.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: So this wasn't just bad weather. This was a climate
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: crisis compounded by a human conflict.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, the ongoing Gothic War between the Romans and the
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Ostrogoths made any kind of organized, coordinated cultivation impossible. It
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: turned severe climate stress into mass starvation.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Now, if we crossed to China, the situation went beyond
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: severe stress into absolute demographic collapse in certain areas.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: The Northern Chinese reports from the Xizi Tungjin are they're
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: truly horrifying. The catastrophe hit northern China extremely hard. The
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: cold and the drought meant mass famine, and the records
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: explicitly state that in the Way region of Guanzhan, the
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: crisis became so severe that men were reduced to cannibalism.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Brutality rates reached seventy to eighty percent in that area.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Like the documents say, that sounds like a complete systemic failure.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: It is. It just highlights the extreme political fragility of
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: the period. You were caught between the Northern and Southern dynasties,
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: and the elite were just consumed by perpetual civil wars.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: So they completely failed to govern completely.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: They had no organized system for food distribution or relief
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: for the common people, so they turned a massive climate
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: shock into a demographic wipeout, simply because the ruling class
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: prioritized their conflicts over the survival of their people.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Let's move north now to Scandinavia, where the five thirty
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: six events seems to have been so profound it was
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: literally written into their foundational mythology.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: That's right. The memory of the five thirty six to
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: five forty event is heavily heavily linked to the Old
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: Norse myth of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. Specifically,
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: it seems to have inspired the concept of thimble winter
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: nimble Winter, the great winter. It's characterized by three continuous
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: years with no summer between them. It's a clear folk
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: memory of the late Ana Little Ice Age.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: And the archaeology supports the myths dark severity. How did
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: researchers figure out that at least fifty percent of the
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: population in the Nordic regions died after the dust Veil.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: That is a staggering number.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: It's calculated by mapping abandonment rates and resource shifts that
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: you find in archaeological surveys. We see massive disruptions to
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: burial practices and crucially, a sharp and widespread abandonment of
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: agricultural settlements.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: So people just walked away from their farms.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: They did, and climate modeling focused on southern Norway helps
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: contextualize this. The simulations show a maximum surface air cooling
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: of up to three point five degrees celsius during the
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: mean growing season three and.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: A half degrees Losing that much during your growing season,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: particularly at high latitudes, that's a death sentence for most
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: cereal crops.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. The growing degree day models confirm that crop failures
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: were highly likely in the northern and western coastal areas.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Those were the regions that experienced the largest temperature drop.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: But this is where the societal response gets interesting because
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: it was uniform.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, not every community just collapsed, correct.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: The societal response showed this really crucial heterogeneity. While the
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Norwegian coast experienced wide scale farm abandonment, the southeastern study area,
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: which was a bit more insulated from the extreme cooling,
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: saw their crops more likely to mature. Okay, and inland
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: Sweden surprisingly showed continued growth in areas like hunting and
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: critically iron production.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: So those inland communities pivoted. They pivoted to what they
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: could control, producing a high value trade commodity in order
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: to acquire food from outside regions that were less affected.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: It suggests trade was a viable coping strategy against this
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: localized environmental risk. A real lesson in resilience and adaptation.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Now let's cross the world again to Mesoamerica, where we
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: see a parallel collapse, also driven by drought and cooling.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: We're talking about at TiO Tuakin.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: The largest city in the central Mexican plane.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: This was the powerhouse, the primate city, with maybe one
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five thousand inhabitants, and its decline beginning
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: so strike makingly soon after five point thirty five AD.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: It just screams synchronization with the climate.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Event, and we have hard physical evidence of the suffering there.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Skeletal analysis performed on remains from the city's suburbs paints
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: a stark picture. Researchers noted a drastic decline in public health.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: How So, it's most evident in the mortality rates of
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: infants and children under twenty five. Before the crisis, they
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: made up about forty percent of the dead. Afterwards, they
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: surged to seventy percent of the mortality samples.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: That spike in infant mortality, that's a classic sign of
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: severe nutritional stress and infentious disease. It was probably magnified
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: by sanitation issues caused by the drought that came with
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: the cooling.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: And this stress led to the city's political and religious
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: unraveling too. Tuwakin's downfall culminated in a revolution. Palaces were
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: violently smashed, and the biggest temple was deliberately set on fire.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: So the interpretation is powerful. The people lost confidence in
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: the elite or the priests, whose job it was to
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: talk to the gods and make sure the rains came.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: When the climate failed, the entire er established order just collapsed.
• 19:02
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• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Now let's get back to the episode.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: The real profound devastation of the sixth century came to
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: the fact that those two eruptions in five point thirty
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: six and five point forty, they left the world so
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: critically exposed. This vulnerability was the necessary precursor. It allowed famine, war, plague,
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: and death to attack these already weakened civilizations.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: And we're talking about an estimated total global mortality from
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: this catastrophic period of around ten percent, which is huge.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: And the most famous secondary disaster, the one that truly
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: cemented this period as the Dark Ages, was the emergence
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: of the Justinianic plague.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Exactly the cooling period the late Antique Little Ice Age.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: It coincided precisely with the emergence of the Justinianic plague,
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: which was the first outbreak give your city of Pestus
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: in Eurasia starting in five point forty one CE.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: So a famine weakened population is obviously highly susceptible to disease.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: It is, but the link is potentially even deeper than
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: just a nutritional deficit.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: What's the biological connection here beyond just hunger?
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: Well, Historians and scientists now speculate that the climate disruption itself,
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: the sudden cooling and the associated changes in moisture, might
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: have altered rodent migration patterns in the steps and along
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: the trade rug oh okay, and this could have potentially
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: increased the interaction between humans and rats, which in turn
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: accelerated that critical mode of plague spillover into human populations.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: So abrupt climatic events act as tipping points for these massive,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: large scale disasters.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: They absolutely do, and this Domino effect extends right into
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: geopolitics and mass migration. We see the climate shift profoundly
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: affecting the nomadic world of Central Asia. How So, the drier,
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: cooler climate meant rapidly dwindling pasture land across the vast
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Eurasian steps, and for highly militarized nomadic tribes like the Avars,
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: whose entire military power was fundamentally dependent on healthy horses,
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: this was a disaster why horses.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: In particular, horses.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Are particularly vulnerable to poor quality vegetation. Their digestive systems
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: really struggle with rank, dry grasses much more than cattle do.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: So climate stress directly weakened the core military asset of
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: the Avars.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: It did and their subsequent defeat by the Turks in
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: five point fifty two AD, which is documented in Chinese chronicles,
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: it triggered a massive demographic event. The surviving Avars began
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: a four thousand mile westward trek.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: And this westward migration, arguably triggered by the five point
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: thirty six catastrophes impact on pasture, land and political stability,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: it fundamentally impacted later European history.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: It introduced a powerful, organized military force into that fragmented
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: post Roman landscape. It's the definition of a ripple effect.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: But while the empires of Rome, Persia, China, and the
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Steps were all suffering, the climate chaos produced this fast
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: and positive twist of fate in the Arabian Peninsula.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: It is countertuitive, isn't it. Why would a global cooling
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: and drying event favor Arabian well as the great settled
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: powers Byzantium to the west and the Sasanian Persian Empire
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: to the east struggled with successive waves of famine and
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: the Justinianic plague, the Arabian Peninsula, specifically the central Highlands,
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: unexpectedly received slightly increased rainfall. It became momentarily greener and
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: more stable than it had been in previous centuries.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: At the same time, the crisis hit the traditional southern
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: powers hard. I'm thinking of Yemen.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Yes. The climatic and geopolitical chaos led to the smashup
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: of the essential Marie Dam in Yemen, which was the
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: foundation of the region's sophisticated agricultural stability.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: And its failure caused immense internal displacement.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: And a regional power vacuum. And this vacuum, combined with
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: the better conditions further north led to a shift in
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: wealth and influence toward Mecca and Medina. The Prophet Mohammed's
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: own Ana ancestors gained significant status and fame by organizing
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: and providing crucial food imports and trade routes during this
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: widespread time of famine and drought caused by the collapse
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: of the established empires.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: So they were the ones who could guarantee life when
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: others were starving.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: They were, and so the climatic and political chaos provided
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: the perfect canvas for a new religious and political order
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: to emerge.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: So the overall apocalyptic atmosphere, yes.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: The constant war, the fear of plague, the widespread famine,
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: and this unprecedented climate disaster, it made the Prophet Mohammad's
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: message incredibly attractive. It offered a stable, unified, divinely guided
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: vision in a world that just felt like it was disintegrating.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: So this socio environmental context was instrumental in helping the
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: new Arab empires spring onto the world stage by the
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: seventh century.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: It was a huge contributing factor.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: The ultimate lesson of five point thirty six a d
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: then is that these extreme events are not isolated accidents.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: They represent a deep, recurring pattern in history where climate
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: forces impose major shifts on civilization.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if we jump forward a couple of centuries, we
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: find a striking parallel around eight hundred CE that just
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: reinforces this pattern.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: The sources from eight hundred CE are equally compelling.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: They are In August seven ninety seven, chroniclers in Constantinople
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: again reported a dramatic darkening of the sun that lasted
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: for seventeen.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Days, and at the time, contemporaries interpreted this through a
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: political lens. Right, they linked it to the blinding and
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: overthrow of Emperor Constantine.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: The six They did, but the science once again tells
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: us the true global story. Ice core data from Greenland
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: and tree ring records from the Northern Hemisphere. They confirm
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: a major volcanic eruption around eight hundred CE.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: And this resulted in one of the lowest summer temperatures
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: in the Northern Hemisphere in fifteen hundred years.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Another massive shock, and this abrupt widespread cooling wasn't just
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: an environmental curiosity. It had immediate societal consequences. Most notably,
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: it was linked directly to the first Great Famine of
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: Charlemagne's reign in Western Europe.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Fascinating about Charlemagne's famine is that it forces a tangible
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: political response. It shows that even a powerful, organized government
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: cannot just ignore these shocks exactly.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: The shock was so severe that the Carolinging king was
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: forced to react with new social policy measures, large scale
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: charitable works, grain distribution decrees aimed at alleviating suffering. It
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: just demonstrates the continuity of the pattern. A sudden natural
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: shock requires an immediate, difficult political adaptation.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Now, let's look at one of the most surprising connections
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: between environmental science and history, using lead pollution as a
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: proxy for economic activity. How on Earth did researchers connect
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: ancient lead in ice cores to societal collapse.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: It's a brilliant piece of interdisciplinary work. Lead mining and
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: smelting cause widespread atmospheric pollution long before the Industrial Revolution.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: I mean, it was essential for everything from Roman pipes
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: and coinage to industrial processes.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: So researchers realized that the volume of atmospheric lead trapped
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: in those ice acted as a reliable proxy for economic activity.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: Yes, when the economy grew, pollution grew. When it declined,
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: pollution tapered off.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: So the concentration of lead in the ice core layers
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: is basically a ticker for the health of the pre
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: industrial economy.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: It is so they studied ice cores stretching across two millennia.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: They found this constant background lead from human activity, but
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: only once, only one time, did the lead pollution decline
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: to natural background.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Levels, which would indicate that human industrial activity had.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: Essentially stopped completely stopped.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: And that single time was not five point thirty six AD,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: which was catastrophic, but something even worse.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, that radical, unique decline happened during the peak years
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: of the Black Death between thirteen forty seven and thirteen
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: fifty three.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Which killed perhaps half of Europe's population.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Exactly because the labor force was so radically and so
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: rapidly reduced, With so few people left to mind, smelt
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: and trade, large scale industrial activity just ceased entirely across
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: major production area.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: That is astounding evidence. It means that only a radical,
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: catastrophic decline in human civilization mass mortality on an unprecedented
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: scale was sufficient to halt large scale atmospheric pollution.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: It reinforces how tightly economic vibrancy is tied to environmental
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: impact and how crisis mortality changes society in these unexpected deep.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Ways, which brings us directly back to the modern mourning
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: that's inherent in the five point thirty six eighty disaster.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: Because a major volcanic event of a similar scale in
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: the future remains a statistical certainty.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: And in a modern, hyper interconnected world, the consequences would
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: be radically different and perhaps even more severe than they
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: were in the sixth century.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Oh they would be devastating. We face the risk of
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: instant global crop failure, but also the crippling of modern logistics.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: Think about the interruption of global communications, the loss of
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: satellite functions due to atmospheric shock.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: And aircraft transport being grounded for an extended period because
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere is choked with sulfate.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly in the ancient world, many people could fall back
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: on localized subsistence farming, however meager the yield was. But
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: today our highly populated urban centers depend on just in
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: time global supply chains.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: They would face starvation within weeks, and.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: The logic remains clear. The lack of resources quickly spirals
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: into conflict. People either sit and starve or they acquire
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: necessary food and resources. By force, the global economic system,
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: which relies on stability and clear skies, would be instantly shattered.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: And the ultimate sobering lesson of five point thirty six
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: CE that we have to internalize is this. The change
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: wasn't a fast event where the world ended overnight. The
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: sources show us that the catastrophe initiated a process.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: A process that took one hundred to one hundred and
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: fifty years for the new reality to fully emerge, the
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: fragmented post Roman dark ages, the rise of powerful new
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: caliphates in Arabia, the fundamental change in global trade.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: It was a slow grinding societal transformation kicked off by
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: a massive, sudden natural shock.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: So if we synthesize this vast array of evidence, from
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: the written chronicles detailing the Sun's feeble shadow to the
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: chemical fingerprint trapped in ancient ice, the magnitude of the
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: five thirty six CE event comes into sharp focus. It
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: wasn't just a cold year. It was a perfect storm
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: of climatic, pathogenic, and socioeconomic factors.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: It initiated the late Antique Little Ice Age, which then
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: provided the ideal environmental conditions for the outbreak of the
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: justinianic plague. This combination didn't just cause hardship. It accelerated
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: a vast geopolitical transformation across multiple continents. It defined everything
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: from the collapse of empires and cities to the forging
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: of new religious and political empires.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: And it demonstrates the climate shock when it hits a vulnerable,
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: interconnected world, acts as the ultimate amplifier of existing social stress.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: It turns localized problems into systemic failures.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: And here is the final provocative thought for you to
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: carry forward from this discussion. How much do modern historians, economists,
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: and politicians truly pay attention to the fundamental non human
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: ability of natural forces, from volcanic eruptions to solar cycles
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: to change the entire long term trajectory of human history.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: The deep history of the planet is often the silent,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: powerful hand that guides geopolitics.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: An excellent point. Thank you for joining us for this
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: deep dive on beyond infographics.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: We hope you enjoyed this extensive conversation and the journey
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: through the worst year to be alive. If you did,
• 30:23
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• 30:24
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• 30:27
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