Why 536 AD Was The Worst Year To Be Alive | Catastrophe | Chronicle

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

Interesting program. Gives some insight into how bad things were in the past. It's amazing that humans were not entirely wiped out by the plague

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/CobraCornelius 📅︎︎ Mar 22 2022 🗫︎ replies

One of those years with no summer and the years after that affected too - famine brings disease and war and of course death

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/wagner56 📅︎︎ Mar 23 2022 🗫︎ replies
Captions
(plaintive music) (ominous roaring) (taut mellow music) - [Narrator] In 535 AD, scientific evidence suggests that a massive volcano erupted in the tropics. It threw up so much ash that it turned summer to winter. Crops failed for years, drought and famine gripped the land, millions died. (taut mellow music) For the last five years, David Keys, a writer on history and archeology, has immersed himself in this worldwide climatic catastrophe. By consulting historians, scientists, and in particular, volcanologists, Keys has concluded that the most likely culprit was the notorious volcano, Krakatoa. An expedition to Krakatoa, which lies off the coast of Indonesia, further supported his theory. But Keys believes that the eruption, the biggest in the last 1,500 years, was only the beginning. What followed was over 100 years of upheaval that would change the course of human history forever. (violent burbling) (mellow music) So what would the volcanic eruption of one and a half thousand years ago have been like? - The amount of power generated by this eruption would have been equivalent to around 2,000 million Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. (volcano bursting) - The eruption of this ancient Krakatoa is something mankind has never witnessed, perhaps tens, hundreds of times larger than any volcano that's ever been witnessed. (electronic beeping) - [Narrator] David Keys asked volcanologist, Dr. Ken Wohletz, an expert on Krakatoa, to feed all the available data about 6th century climate change into a supercomputer to simulate how the explosion began to unfold. - I will start the simulation. It will show several phases of the eruption. - [Narrator] Wohletz has located the eruption in the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra. By combining tree ring and ice core data with eyewitness accounts of the dimming of the sun, it's possible to estimate how much material might have been thrown up into the Earth's atmosphere. With that figure, it's possible to calculate the scale and power of the explosion and associated aftereffects. (distant roaring) Using Wohletz's model, we have reconstructed the Krakatoa 535 AD Big Bang. (volcano explodes) A giant red hot fountain of molten rock and a vast cloud of ash towered over the countryside. Then a second crack would have let seawater in. (volcano explodes) This caused an absolutely vast explosion, creating a 30-mile high fountain of magma, dust, and ash. Up to a thousand away, ash rained down on forests and fields. (magma burbling) - The towering clouds of steam and gas and ash pierced and shot upwards, and at times when it seemed like could go no higher, it would continue to go high, eventually to the point where it started to block out the sun in all directions. And this gray, white cloud would then see to sort of move laterally across the sky, like a mushroom cloud. (tense music) - [Narrator] The fallout from the eruption would have been the natural equivalent of nuclear winter. (ominous music) So how did Krakatoa affect the world? Ken Wohletz has studied Krakatoa in detail and he can see similarities between it a huge dormant volcano near his laboratory high in the hills of New Mexico. (taut electronic beeping) The 15-mile-wide volcanic crater, or caldera, at Valley Grande, New Mexico last exploded a million years ago. Ash from here landed as far away as Louisiana. Using the remains of Valley Grande, Ken shows how high-flying volcanic ash blocks out the sun. - This is ultra-fine volcanic ash formed by phreato-plinian eruption, similar to what we think happened in the 6th century at Krakatoa. It's so fine, (wind blowing) that even just a baby's breath of air will keep it suspended by minute turbulence. It will never fall to the earth as long as the air is moving, which of course, it always does high up in the atmosphere. (ominous music) - [Narrator] In 535 AD, similar microscopic particles of ash and sulfur dioxide from Krakatoa would have shrouded the whole sky, turning it endlessly gray. Temperatures dropped. Without the full strength of the sun to heat the oceans, less water would have evaporated, and the atmosphere became drier and drier. (ominous music) - As a result, there would have been progressively less rainfall. As a result, there were droughts and famines. Very often at the end of major droughts, you do get massive floods. And that seems to have been what occurred. (somber music) - [Narrator] But what fascinated David Keys most was not the climatic catastrophe itself, but the possible effects on human civilization. (fire crackling) (suspenseful music) - I began to think to myself, well, disruption as severe as this has got to have political consequences. It's really the long-term consequences that I was interested in isolating, to see whether one big event can actually have a knock-on effect throughout history, worldwide. (mellow music) - [Narrator] Keys decided to examine a series of historical puzzles of the 6th century AD. He looked at events which from contemporary writings and archeological evidence were known to have taken place, but whose cause has never been properly explained, The first puzzle was the spread of a terrible disease, which brought the greatest superpower of the time, the Roman Empire, to its knees. (suspenseful music) In 535 AD, under the Emperor Justinian, the late Roman Empire based in Constantinople was flourishing. (suspenseful music) But in 542 AD, something awful struck at the heart of Justinian's glittering empire. The horrors were described by a contemporary writer, a monk called Evagrius. (somber music) - [Evagrius] With some people, it began in the head, made the eyes bloody, and the face swollen, descended to the throat, and then removed them from mankind. With others, there was a flowing of the bowels. (somber music) - [Narrator] Evagrius was describing a massive outbreak of bubonic plague, the first time it was recorded in history. But how could the plague have anything to do with the climatic catastrophe unleashed seven years before? Plague is a bacteria, a bacillus transmitted from infected rats to humans. The carrier is the humble flea, which feeds on rats' blood. - This is a flea, which has had a blood meal and has a known plague organisms in its gut. And you can see that it's quite, stomach's quite full, and everything's fine. If we contrast this with a flea, which has taken up some of the bacillus, we can see that there's a blockage here. And this is brought about by a reaction between the bacillus and the flea's gut. Now, the result of this is, of course, the flea can't feed properly. - They become so ravenously hungry, because they begin to starve, in effect, the more they eat. Well, they can eat and eat and eat, and they don't satisfy their hunger because their gut is blocked. And so they will jump onto absolutely anything in the chance of getting a free meal. - [Narrator] As the rats themselves die from the plague, the flea has an obvious new target to bite for blood: humans. And then, as Evagrius describes, the agony begins. - [Evagrius] Some came out in sores, which gave rise to great fevers, and they would die two or three days later with their minds in the same state as those who had suffered nothing, and with their bodies still robust. Others lost their senses before dying. (ominous music) - [Narrator] What Keys found out is that scientists now know that outbreaks of plague are strongly related to changes in climate. (ominous music) The sort of changes that followed 535, in particular, cooling, could have had a huge impact on the spread of the disease. Temperature directly affects how the plague bacteria form in the flea's gut. - Well, plague epidemics are temperature-related. What happens is that in the gut of the flea, the fibrin clot only forms at temperatures below 25 degrees centigrade. Above 25 degrees centigrade, the clot doesn't form and any bacillus is simply passed out of the flea with the feces. - [Narrator] If cooler conditions bring about the onset of the disease, did that happen in 535 AD? And if so, where? - Well, according to one of our contemporary sources, the church historian, Evagrius, the plague originated in Ethiopia. What we know, both scientifically and historically, is that the Great Lakes area, Central Africa, is one of the oldest foci of plague activities in the world, and that it would appear that the assertion of Evagrius is correct. - [Narrator] Because Africa is normally hot, the disease is kept at bay, but if Africa was affected by the global cooling of 535 and 536, it would have been a lethal breeding ground for plague. From Africa via the trade route, ships, rats, and sailors could easily bring the plague up the coast, first hitting the major port of Alexandria in Egypt and on into the heart of the Roman Empire. And Roman greed for one precious commodity from African elephants would only accelerate that process. In the 6th century, there was an enormous trade in African ivory. (suspenseful music) - Hundreds of tons of ivory are being brought into the empire every year, and being processed for luxury furniture, for luxury objects, which important magistrates would give out as gifts, processed for diplomatic gifts that the empire could then use to impress his neighbors farther to the north and farther to the west. People who would never have seen an elephant in their lives. - And it was essentially the European and Mediterranean greed for ivory that brought the roof in. - [Narrator] Only seven years after the climatic catastrophe in 542 AD, on the back of the ivory trade, the plague surged into Constantinople. - Its impact was devastating. We had to dispose of over 10,000 bodies a day, week after week after week, throwing them into the sea off special boats, sticking them in the towers of the city wall, filling up systems, digging up orchards. - Soldiers were forced to dig mass graves in which to cast the bodies of those who had died. The impression is one of chaos and pandemonium. - Constantinople, Europe's biggest city stank for month after month after month. - [Narrator] One contemporary writer recorded that when the number of dead reached a quarter of a million, city officials simply stopped counting. As people left the stricken city, they took the plague to towns, villages, and farms throughout the empire. Untold millions died. (ominous music) And unknown to the empire, a second mortal threat was brewing 3,000 miles to the east. (horseman yelling) The climatic catastrophe was also having an extraordinary effect on an extraordinary people. They, too, would play their part in the decline of the Roman Empire. And the simple reason for this new threat was the difference between the digestive systems of horses and cows. (volcano exploding) (ominous music) In the isolated planes of Mongolia, hundreds of miles north of China, something strange was about to happen. Before 535 AD, the overlords of the region were a tribe of violent barbarian horsemen, the Avars. Chinese writers recorded their uncivilized way of life. - These are foul-smelling barbarians, from their point of view, with outrageous habits. The Avars never bathed, never washed their clothing. They cleaned their dishes by having the women lick them dry, all of which was simply horrifying to the Chinese. - [Narrator] But in one respect, as both Chinese chronicles and archeological finds show, the Avars were years ahead of the competition. (electronic beeping) Finds from archeological digs all over Avar territories suggest that they were the most advanced horsemen in the world. Their style of riding, saddles, and mouth bits are still in use by Hungarian plainsmen today. And many believe that the Avars almost certainly invented the stirrup. - It was this large concentration of horses that gave them a military edge, the latest in the military technology of that era. (pensive music) (indistinct chattering) The horses also provided food and sustenance. The Avars drank fermented mare's milk, an alcoholic beverage. (indistinct chattering) So, horses were central to their existence. (horsemen yelling) - [Narrator] But then in 535 and 536, the years of the catastrophe, Chinese records and tree ring evidence from Siberia suggest that the Mongolian Steppe was crippled by cold and dry conditions. The knock-on effect would have been long-term, lasting decades. (suspenseful music) By 552 AD, the Avars were attacked by people who lived in the surrounding highlands, the Turks. They had previously been ruled by the Avars. Mysteriously, the once invincible Avar horsemen were crushed. Up until now, the cause of this sudden reversal of power has never been explained, but then David Keys had an idea. (taut music) - So I was very puzzled by this and decided to try and find out what the mechanism was. I thought, well, maybe it's something to do with their economy. Well, the Avar economy was a horse-based one. The Turk economy was a much more mixed one, involving considerable numbers of cattle. The question came to my mind, well, was there something about the way that a cattle economy works and a horse economy works? The difference between those that might shed some light on the political events, on the demise of the Avars. (electronic beeping) - [Narrator] Keys contacted John Milne at Macaulay Land Use Center in Aberdeen. Milne has made a detailed study of how different animals feed and survive. - Yes, these horses here are actually highland colonies, but in terms of the sort of size, they're very similar to what I believe the Avar horses would have been like. They're quite similar to some of the, at least in terms of size, in terms of the Mongolian and Kazakh horses that you see now. - [Narrator] Milne had done intriguing research into the difference between horse dung and cow dung. - Here, you can see some horse dung, and you can see that it's very fibrous, which demonstrates, and it's made up up of very large pieces of fiber, which demonstrates that this has not been well digested by the horse. Now, if you compared some cattle feces, you would see that it was much more finally ground up, and in fact, much better digested than horse manure. - [Narrator] Could the contrast in horses' and cows' digestive systems have made a vital strategic difference on the Mongolian Steppes when after the catastrophe, grass and vegetation were in a terrible state? - Cows have a greater efficiency to digest food. They also have the ability to eat a wider range of different herbage types so that they can eat, for example, very rank vegetation. In contrast, the horses are less capable of eating rank, really poor quality vegetation, than cattle. And in a drought situation, you would get eventually to the state where the horse was not able to eat enough food. And because it was not able to digest it successfully, then it would not be able to survive. And so in those circumstances, then the Avars would be very vulnerable. (dramatic music) - I was absolutely amazed when I found that in fact, it was merely the differences between a cow's and a horse's stomach design that had probably had such a major effect on subsequent history. (wind howling) - [Narrator] Chinese chronicles record how in the defeat by the once subject Turks, thousands of Avars were slaughtered or enslaved. Their leader committed suicide. Most of the surviving Avars began a 4,000-mile trek westwards. Their journey triggered, according to David Keys, by the catastrophe, was about to have a huge effect on history. The Avar refugee caravan cut across what is now Northern Kazakhstan, skirting the northern shores of the Caspian Sea, and on into the fertile grasslands to the south of the Carpathian Mountains, an area which is now the Balkans. (taut mellow music) And as they traveled, the Avars recovered. Their horse technology was still superior to anything they found on their route. Once again, the Avars became a conquering people, driving all others before them, until finally, Roman writers recall how they reached the fringes of the Roman Empire. (suspenseful music) - They arrive in the late 550s as refugees. Within a decade, their ruthless horsemanship, ruthless military ability, has come to dominate all the tribes, all the groups of Slavs, Huns, Germans, living north of the Danube on the empire's frontiers, and having imposed their control over these groups, the Avars can then turn their attention against the empire. (horseman yelling) - [Narrator] The Roman Empire, already weakened by the plague, was constantly harassed by Avar incursions. At one point, Constantinople was besieged by the barbarians. Rather than take over, the Avars opted for blackmail and extracted vast amounts of gold from the empire in return for not fighting. Some of it can be seen today in museums. Much of it is still believed to lie buried in the plains of Hungary. (horsemen yelling) (taut music) It's reckoned that over 50 years, the Avars netted in today's terms, seven billion pounds worth of gold from the Roman Empire. (taut music) (mellow music) - The Avar impact, combined with the plague, and the economic problems that ensued, destabilized the empire. And at the end of the day, it can all be traced back to this climatic destabilization of the 6th century, which was triggered by the volcanic eruption. (magma swooshing) - [Narrator] David Keys believed a pattern was emerging, which showed huge political consequences stemming from the catastrophe. He had already found evidence of the catastrophe's effects throughout Europe and the East. Now he turned to the Americas, where he found another extraordinary coincidence of timing, and another historical puzzle where a great city had been destroyed, but no one had ever known why. (electronic beeping) In the early 6th century, 125,000 people lived in Teotihuacan in the Central Mexican plain. - In 500 AD, when the city reached its peak, it really was what is called the primate city. By that, I mean the second next largest city is so far below it in size that there really, you could almost say there are no other cities. I mean, that's an overstatement obviously, but there were cities of 10,000 people, 20,000, but compared to the 125,000 here, there was nothing. So it was the only huge, large city in the entire Central Mexican plateau. - [Narrator] Then, midway through the 6th century, shortly after the 535 AD catastrophe, things began to go wrong in Teotihuacan. (suspenseful music) For the past 20 years, Rebecca Storey has been painstakingly studying skeletons of people who lived in one of the city's suburbs called Tlajinga. The bones provide a remarkable history of the population's health. (suspenseful music) - Well, the Tlajinga population has adults. It also has quite a few children and an awful lot of babies. - [Narrator] Rebecca Storey began to notice that it in Teotihuacan's later period, the population, in particular, the babies suffered a severe decline in health. (somber music) - These kinds of infections that show up on the bone are long-lasting bacterial infections. And they're very common on the children. Now, babies shouldn't have infections like this. Normally, they should be born with relatively good immunological protection from their parents, their mother, but in the case of Tlajinga, we find lots of babies with already infectious reactions, indicating that the health of the mothers was so poor that the children are getting sick as well. The problem with the very late population there around the 6th century is that overwhelmingly, it is babies, children, and individuals under the age of 25. They should not be dying at that proportion. So they start to become 70% of my sample, rather than the much lower 40 or 45% that they were in the earlier period. It is a population that is in great trouble and is probably collapsing. - [Narrator] New scientific evidence suggests that the city's decline occurred around the middle to late 6th century, 150 years earlier than previously thought. For David Keys, this re-dating was a breakthrough. (somber music) - Now, in fact, one can see that Teotihuacan's fall really comes straight on the heels of the climatic disaster. And I think that there's a very, very high chance the two are connected. (somber music) - [Narrator] There are no existing tree rings or other evidence from Mexico itself to show whether there was a significant climate change. However, lake deposits in the nearby Yucatan Peninsula show a 30-year long drought starting the mid 6th century. Tree ring evidence from Chile and California shows a dramatic reduction in tree growth from the late 530s onwards. (somber music) And a study of river levels in Colombia shows that the mid to late 6th century was the driest period in the last 3,000 years. The evidence throughout the Americas, combined with Rebecca Storey's findings of malnutrition, suggest that Teotihuacan was gripped by a long-lasting drought, a drought which, according to David Keys' theory, was directly linked to the climatic catastrophe and had a devastating effect on the city's supply of food. (pensive flute music) - When something happens to the food supply, well, that makes people more subject to getting ill because they're not getting enough food. Then, this is a very dry environment. Water had to always have been a very important thing. And without water, you have (indistinct) sanitation problems. Sanitation would then lead to lots of diseases circulating through the people and causing mortality in your health. And that affects the productivity of city. City's not productive when its people are sick. And that becomes one of the things that then to say, "Well, no, we don't wanna go to Teotihuacan anymore because it's not a good place to be." - [Narrator] According to the latest research, Teotihuacan was finally destroyed when the people rose up against their leader, smashing their palaces and setting light to the city's biggest temple. (pensive flute music) - Somebody went in there and set fire to all the roof (indistinct), and caused the ceiling and roof to collapse, bring down the upper walls and formed a big mound of debris. And that's what happened all up and down the main street of the city. Maybe they decided that elite class that was making demands on them was asking too much, that the priests who were supposedly bringing the rain and making the springs flow were no longer successful, because the spring flow was dropping and the rains were diminishing. Then they lost confidence maybe in the priestly class as well. - What appears to happen is that you've got a destabilization, perhaps some religious and political changes, followed by a revolution of some sort, and the collapse of the city, in a way similar to events in Europe, indeed in the way that Constantinople, Roman Empire was affected. (plaintive flute music) (mellow music) 535 disturbs the status quo and allows history to reform itself all over the world. It really is the interface between the ancient world and the world we live in today. (taut upbeat music) - [Narrator] In Central Mexico, it took 300 years for a new civilization to establish itself. Throughout the 6th century, a similar story was unfolding all over the planet: ancient civilizations crumbling, others just beginning. And according to David Keys, one example of an emerging nation was England itself. (taut mellow music) (suspenseful music) Britain in the mid 6th century, the Dark Ages. The Romans had left 100 years earlier. In the west of the island, native British tribes, the Celts, fought to stem the tide of Anglo Saxon invasion from Northern Europe. According to legend, it was the time of the death of King Arthur. His country turned into a wasteland. - [Man] As he rode dust through the land, he found trees down and grain destroyed and all things laid waste as if lightning had struck in each place. He found half the people in the villages dead. (ominous roaring) The earth no longer produced when cultivated. From that time on, no wheat or other grain grew there, and no tree bore fruit and very few fish were found in the sea. For this reason, the two kingdoms were called the wasteland. - [Narrator] But could the wasteland of legend be a distant memory of a climatic catastrophe that really did hit the native British as a result of 535? (ominous roaring) What is certain from British and Irish annals is that the bubonic plague, which had devastated Roman Empire finally reached Britain by around 547 AD. It entered mainly through ports on the Cornish coast, from which the British still traded with the Roman Empire. - This was a significant event in the history of Western Britain and Ireland. Certainly, as one goes through the annals, one can find many references to plagues. One of them is referred to as the Mortalitas Magna, the Great Mortality. Another one is the Mortalitas Prima, the first plague, like this. This does suggest something special. - They'd never experienced the plague before. It was completely new horror that they knew nothing about. They wouldn't have understood even what was happening. Suddenly people began to develop these terrible pustules underneath their armpits, in their groins, and they would've died in the most terrible agony. - [Narrator] According to Keys, the plague changed the political shape of Britain. At this time, Britain was divided in two. In the west lived the native Celtic Britons. The east was occupied by invaders from Europe, the Angles and Saxons. East and west had very little contact with each other. The Celtic Britons traded with the Roman world. The Anglo Saxon peoples traded mainly with their former homelands of Germany and Scandinavia. It meant that the Celts, the native Britons, were far more exposed to the plague arriving from the Roman Empire. - So, by the time you come into the latter part of the century, the Celtic west and center have experienced a huge population reduction. There's a population vacuum. And so Anglo Saxon peoples are able to move from the east. They're able to move west into partially empty lands. And England was born. - [Narrator] Keys' theory is that England came about because the Anglo Saxons were able to defeat the plague-stricken Britons. A 6th century poem tells of the defeat of one group of Celts, the man of Gododdin and their leader, Madawg. (dramatic percussive music) (speaks in foreign language) - [Translator] He did not retreat from battle until blood flowed. Like rushes, he cut down men who did not flee. The man of Gododdin relate from the floor of the hall, but before Madawg's tent when he returned, there would come but one who from a hundred. (tense percussive music) - One can see 535 as a watershed where you see the forces coming into play, which create such countries as England, Spain, France, Japan, the United China. (volcano exploding) - [Narrator] Now came the final and boldest turn in his theory. Could it be that the catastrophe was linked, not just to the emergence of new nations, but also to the birth of a new world religion, Islam? (taut energetic music) (religious chanting) This is all that is left today of the Marib Dam in Yemen at the southern tip of Arabia. But at the beginning of the 6th century, Yemen was the region's greatest power. It depended on the Marib Dam, its greatest piece of engineering. The Marib was huge, 2,000 feet long, feeding into hundreds of miles of canals. But within a few years of the 535 catastrophe, climatic chaos hit Yemen, first, drought, and then a succession of storms and flash floods, which weakened the dam. The constant attempts to repair the dam are recorded on contemporary inscriptions. - What we're looking at is one of the great inscriptions that was put up on the facade of the dam, really commemorating the rebuilding of the dam, repair of the dam, in this case, in the year 542, and it's a long inscription describing all the various people who came and contributed to this. And we can pick out right in the center here, the cartouche, the symbol of the ruler of the kingdom at that stage, one Abrahah. And there are a whole series of these inscriptions for about two or 300 years, and then they stop, which is very indicative of exactly what the Arabic sources are telling us that there was a period when this dam was broken and was not repaired again. - [Narrator] The Marib Dam was abandoned. Its ruin was also the ruin of Yemen. Its population migrated to a new regional power base, which emerged in its place, around Medina and Mecca. (mellow music) In 570 AD, the prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca. - It's in precisely that Mecca Medina area, that Muhammad was based. And so it's really the growth of Medina as a important political center that is so crucial in the early development of Islam. - [Narrator] The climatic chaos had not only smashed the Marib Dam and shifted power to Medina. It also brought Muhammad's own family to prominence. - The prophet's family or the prophet's ancestors had taken it upon themselves really to provide food, to import food into this area and provide food for the population. And this was one of their claims to fame and to status. - [Narrator] Muhammad's family's reputation for social concern helped his ministry take root in a time of drought, famine, and the plague which had spread from the Roman Empire. (man chanting) (men chanting) - I think Muhammad's message was attractive because this was a period of upheaval and disturbance. - One's got this whole apocalyptic atmosphere in the ancient world at that time. There's been war, there's been a revolution, the Roman Empire, which had really dominated the political scene for about 800 years appeared to be tottering. - There is a lot of apocalyptic literature from this period. There are a lot of people saying, "This is terrible, the world's coming to an end. How do we interpret these disasters? What are they a sign of," and so on. - The political certainties of the world were collapsing around everybody's ears. Nobody seemed sure of the future. It was a very, very unsettled time to live. All these things can be traced back, to an extent, to the climatic chaos caused by the eruption of 535. And they all feed into the early evolution of Islam. (mysterious music) (religious chanting) (soft serene music) Now, if a volcanic eruption, 535, could wreak all this havoc and draw the ancient to a final close and really help lay the foundations of the world we live in today, what would happen if there was another massive eruption? - [Narrator] This is not fantasy or wild speculation. While nothing may happen in the next hundred years, there are a handful of underground volcanic monsters whose arrival date is long overdue. - The granddaddy of them all is believed to be Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. This caldera is maybe twice the size of any known modern caldera, and its eruptions, which have occurred not once, not twice, but three times over the last two million years, indicate that it has devastated Northern America several times. Besides Long Valley Caldera, there's a caldera in California, which is also heating up. The ground is shaking there. There's been a die-off of the forest by noxious gases, carbon dioxide coming out of the earth. Public is very concerned about that volcano. (pensive music) Closer to home for some people would be the area around Naples, Italy. Sure, it's famous for Vesuvius, which has erupted many times in the past and potentially will again in the future. There is also a caldera just on the north side of Naples, underlying a metropolitan area of Campi Flegrei and Pozzuoli, where thousands of people live and have lived for a long time. - [Narrator] The last eruption in the Campi Flegrei complex was in 1538. At that time, 3,000 people were killed by the immediate explosion. Now, 400,000 people live within the same area. The whole complex is still active and capable of major eruptions. - That would be a total disaster for Italy, a major disaster for Europe, and would no doubt have worldwide climatic repercussions, which would have huge implications for agriculture, huge implications from a disease point of view worldwide, and would no doubt have the effect of destabilizing all sorts of potentially unstable countries all over the world. (mellow music) - It would change our climate. It would produce change in the pattern of wet and dry cycles for vast portions of the earth. We're familiar with the El Nino and La Nina effects. This would be even a much greater perturbation, perhaps lowering the temperature, the global average temperature several degrees and more. - The biggest effect for people anywhere is that it's going to disrupt the food supply. And it's going to take years for the climate to either go back to normal, or for people to change the crops that they use and the way that they plant them. (ominous music) - There may not be food to import from other countries because they'll need it every bit as much or more than we will. And if our agriculture has failed in some way, then there just wouldn't be enough to eat. I mean, that to me seems to be the logic of the situation. Now, in times past, you're right subsistence economies, if they had low population densities, they could go to the seashore and live on shellfish. And indeed people sometimes did that under real stressful conditions, but you can't do that nowadays. There aren't enough shellfish to go around. If we are confronted with a global event at any time in the future, it's not quite clear how we would cope. (soft pensive music) - The whole infrastructure of civilization will collapse around us due to the huge environmental catastrophe that would happen because of the failing of crop production, the darkening of the skies. (ominous music) - Communications would be taken out, satellite communication, aircraft, transport would be interrupted very severely for a long period. That type of event will occur in the future. - Well, people start to struggle for resources. I mean, basically that means warfare, and the modern world is not quite clear exactly what would happen. You either sit and starve or you get out there and try and acquire food. And there's not much alternative in a really stressful situation. (volcano exploding) - One of the big lessons from 535, I think, is that we're not talking about a Big Bang and then the world changes. We're talking about a Big Bang, and then it takes 100 to 150 years for the new reality to actually emerge. (suspenseful music) What will happen in the future? Of course, one doesn't know, but I think that historians, economists, politicians should really pay rather more attention perhaps to the ability of natural forces to change history than they do at the moment.
Info
Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries
Views: 1,517,316
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, 536, 536 ad worst year in history, 536 worst year in history, 536 worst year, 536 volcano eruption, worst year in history reaction, worst year in history to be alive, worst year in history for natural disasters, worst year in history 536 ad, how krakatoa caused the worst year in history, history of pandemics, history of covid, history of natural disasters, medieval science
Id: AYAsw1o7AMs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 49min 28sec (2968 seconds)
Published: Wed Mar 16 2022
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.