Catastrophe - The Day the Sun Went Out - Part 1 of 2 (Mysteries Of History Documentary) | Timeline

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just under 1500 years ago something terrifying happened to the world's climate something nobody could understand the Sun began to go dark rain the color of blood poured from the skies clouds of fine dust enveloped the earth [Music] winter grips the land of two years then came drought famine plague death whole cities were wiped out civilizations crumbled and nobody knew what had happened it was a catastrophe a catastrophe that affected millions and millions of people all around the world but what was it in mid sixth century catastrophe was the most important date in the history the past 2,000 years it really did lay the foundations of the world we live in today for five years in the attic of his unassuming suburban home David Keynes a writer on history and archaeology has immersed himself in a worldwide investigation he's consulted over 80 experts on drought famine floods cosmic and ecological disasters epidemics and ancient wars he scoured the annals and chronicles of the six and seventh centuries ad from all over the world his book tells the story of a catastrophic climatic event buried in the heart of the dark ages which Keyes believes totally altered the course of history [Music] the mystery which has so tantalized him began at a conference on archaeology in 1994 one particular talk really amazingly it was a lecture given by a dendrochronologist an expert in tree rings called Mike Bailey and he was giving a lecture about how all the tree rings in the world really went haywire some women in sixth century [Music] thirty years ago when he was a physics student professor Mike Bailey of Queen's University in Belfast pioneered a revolutionary idea in a totally different field to his own he devised a computer system which would put trees to scientific use he had realized that trees had the potential to become the silent witnesses of the world's changing weather going back thousands of years every year trees put on a new layer of growth within the bark these layers show up as rings [Music] every ring varies in width the wide ring is a year of good weather and narrow ring a bad year the pattern of wide and narrow rings is distinctive each ring sequence can be matched with the rings of previously felled trees and precisely dated the computer program which matches the patterns of the Rings was Mike Bailey's invention and it's now used by laboratories all over the world over the last 30 years in northern Europe a variety of people very over a variety of laboratories have set out and worked back from nan felling deaths tu back through long ring records of living trees and then overlapping to patterns from historic buildings for example fitting together the sort of long ring patterns going back hundreds and eventually thousands of years it's by painstakingly analyzing and overlapping the patterns of older and older trees that a complete unbroken record of tree ring widths is built up so you've got this sample with it's very clear character change just here when we processed another sample from the same building we could see that it came originally from the same parent tree and you could extend the pattern back from the first sample right back through to beginning of this sample many many samples have to be analyzed by Mike Bailey's computer program to get the average width for every year it took 14 years to build up the complete data just for Irish Oaks this tree record is now telling iris scientists what the weather was like every single year for the last seven and a half thousand years if you think with us that's an astonishing position to be in we can interrogate for any calendar year in the last thousands of years what trees thought of their growth conditions over a big geographical area not information simply didn't exist before but what we are interested in is why did this tree go narrow at this point and narrow again at this point what is the environmental information which is actually stored in the patterns David Keys went to Ireland to see for himself the mysterious sixth century event stored in Mike Bailey's tree rings yes shuffle through here David it was ten years ago that Mike Bailey noticed his oak rings went abnormally narrow in the mid 6080 signs that something very powerful was stopping the trees growing I'd 39 five 40 41 42 extremely now daily then told keys of similar evidence from Europe particularly from a colleague in Finland he sees a really abrupt drop in 536 a bit of a recovery in 537 38 and then it drops dramatically into 542 - previously a pattern and that pattern wasn't just confined to Ireland and Finland by contacting other labs David keys found that wherever you looked in the world in the mid 60's were having a terrible time foxtail pine rings from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California showed that 535 by 36 and 541 were three of the four worst years in the past two millennia in Chile Fitzroy dreams record the greatest summer growth drop of the past sixteen hundred years in Siberia a 20 year decline in tree growth than the five 30s and five 40s was the most serious in the past nineteen hundred years so why were the trees not growing was it dark coal natural pollution or drought for Mike Bailey the answer lay in a microscopic examination of the 536 ad oak green cells normally seen in winter were showing up in summer to colleague in Germany sent me a photograph of one of his German Oaks the tree put on a line of these large spring vessels then put on fine tail wood during the oddly the summer and goes dormant then it does again next year so each year's growth is from the beginning of one line of vessels to the beginning of the next and in this year the year 536 the vessels are enormous Lea small and they're also distributed right through the summer it's widely reckoned at this phenomenon is due to frost damage the implication from this kind of worldwide evidence was that the weather was extremely cold for long periods in the mid 60 a Mike Bailey also had archaeological evidence from Ireland which backs this up much of the wood that he dated came from chronics wooden island forts that people built as refuges in times of trouble and clan warfare Bailey took keys to the remains of one in Loch Katherine near OMA to look at the submerged Timbers that once formed the outer wall my first inkling that there was something going on came from Timbers specifically from sites like this the mid 60 a Marx the beginning of the construction of kromaggs bailey believed that this was due to the hostile conditions stemming from the climatic disaster when you look at the overall picture there seems to be about a decade of really bad condition starring inside 36 and running onto the mid-size forties at least the implication from lots of bits of evidence is that it was extremely cold and that this reduced sunlight and cold caused crop failures basically people in an area like this would be forced back onto non agricultural produce they would be forced to fish they would be forced to to hunt and i would put a lot of strain on the population which was used to having agricultural produce to see them through the winters for example so i think things would have been very bleak here [Music] quis was now hooked not just by the tree ring evidence that it was cold but also by the fact that people seemed to be suffering too his next step was to see whether there were any written accounts from the time of the climate falling apart by far the greatest civilization as the sixth century was the Roman Empire Rome had been sacked a hundred years earlier by Huns and Goths but now the Empire was resurgent with a new capital in Constantinople once again it was the center of Mediterranean culture by contacting classical scholars Keyes unearthed many highly significant Roman accounts of bizarre weather one eyewitness a Syrian bishop john of ephesus describes the extraordinary events during the years 535 and 536 ad there was a sign from the fun the life over which had never been seen or reported before the Sun became dawn and its darkness lasted for 18 months each day shown for about four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow everyone declared that the Sun would never recover its full light [Music] [Music] historians of the 6th century Empire do not usually record climatic events unless they are something really stupidest natural event like comet will get mentioned now in 5 30s the fact that John mentions a two-year dimming of the Sun indicates that it was significant John writing in Constantinople mentions it cassiodorus writing in Italy he too refers to a dimming of the Sun we have had a spring without mildness and a summer without heat the month would have been maturing the crops have been killed by north winds rain is denied and the river fears new from these accounts from the Mediterranean and Middle East were extraordinary enough but what about the other civilizations of that time Keyes scoured records from North and South China Korea and Japan [Music] and as it turned out the word out of say whatever 30 sources the were around a dozen which actually refer directly to the darkened Sun event or to its consequences to its immediate climatic consequences in 540 the Japanese great King wrote food is the basis of the Empire yellow gold and 10,000 strings of cash cannot cure hunger what availed a thousand boxes of pearls to him with starving of cold and the nan Chi ancient Chronicle of southern China records yellow dust rained down like snow it could be scooped up in handfuls as a research continued I began to realize more and more this disaster had really enveloped the entire world but it doesn't wasn't just a few places but it was virtually everywhere the only question was what was causing it there seemed in my mind only three possible answers to that either an asteroid or comet or volcano imagine living in the middle of the 6th century suffering a climatic catastrophe an event so horrendous that trees hardly grew for years and the Sun was dimmed whatever it was it would have taken thousands of cubic miles of dust to be hurled into the atmosphere to cause this permanent winter was an asteroid comet strike or volcano responsible [Music] have Los Alamos the birthplace of the atomic bomb scientists have been studying all the possible atmospheric consequences of nuclear strikes and cosmic collisions we certainly have plenty of evidence that the earth is struck repeatedly by asteroids large and small comets large and small you have to have a big thing that hits the ground in order to have a climate effect extraterrestrial body has come in all shapes and sizes meteors are small rocks which roam space occasionally hitting planets usually causing little damage asteroids are big meteors when these things hit the Earth's surface they explode churning up vast amounts of dust and debris David Keys asked an astrophysicists to calculate how big an impact would have been needed to generate a climatic catastrophe lasting at least a decade so what we can say is that the total number of particles in the atmosphere because this is one one then Rho is around one over Kappa L to cause a major climatic catastrophe but with last decades we would need an impact by a rather large asteroid say four kilometers across it would take an even bigger comet to create the same effect a comet consists mainly of gas and ice this gives them their distinctive tail as they move across the sky because they're less dense Allan Fitzsimmons has calculated that it would take a six kilometer wide comet to affect our climate such a crash would have a spectacular effect on our planet when it was just over two days from impact it would only be seen as a very faint star in the night sky now I did a poster size it got closer and closer we've slowly see it brighten and grow larger and to about 30 minutes before impact it would be about brightening in the sky by then we believe everybody would have noticed it but we wouldn't be able to do anything about it now the time it takes for that asteroid to travel from the top of the Earth's atmosphere until it reaches sea level is only 8 seconds so we see this brilliant fireball all the time of course making no sound because it's travelling about 20 times the speed of sound the first sound we would hear would occur minutes after we see the huge flash of light when the asteroid strikes the Earth's surface and is instantly vaporized in a ginormous island could this disaster have happened without at least one civilization noticing and reporting it known civilization at the time records any such event in addition scientists have found no evidence of a crater left by an impact from the 6th century I mean that's it's just yesterday in geologic time it be the crater we know about it certainly that happened 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died I don't think it happened in the 6th century but the lack of a crater alone does not rule out a comet or asteroid strike seventy percent of the earth is covered in water could it be that the impact is on the oceans if the asteroid landed in the ocean then that the initial wave caused by the impact would be miles high there would have been a humongous tidal waves big huge tidal waves that that would have swamped the coasts for over of the margins of whatever ocean it struck the tidal damage would have traveled miles inland again no civilization recorded such an event and scientists haven't detected any significant interruption to the growth of coastal plants of this period there doesn't appear to be any evidence of an asteroid or comet strike on earth at this time the search seemed to be narrowing down to a volcano but could there be another extraterrestrial explanation this time not a complete comet hitting the earth but one which had fragmented and scattered throughout the atmosphere it's a theory mike baillie suggested to david keys the bombardment event has been like classically defined as a large number of pieces of coma arriving in a short period of time on excluding in the atmosphere and the model for that is the 1908 Tunguska impact over Siberia which was a single object which probably caused both a 20-megaton equivalent size of explosion the 1908 Tunguska event was an example of an airburst explosion a lightweight meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere and exploded in the air while the shock wave caused massive local destruction there weren't enough micro fine particles released to affect the weather but mike baillie believes that a whole shower of cometary debris hitting in in Tunguska style event could affect the climate if you have a large number of those you're going to just put a lot of material into the atmosphere and you're going to cause a dust field Mike Bailey believes that it's possible to use mythology to support his theory he's analyzed the life and death of one of the most famous legends of all time and reached an intriguing conclusion 6th century Britain was supposedly the time of King Arthur all the many later legends told that Arthur lived in the West of Britain and that as he grew old his kingdom was reduced to a wasteland curiously the legends give the date of Arthur's death that's 539 or 542 ad right in the middle of the climatic catastrophe the legends also tell of terrible blows which rain down from the skies on - Arthur's people Mike Bailey thinks that Arthur's dead could therefore be a symbol of something that really did happen devastation by a comet as it shattered and crashed into Earth [Music] then you look at the mythology you discover that Arthur isn't just somebody with a nice suit of shining armor and some buddies sitting on a round table the origins of the stories are in Celtic mythology and that one of the key figures that you can trace him back to would be the Celtic God Luke that Luke is a great solar deity who curiously comes up in the West and has a long arm it could well be the description of a comma and Luke also is famous for delivering these terrible blows could Bailey's myths hold a grain of truth by process of elimination it now seemed to come down to a clear choice cometary bombardment or a volcano but which David Keys discovered that there was one hostile area of the earth which could just hold the final clue the polar ice caps you [Music] for the past decade a multinational team of scientists has been extracting 1,000 meter deep columns of ice from Greenland in the north and the Antarctic in the South in the same way trees put on a new ring of growth each season the polar ice caps put on a fresh layer of snow and in each layer is a record of what was in our atmosphere the chemistry of the old atmospheres in there and even the chemistry today is changing in our atmosphere if we combine this we can have a record which we can compare with other records from the deep sea sediments from tree rings from lakes but the fantastic thing about the ice caps is that they are directly related to the atmosphere itself professor Hanna's team are testing a new Greenland core from the 530 ad that has just arrived at their laboratory if pieces of a comet or asteroid had exploded in the atmosphere the team would expect to find traces of rare chemical elements like iridium if there had been a massive volcanic eruption they would expect to find an excess of sulfuric acid the tell-tale signature of a volcano the sulfates would have been hurled up into the atmosphere by the explosion and scattered by the winds they would have then got into rain and snow to be finally stored at the poles as ice and what we are going to do now is take a piece I of ice out around 5:30 our precise we would have to clean it a little roughly effort without bringing is it set up here where it will be cleaned in the end and on all sides and then we will be caught by the steel knife so that we are not touching the coal we have to remove quite a lot to be sure that we don't have any item outside contamination the cleaned core is sliced into five centimeter length each length is then melted and analyzed we would be mentioned one at a time automatically from now on and the results will show up on this computer as commencement so what does the ice contain cometary debris or volcanic sulfates subject piqued increasing when I offer an example that must be M confirms referring evidently atmosphere and that's an indication that there's been an several chemical action and as the final result shows it wasn't against any eruptions I saw here is the Sephora get it and actually these huge amount of sulphate here lasting several years and clearly higher than anything else in this part of the record corresponds exactly to this around five hundred thirty five so there's no doubt it's a major eruption the evidence from Greenland seemed conclusive lots of sulfates and no cometary debris but for the eruption to have had worldwide consequences more was needed if you want a climatic important major eruption it must show up with a large signal in both hemispheres addition what see it in Antarctic ice cores and you must see it in Green Bay at the moment information from the Antarctic ice core is less precise but from their existing data professor hammers team already know that there is a volcanic signal in Antarctic - we have a mechanic's signal which last several years we have from an Antarctic or similar evidence as in Greenland but not as good not as well dated but indicating that this volcanic eruption could have taken place the data from both the North and South Poles is the same a huge sulphur spike around the mid sixth century that strongly suggests volcanic ash caused the global climate damage seen in tree rings the idea of volcanoes causing climatic catastrophe may seem unfamiliar but tree rings and ice cores now show that every thousand or so years massive climate downturns have happened the mid six centuries vent is simply the most recent in fact what surprises volcanologists is how few volcanic eruptions there have been in the last hundred years one of the amazing things which people sometimes forget even scientist is that our century is one of the most quiet century with respect to volcanism if you go back in time in the 19th century in 17th century 18th century there's a lot of volcanoes they come in lumps say 20 30 years a lot of them they even know a lack in the stratosphere mixing up and it's not speculation but people do think that Turner's paintings with his sunsets it was not the taste of the artists to make them so red as they were but they were actually painted in a time when the real sunset looked like this we live on this planet with over 200 active volcanoes they may have been quiet recently but a really massive eruption can turn the climate upside down to create a dust veil that spreads all around the world the eruption has to happen near the equator as only Equatorial winds can spread dust over both Emma spheres but there are over 90 equatorial volcanoes could David Keyes discover which one caused the mayhem of the sixth century [Music] David Keys began to narrow the search for the sixth century volcano he knew that the highest concentration by far of large tropical volcanoes lies in an arc straddling Southeast Asia from India through Sumatra Java the Philippines and Japan first he turned to the greatest civilization near this area which was then producing written records China I in great excitement started looking to see there was any trace of anything happening in 535 and in fact in February 5 3 5 there's a record of a loud bang a huge thunderous sound coming from the southwest and with this one there was no mention of lightning or anything it was merely the rather sort of mysterious entry which they only referred to as a thunderous noise and interestingly that points straight towards that Indonesian area where all those volcanoes are but the Chinese who have bothered to record such a sound it must have been an exceptional one-off event but could the sound of a volcanic eruption had cadell's the 3,000 miles from Indonesia to China to help locate the volcano Kees asked experts at Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico to explain the physics of long range sound travel we know that neared a volcano the sudden explosive eruption provides a shockwave in the near field and that propagates out going out to thousands of miles but as it propagates out you lose the high frequencies the shock very sudden sharp reports of the volcanoes and all you're left with are the low frequencies that we measure in what we call infrasound which is generally below 10 cycles per second the long-range perception of that sound would be very low rumbling much like very distant thunder the Los Alamos experts had said it was possible now could keys find any written evidence from Indonesia unfortunately very little writing survives from the area but once again he found a fascinating clue housed in the Royal Palace at Solo in Central Java is a massive set of manuscript volumes called The Book of Kings put together in the 1850s but based on ancient sources it describes an extraordinary event which took place around the middle of the first millennium ad today's Javanese royal archivist prince puja reads from the original text but at a mighty thunder which was answered by a furious shaking of the earth pitch darkness thunder and lightning and then came forth a furious Gale together with a hard rain a deadly storm darkening the entire world in no time there came a great flood then when the water subsided it could be seen that the island of Java had been split in two thus creating the island of Sumatra had Keys struck gold with the book of kings geophysicists he consulted said the story accurately described a major volcanic eruption and would have been difficult to invent but which of the many Indonesian volcanoes was the book of kings describing there was a clue the only major volcano in that specific area between the islands of Sumatra and Java is the legendary Krakatoa the world's most notorious volcano which last erupted in 1883 but could keys prove Krakatoa was the culprit an Icelandic volcanologist professor Harald ur Sigurdsson now working in the USA joined the chase he had visited the volcano many times and already knew that Krakatoa contained an ancient mystery an eruption long ago far bigger than anything recorded in modern times about five years ago when we were doing research on the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatoa we discovered this deposit of a major eruption and so we became very interested in this deposit but at the time we didn't have the time and resources to study it in detail so what we really want to do is ideally find charcoal within this layer or charcoal immediately above immediately below it in order to give us a date of the event it was an irresistible temptation david Keyes's ingenuity had led us this far we had to go on channel 4 decided to finance an expedition to java by professor Sigurdsson [Music] his goal to test Keyes's theory by dating Krakatoa's major eruption [Music] Krakatoa is part of a group of uninhabited rainforest islands lying west of Java and just south of the Equator [Music] it's also the scene of the most famous volcanic eruption of recent times in 1883 Krakatoa blew itself apart killing 36 thousand people on the mainland the first stop for Professor Sigurdsson and his team will be the island of anak Krakatau a' meaning child of Krakatoa anak has formed entirely since the eruption of 1883 and grown up into a thousand foot high volcanic island each year anak becomes ever bigger and ever more dangerous now actually when you get up from the reason rods are the size of houses and five six meters in diameter and these were ejected by the explosions of anak and they travel through the air like a bomb basically and they fall to the ground and when they hit the ground they create a crater this is about as big as they come this one must be 2 meters high and what do you think about 4 meters wide yeah that's a big bomb beautiful column how to mod you missing flying through the air and landing here during an explosion flunking down and creating this crater that it sits in this one is a good one because you can hide behind it in an explosion and take shelter let's hope they don't land like this today will be a very dangerous anak Krakatau ax is a noisy and coral sand child only two hours after the team pushed off from the island Anna let rip hurtling rocks and lava onto the area where we had stood from the safety of the sea it was possible to gaze back at one of the greatest firework shows on earth this activity is just part of a cycle that's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years Krakatoa grows up out of the sea every little eruption adds more and more Rock to the island eventually it gets so large it blows itself apart this time anak continued its barrage throughout the night on into the heat and dust of the next tropical morning but sigurðsson task is to journey back in time hundreds of years back long before anak Krakatoa was born for decades scientists have thought that Krakatoa contains a centuries-old secret illustrations from a 1920s book show a possible pattern first there was ancient Krakatoa which exploded possibly around 5:35 leaving islands behind which eventually with occasional minor eruptions grew back to the Krakatoa of 1883 this in turn blew up leaving the Krakatoa islands of today sigurðsson last survey of the island seems to confirm this five years ago he charted the ocean floor using sonar the charts show the outlines of a caldera the term for a giant crater left after a massive volcanic explosion there's a structure out here in the ocean a circular structure which is much larger in diameter and it is possible that this a buried feature circular features as we see here to the north and the East may in fact be a gigantic ancient caldera crocodile well actually right on the edge here so configured sand find any hard evidence to date this eruption of ancient Krakatoa such evidence is only contained in charcoal which is formed when hot lava instantly carbon eise's trees the charcoal can then be carbon-dated in the laboratory to get an exact date Sigurdsson must find charcoal from the major eruption layer which is on the islands around and add Krakatoa it's a vertical drop failing that he could also narrow the margin if he finds charcoal in the layers above and below looking for charcoal is like looking for a needle in a haystack and a lot more dangerous right in the middle of the major pyroclastic deposit that is formed by a very large eruption of Krakatau now this is very likely to be the deposit that was created by a eruption possibly in the 6th century AD and this is the one I would really like to get some charcoal from so we can take this very important event now we'd be very lucky to find charcoal but I'm going to keep digging around here a little bit and see what we got the material in the layers of krakatoa spans hundreds of thousands of years even narrowing down the date of the major ancient eruption to within a few thousand years would be a big stride forward often it's extremely difficult to find the charcoal you might think there will be a lot of burnt wood or carbonized trees here because it's a tropical environment but many volcanoes are forests because there's so much activity that the vegetation and the forest doesn't really get established we've had a lot of problem with finding charcoal in this particular deposit but we must keep in mind that there are only small pieces of the island sticking up above sea level so we have very small areas of prospect during the fortnight he was in Krakatoa professor sigurðsson was only able to find 10 charcoal samples he was unable to find a charcoal sample big enough to date from the major eruption layer however he was able to find good samples for the layer immediately above it and a layer a few levels below it it will now be possible to see whether 535 falls between those dates if it does not david Keyes's theory will fall [Music] [Music] six weeks later the carbon-dating analysis is completed professor Sigurdsson faxes the results and an accompanying report to david keys so what is assessment on as it's really good news the results showed that the layer immediately above the major eruption is dated as 1215 ad a layer several layers below it is dated of 6600 b.c while if we look at this in detail over here let me have this picture we have twelve hundred and fifteen ad right on top here in this deposit level then we have the the major eruption deposit right underneath it and then we have about five layers and then down here we have the charcoal a bit dated at 6600 b.c so in here we have quite a period of activity and development of the volcano possibly several thousand years and that leads us to think that the event is much closer to 1215 ad as opposed to six thousand six hundred a lot spun still covers the 535 ad event so it doesn't rule it out at all in fact I think as a result of this we are focusing more and more in on that time frame he thinks that the the the lead period the lead option if you like for when the major eruption that we're talking about took place was the first millennium ad so although technically can be anything between 6600 b.c and 1300 ad all the other pieces of evidence that he's got suggests that it's actually we can narrow that down to the period let's say 0 to 1000 now 535 is marvelously right in the middle so I think that it's looking good David Keyes is 5 years of detective work suggests that there is overwhelming evidence of a massive volcanic eruption around 535 ad in the tropics Krakatoa is now the most likely culprit the volcano that did go up in 535 ad would have produced a dust cloud that enveloped the world it would have been one of the most dangerous spectacles ever seen a 30-mile high column of ash and dust brought global climatic catastrophes darkness droughts frost and famine and ultimately chaos and war it was a natural catastrophe that would change the course of human history [Music] you

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Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Length: 49min 21sec (2961 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017

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