Mega Volcanic Eruptions in 536 and 540 CE and Aftermath Caused the Collapse of Multiple Societies and Massive Deaths

"...the volcanoes decreased average global temperatures by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Crops in northern Europe and elsewhere failed, likely triggering starvation and disease."

I zeroed in on that 36 degrees F decrease in temperature, because a few days ago, I read an article at The Washington Post about the recent average 2 degrees Centigrade increase in temperatures in the United States - which equates to 3.6 degrees F.  If a drop of less than 4 degrees F caused massive crop failures and famines around the globe, triggering societal collapses in one area after another and roving groups of bandits and invaders looking for food, water and animals - what do you think a 3.6 degrees F rise in temperature on average may do to crop production, local ecosystems and their plants and animal life?  

The "disease" the quote above refers to is the plague of Justinian, which killed "tens of millions of people" starting in 541, arguable the worst year of the combined sustained impact of the catastrophic volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540.

This scares the bejesu out of me!  The climate change in the 6th century CE was "mini" (it lasted about 10 years) compared to what we can expect to get worse and deepen from now into the foreseeable future - and beyond that. 

If you want to read the articles I did, here they are:

"2 Degrees Centigrade Beyond the Limit
Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived in America"
Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens
Photography by Salwan Georges
August 13, 2019"
The Washington Post Online

"The Global Cooling Event of the Sixth Century.  Mystery No Longer?"
Dr. Tim Neufield, Princeton University
May 1, 2016
Historical Climatology Blog
(This is the first article I read about the period in the 6th century CE called the "Mini-Ice Age."  It can get a little bit technical in places, but not overly so).  

"Colossal volcano behind 'mystery' global cooling finally found"
Michael Greshko
August 23, 2019
National Geographic Online
(While this article does not pinpoint the location of the massive volcanic eruption that occurred in 536 CE, it does refer to it.  The article itself is about the eruption in 540 CE and how researchers eventually narrowed the eruption site down to a volcano in Central America).  

Gigantic Sandstorm Blankets Beijing - Again

Hola everyone!

Well, not a good way to start off the morning, but I had to report this as I don't know how many of you read The New York Times daily like I now have the luxury of time to do (since being retired).  This is just frightening to me.

And when I consider that if Orange One (Donald J. Trump, our illegitimate *president), gets his way, the United States could very well look like this in just a few years when he guts the Environmental Protection Agency and sells off our national heritage to big multi-nationals while slashing environmental protections for all Americans.

Dust Storms Blanket Beijing and Northern China
By Gerry Mullany May 5, 2017

The central business district in Beijing on April 25, left, and on Thursday, after a dust storm swept through. Such storms have become increasingly common for the region as China’s deserts expand.CreditNicolas Asfouri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

HONG KONG — Dust storms enveloped parts of northern China for a second day on Friday, reducing visibility in cities like Beijing and threatening the health of millions of people.

Such storms have become an increasingly common phenomenon for the region, as China’s deserts expand by gobbling up roughly 1,300 square miles a year. A half-century ago, such storms happened every seven or eight years; now they are an annual occurrence.

The storms typically happen in the spring, as strong winds send soil and sand from the Gobi Desert over northern China and even the Korean Peninsula.

This week’s dust storms led to the cancellation of scores of flights and caused pollution in northern China to soar. Beijing’s air-quality index hit a dangerous level of 623 on Thursday; the United States government rates readings above 200 as “very unhealthy” and 301 to 500 as “hazardous.”

Experts tie the problem to the rapid urbanization of northern China, deforestation and climate change. The government has spent billions of dollars to plant forests to stop the creeping desertification, but some experts have questioned whether it has been effective enough in doing so.

The state news media in China said that children and the elderly should stay indoors during the storms. On both Thursday and Friday, the storms were at their worst in the morning, with cities like Beijing clearing later in the day.

Sand and dust storms take place when hot air over the desert destabilizes the lower atmosphere, whipping up strong winds that send huge amounts of sand hundreds or even thousands of miles. The storms have been linked not only to respiratory illnesses but also to lethal epidemics because of the spread of potentially harmful bacteria, viruses and fungal spores.

The dust storms typically hit northern China after the region is afflicted by high wintertime smog, which is caused by coal-burning power plants, factories and vehicle emissions.

Do the Rock Carvings at Gobekli Tepe Record a Catatrosphic Earth-wide Event?

Food for thought.

Ancient people left a frightening message for us, and scientists just found it

 Mike Wehner,BGR News 6 hours ago 

10,000 years from now (assuming humans haven’t been wiped out by a plague, space rock, or our own destructive tendencies), it’ll probably be fairly easy for the average person to research what life was like in 2017. For us here today, finding out what life was like in 11,000BC is much more challenging, but by studying ancient stone carvings and pairing the somewhat confusing messages with archeological data, researchers believe they’ve discovered concrete evidence of an apocalyptic event that may have altered the future of mankind: a comet strike.

The study, performed by a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh (PDF), suggests that a potentially cataclysmic comet strike rapidly and dramatically altered the Earth’s climate for hundreds of years, sending humanity into a mini ice age with nearly glacial conditions. The time period when this occurred is known as the Younger Dryas, and has been well documented thanks to ample evidence of the cooling found in core samples, but its cause has been theorized and debated for a long while. Now, thanks to stone carvings left by ancient people in modern day Turkey, researchers believe that a comet was the culprit.

The carvings are remarkably preserved and appear to have been created to document an apocalyptic event which devastated the land. Figures depicted in the carvings, including apparently deceased, headless human bodies and other wildlife, were made at around the time the Younger Dryas began, suggesting that the event archived in stone could have been the same one that caused the thousand-year cold snap. The carvings were found at what is considered to be one of the oldest and most important temple sites on the planet, and for the images to appear there suggests that they have enormous historical significance.

The Younger Dryas is often credited with pushing ancient humans to band together out of pure necessity, forming the foundation of modern agriculture and other huge advancements in civilization. The idea that a comet may have been responsible for pushing humanity forward is an extremely interesting, and potentially frightening possibility.

The findings are far from an iron clad confirmation, but the timing matches up shockingly well, and would have to be a fantastic coincidence if the two events are actually unrelated.

More on the Younger Dryas period from NOAA (one of the agencies Orange One, er, El Trumpo, American Dictator wannabe, wants to wipe out in 2018.)

More on Gobekli Tepe.

Hola darlings!

The hot, humid and unbearable tropical weather (dew points were close to 70 nearly every day) we've been suffering through the entire month of August and the beginning of September in my little piece of southeastern Wisconsin is FINALLY over, hooray!  Drier and cooler air coupled with plenty of sun have arrived, and I am feeling re-energized.  It also helps that my latest flair-up of sciatica seems to have miraculously nearly disappeared, literally overnight!  I'm actually tackling some much needed home improvement projects that I should have started and finished a year ago.  Oh well.

Headline:  DUH!  I mean, really.  We all know there are a kabillion jillion gallons of water locked up in Antarctica's ice cover and it is melting (along with the ice cover in the Arctic regions) at an alarming and rapidly expanding rate.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government fiddles instead of preparing for the coming inexorable rise in the oceans - and what will happen to the Great Lakes?  Will they be inundated with salt water via the St. Lawrence Seaway and other swamped rivers?  Holy Hathor!  I'm sure there will be those who say - hey, we'll have figured this all out long before 10,000 years from now.  I say: Yeah, right (sarcasm).

Students of herstory know for a fact that many great civilizations have come and gone over the thousands of years of recorded herstory and long before that, with many (most) of them wiped out by climate changes of relatively short (a few hundred years) or long (the last Ice Age) duration.  But somehow, we just never seem to learn herstory's lessons.  Why is that?  I leave that to the philosophers to debate.  Here's the article:

All of Antarctica Might Melt, Drowning Major Cities

By Zoë Schlanger22 hours ago

“Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

Few peer-reviewed study titles sound quite so much like a line spoken by the bad-news-bearing scientist from a dystopian sci-fi movie. But there it is. A real-world—and apparently very possible—dystopia.

For what Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and an author on the paper, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, believes is the first time, he and his colleagues have shown that there are enough fossil fuels still in the ground to melt “effectively all of Antarctica” and ultimately cause as much as 200 feet of sea level rise.

Of course, it wouldn’t be only Antarctica that melts under this scenario. “Our study shows that if we don't leave most of the carbon in the ground, we are going to melt most of the ice on this planet,” Caldeira says. “I think this is one of the most important papers of my career.”

Sustained Drought Led to Collapse of Ancient Mayan Civilization

We, the people, need to sit up and take notice of the current climate changes taking place, and somehow push and shove our governments into action!  I mean, really -- what do YOU think it's going to be like in your area of the world weather-wise in 20 years, heh?

December 29, 2014 (from Archaeology Magazine)

BELIZE’S BLUE HOLE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF DROUGHT IN MAYA WORLD

HOUSTON, TEXAS—New evidence from Belize’s Great Blue Hole strengthens the case that drought contributed to the collapse of Maya civilization. Earth scientist André Droxler of Rice University and his team drilled cores from the sediments of the Great Blue Hole, located near the center of Lighthouse Reef. “It’s like a big bucket. It’s a sediment trap,” Droxler told Live Science. The team also collected samples from Romboid Reef and analyzed their chemical composition, especially the ratio of titanium to aluminum. When rain is plentiful, titanium from volcanic rocks in the region is swept into streams and carried to the ocean. Low levels of titanium to aluminum suggest a period with less rainfall. Droxler’s team found that between A.D. 800 and 1000, when Maya civilization collapsed, there were only one or two tropical cyclones every two decades, rather than the usual five or six big storms. According to the new results, another major drought struck between 1000 and 1100, about the time of the fall of Chichen Itza. “When you have major droughts, you start to get famines and unrest,” Droxler explained. To read about a similar study, see "Long-Term Drought May Have Led to Fall of Harappan Civilization."

Was It Race, Or Climate Change, That Triggered A War?

I do wish writers and editors would stop using such misleading lead-ins to articles. 

Saharan remains may be evidence of first race war, 13,000 years ago

This is a very interesting article, once one gets past the crap about it possibly (later in the article it is essentially stated as fact) being a race-based war instead of what a current look at the evidence actually suggests -- it was a war triggered between different population groups competing for the same scarce resources (fresh water and animals going to that water source for food) ... something that is coming to a country near you in the next 50 years or so thanks to global climate changes.

*************************

Article by

David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent, Monday 14 July 2014

 

Scientists are investigating what may be the oldest identified race war 13,000 years after it raged on the fringes of the Sahara.

French scientists working in collaboration with the British Museum have been examining dozens of skeletons, a majority of whom appear to have been killed by archers using flint-tipped arrows.
The bones – from Jebel Sahaba on the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict.

Over the past two years anthropologists from Bordeaux University have discovered literally dozens of previously undetected arrow impact marks and flint arrow head fragments on and around the bones of the victims.

This is in addition to many arrow heads and impact marks already found embedded in some of the bones during an earlier examination of the skeletons back in the 1960s. The remains – the contents of an entire early cemetery – were found in 1964 by the prominent American archaeologist, Fred Wendorf, but, until the current investigations, had never been examined using more modern, 21 century, technology.

Some of the skeletal material has just gone on permanent display as part of the British Museum’s new Early Egypt gallery which opens officially today. The bones – from Jebel Sahaba on the east bank of the River Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict.

Now British Museum scientists are planning to learn more about the victims themselves – everything from gender to disease and from diet to age at death. The discovery of dozens of previously undetected arrow impact marks and flint arrow fragments suggests that the majority of the individuals – men, women and children – in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery were killed by enemy archers, and then buried by their own people. What’s more, the new research demonstrates that the attacks – in effect a prolonged low-level war – took place over many months or years.

Parallel research over recent years has also been shedding new light as to who, in ethnic and racial terms, these victims were.

Work carried out at Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Alaska and New Orleans’ Tulane University indicates that they were part of the general sub-Saharan originating population – the ancestors of modern Black Africans.

The identity of their killers is however less easy to determine. But it is conceivable that they were people from a totally different racial and ethnic group – part of a North African/ Levantine/European people who lived around much of the Mediterranean Basin.

The two groups – although both part of our species, Homo sapiens – would have looked quite different from each other and were also almost certainly different culturally and linguistically. The sub-Saharan originating group had long limbs, relatively short torsos and projecting upper and lower jaws along with rounded foreheads and broad noses, while the North African/Levantine/European originating group had shorter limbs, longer torsos and flatter faces. Both groups were very muscular and strongly built. [So we're going Hitleresque here -- making the "enemy" the "other" -- somehow inferior to YOU; but the bottom line is that it was not what the people looked like, it was the fact that they were taking water and animals that the "other" wanted and needed to survive.  Thus - war.  The rest is just gloss.]

Certainly the northern Sudan area was a major ethnic interface between these two different groups at around this period. Indeed the remains of the North African/Levantine/European originating population group has even been found 200 miles south of Jebel Sahaba, thus suggesting that the arrow victims were slaughtered in an area where both populations operated.

What’s more, the period in which they perished so violently was one of huge competition for resources – for they appear to have been killed during a severe climatic downturn in which many water sources dried up, especially in summer time.

The climatic downturn – known as the Younger Dryas period – had been preceded by much lusher, wetter and warmer conditions which had allowed populations to expand. But when climatic conditions temporarily worsened during the Younger Dryas, water holes dried up, vegetation wilted and animals died or moved to the only major year-round source of water still available – the Nile.

Humans of all ethnic groups in the area were forced to follow suit – and migrated to the banks (especially the eastern bank) of the great river. Competing for finite resources, human groups would have inevitably clashed – and the current investigation is demonstrating the apparent scale of this earliest known substantial human conflict .

[Note:  So, the information in bold is the crux of the matter.  Race war?  Oh please!  War over scarce resources, yes.  Isn't it interesting how in the 21st century, when we are supposedly so advanced, we still insist upon applying 18th century lenses to our perceptions of what may have happened in the past!]

The skeletons were originally found during UNESCO-funded excavations carried out to investigate archaeological sites that were about to be inundated by the Aswan High Dam. All the Jebel Sahaba material was taken by the excavator Fred Wendorf to his laboratory in Texas, and some 30 years later was transferred to the care of the British Museum which is now working with other scientists to carry out a major new analysis of them.

“The skeletal material is of great importance – not only because of the evidence for conflict, but also because the Jebel Sahaba cemetery is the oldest discovered in the Nile Valley so far,” said Dr. Daniel Antoine, a curator in the British Museum’s Ancient Egypt and Sudan Department.

Of the 59 Jebel Sahaba victims, skeletal material from two has been included in the new Early Egypt gallery. The display includes flint arrowhead fragments and a healed forearm fracture, almost certainly sustained by a victim seeking to defend himself by raising his arm during an episode of conflict.

While Egypt, and Ethiopia are Doing War Posturing Over the Blue Nile, Europe is Drowning...

See post below about the Ethiopian dam being constructed on the Blue Nile, and the Islamist government of Egypt's response thereto (foolish, foolish - making threats war).

Meanwhile, in other news of global climate change, there is ongoing massive flooding in Europe, going on for the past two weeks now, I believe.  But what do we give a hoot here?  Well, we should start giving a hoot, because what's going on in Egypt, and Europe, WILL impact us sooner than later.  It's not just about Moore, Oklahoma, people.

Thousands of Germans evacuate as dam on Elbe river breaks

By Martin Schlicht and Oliver Keck | Reuters – 2 hrs 38 mins ago

By Martin Schlicht and Oliver Keck

 

MAGDEBURG/GROSS ROSENBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Thousands of people left their homes in eastern Germany on Sunday as a dam burst on the swollen River Elbe and swathes of farmland were flooded in an attempt to spare towns, with meteorologists forecasting more rain.

In Magdeburg, one of the oldest cities in eastern Germany and a regional capital, some 23,000 people were asked to evacuate as water levels in the Elbe rose to a record 7.48 meters, around 5 meters above normal and surpassing the level reached in devastating floods in 2002.

"We helped yesterday to carry sandbags to secure the town. The mood is very depressed and frightened because many people have to leave their homes," said resident Liane Nagen.

There have been at least a dozen deaths as a result of floods that have hit Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic over the past week.  Officials said more than 8,000 people were evacuated by bus from towns and villages around Aken, south of Magdeburg. Some took their pets or farm animals with them.

A dam at the confluence of the River Elbe and the River Saale south of Magdeburg burst despite attempts to stabilize it. A dike was also breached, and a crisis unit said the high waters were likely to put further pressure on dikes in coming days.

Holger Stahlknecht, Interior Minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Magdeburg is located, said air and land surveillance would be stepped up in response to a threat from a previously unheard-of group calling itself the Germanophobic Flood Brigade to attack the sodden dikes. [What?]

More than 36,000 people were evacuated across Saxony-Anhalt. In Brandenburg, a largely rural state that surrounds the capital Berlin, some residents were evacuated and flooding of uninhabited areas was planned.

In Hungary, the Danube was also set to reach record levels in the capital Budapest on Sunday night and Prime Minister Viktor Orban said dikes had been strengthened at critical points to protect the city from flooding.  The deluge reached Hungary on Friday but so far authorities, soldiers and thousands of volunteers have managed to defend the villages and towns along the Danube, piling more than three million sandbags beside its dikes. [Won't make a difference in the end...]

Carmaker Suzuki, one of Hungary's main exporters, said it would will halt production at its plant in Esztergom, north of Budapest, on Monday because of the floods.

GERMAN ELECTION FACTOR

The damage from the floods in Germany could amount to more than 6 billion euros ($7.93 billion), according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces an election in September, has promised 100 million euros ($130 million) in aid for flooded areas.

"We'll do everything humanly possible when it comes to reconstruction. Germany is sticking together in an admirable way at the moment and it should stay like that," she said.

She has been seen visiting flooded regions and speaking to victims and helpers, unlike her Social Democrat (SPD) challenger Peer Steinbrueck, who told German state television on Sunday he would not get involved in a "rubber boot competition".

"When the worst is over, I'd like to sit down with those affected and discuss in concrete terms what kind of help we can give," he said, adding that he wanted to create an ombudsman to coordinate aid for the victims of flooding. [OHMYGODDESS - WHAT A STUPID FOOL!]

The pair's response to the flooding could affect their respective chances in the election on September 22. During the floods of 2002, decisive crisis management by SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder gave him a boost in the polls which helped him win a second term.

Along with citizens and emergency services, around 11,000 German soldiers were helping fight the flood waters on Sunday. The situation in cities like Dresden and Halle and in the state of Bavaria had improved. ($1 = 0.7564 euros)

(Reporting by Reuters TV and Nadine Schimroszik; writing by Michelle Martin in Berlin; editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

The Riddle of Ancient Kerma's Survival During Drought Now Explained

The most powerful kingdoms in the world at the time were not able to escape the overwhelming forces of nature when climate change in the guise of drought for 30 years and rising temperatures devasted their lands, their people and, in some cases, wiped away their kingdoms forever. 

And yet we, today, if we're thinking about it at all, appear to be blythely assuming that somehow it won't affect US, nosirree, it may make some islands in the Pacific disappear, it may cause mass starvation in Africa and Bangladesh and other places, including China, but then, who cares about THEM?  They're over-populated anyway and this is just Nature's way of restoring equilibrium.  And so we in the west go on our sanguine way.  Tick...tick...tick...  In the end, even Kerma bit the dust, both figuratively and literally.

From Phys Org

Solved: Riddle of ancient Nile kingdom's longevity

Apr 29, 2013

(Phys.org) —Researchers have solved the riddle of how one of Africa's greatest civilisations survived a catastrophic drought which wiped out other famous dynasties. Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan.

Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.

Their analysis of three ancient river channels where the Nile once flowed shows, for the first time, that its floods weren't too low or too high to sustain life between 2,500 BC and 1,500 BC, when Kerma flourished and was a major rival to its more famous neighbour downstream.  They also show that the thousand year civilisation came to end when the Nile's flood levels were not high enough and a major channel system dried out - though an invasion by resurgent Egyptians was the final cause of Kerma's demise.

Downstream in Egypt, a catastrophic 30 year drought 4,200 years ago, which produced low Nile floods, created chaos in the old kingdom for at least a century.  Other civilisations in the near east and Mesopotamia were also severely hit by this drought.

The team's findings, funded by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS) and the Australian Research Council, are published in the journal Geology.

Professor Mark Macklin from The University of Aberystwyth said: "This work is the most comprehensive and robustly dated archaeological and palaeoenvironmental dataset yet compiled for the desert Nile.

"The relationship between climate change and the development of Old World riverine civilizations is poorly understood because inadequate dating control has hindered effective integration of archaeological, fluvial, and climate records."

Professor Jamie Woodward from The University of Manchester said: "In Nubia four thousand years ago the Kerma people farmed what we might call the Goldilocks Nile: its floods were just large enough to support floodwater farming, but not so big as to cause damage to the riverside settlements.

"It's quite remarkable that the Kerma civilization was able to flourish, produce amazing craftsmanship and wealth, at a time when their Egyptian rivals to the North were struggling with environmental, social, and political strife.

"Until now we didn't understand why that was - but thanks to our field work in Sudan, this riddle has now been solved."

The team used cutting edge geological dating methods to analyse the dried up channels, now 20 km from the today's river course. It is the first time individual flood events on the desert Nile have been dated.  Using hundreds of deep irrigation pits dug by modern Sudanese farmers, Macklin and Woodward were able to observe the geological history of the old channels. In places, these old channel belts are well preserved at the modern land surface. They are between 1 and 3 km wide with Kerma sites on their margins.  According to Derek Welsby from the British Museum who led the archaeological survey, Kerma's wealth and power may have been underpinned by its agriculturally-rich hinterland utilising the banks of the ancient channels.

Archaeological surveys of the floodplain in the Dongola Reach to the south of Kerma have discovered more than 450 sites spanning the Neolithic (pre–3500 B.C.) to the Medieval Christian period (A.D. 500–1500). Many sites are associated with the Nile's ancient channels.  He said: "Kerma's success was also down to their reliance on animal husbandry practices that are less susceptible to changes in flood level, more mobile, and better able to cope with environmental stress.
"They were a truly remarkable civilisation, producing some of the most exquisite pottery in the Nile Valley."

The paper is titled "Reach-scale river dynamics moderate the impact of rapid Holocene climate change on floodwater farming in the desert Nile."


Background article from Phys Org, that talks more about that mega-drought that occurred more than 4,200 years ago: 

Climate and drought lessons from ancient Egypt, Aug 16, 2012

How Ironic: Global Warming Aiding Archaeology

Hola darlings!  Well, global warming, or to use the more politically correct phrase, global climate change (of which I see plenty evidence here in SE Wisconsin over the past 40 plus years, for sure), is destroying priceless archaeological sites as fast as it is revealing them!  Damn! 

Pre-Viking tunic found by glacier as warming aids archaeology
Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:41 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

 

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO, March 21 (Reuters) - A pre-Viking woollen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday.

The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing - suitable for a person up to about 176 cms (5 ft 9 inches) tall - was found 2,000 metres (6,560 ft) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway.

Carbon dating showed it was made around 300 AD.

"It's worrying that glaciers are melting but it's exciting for us archaeologists," Lars Piloe, a Danish archaeologist who works on Norway's glaciers, said at the first public showing of the tunic, which has been studied since it was found in 2011.

A Viking mitten dating from 800 AD and an ornate walking stick, a Bronze age leather shoe, ancient bows, and arrow heads used to hunt reindeer are also among 1,600 finds in Norway's southern mountains since thaws accelerated in 2006.

"This is only the start," Piloe said, predicting many more finds.

One ancient wooden arrow had a tiny shard from a seashell as a sharp tip in an intricate bit of craftsmanship.

RECEDING GLACIERS
The 1991 discovery of Otzi, a prehistoric man who roamed the Alps 5,300 years ago between Austria and Italy, is the best known glacier find. In recent years, other finds have been made from Alaska to the Andes, many because glaciers are receding.

The shrinkage is blamed on climate change, stoked by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway's Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300 AD. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks.

"The tunic was well used - it was repaired several times," said Marianne Vedeler, a conservation expert at Norway's Museum of Cultural History.

The tunic is made of lamb's wool with a diamond pattern that had darkened with time. Only a handful of similar tunics have survived so long in Europe.

The warming climate is have an impact elsewhere.

Patrick Hunt, a Stanford University expert who is trying to find the forgotten route that Hannibal took over the Alps with elephants in a failed invasion of Italy in 218 BC, said the Alps were unusually clear of snow at 2,500 metres last summer.

Receding snows are making searching easier.

"I favour the Clapier-Savine Coche route (over the Alps) after having been on foot over at least 25 passes including all the other major candidates," he told Reuters by e-mail.

The experts in Oslo said one puzzle was why anyone would take off a warm tunic by a glacier.
One possibility was that the owner was suffering from cold in a snowstorm and grew confused with hypothermia, which sometimes makes suffers take off clothing because they wrongly feel hot. (Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)

Drought May Have Doomed Sumerian Civilization

Absolutely fascinating! 

Recently I watched a PBS special on the Dust Bowl, a drought that affected large swatches of the "Bread Basket" of the USA but extended also to other parts of the country, for TEN long years, from 1930 until 1940. 

From PBS Dust Bowl Special website. 

Untold damage was done to the ecology of the country.  Tens of thousands of families and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from their homesteads as the earth beneath their feet literally blew away! Families were torn apart.  Hundreds of people were smothered to death in the horrible all-encompassing, all-engulfing BLACK dust storms of the period in the worst-affected regions of the country.  Thousands more people, mostly children and the elderly, died from a disease similar to the  Black Lung caused by the never-ending dust.  The medical establishment at the time had no cure.  Millions of domesticated and wild animals died as a result of the drought and the dust storms.  Some died of thirst; some died of starvation; some were suffocated to death.

Dust clouds from the never-ending storms in the Dust Bowl could be traced in the stratosphere by the equipment of the day, circulating around the globe (perhaps similar in effect to volcanic "winters" caused by eruptions like Krakotoa in the 1880s, but lasting much longer because more and more dust blew up into the stratosphere each year for ten years...)  Yes, the entire globe was affected.  Perhaps worst of all, this hit the USA just as The Great Depression (part of a world-wide depression) was taking a firm hold here.

I cannot even begin to imagine what might have happened here during that time IF THAT DROUGHT HAD LASTED 200 YEARS!  Would I even be here today?  Doubtful.  I wasn't born until 1951, after the end of WWII.  The worst effects of the drought ended about a year before the USA got involved in WWII, with the attack on Pearl Harbor.  But if that drought had not ended, could the USA have played the role it ultimately did in that war?  My dad may not have met and married my Mom and started a family....  Hell, my dad might not have even survived.  He was 8 years old when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl started.  If things had not gotten better around 1940 - who knows...

Article:

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 04 December 2012 Time: 11:35 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.

The findings, which were presented Monday (Dec. 3) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change.

"This was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Beginning about 3500 B.C., the Sumerian culture flourished in ancient Mesopotamia, which was located in present-day Iraq. Ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing, built the world's first wheel and arch, and wrote the first epic poem, "Gilgamesh."

But after 200 to 300 years of upheaval, the Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.

Konfirst wanted to see if a drought that spanned about 200 years may have caused the decline. Several geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.

"As we go into the 4,200-year-ago climate anomaly, we actually see that estimated rainfall decreases substantially in this region and the number of sites that are populated at this time period reduce substantially," he said.

Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.

"People still live in this region. It's not that the collapse of a civilization means that an area is completely abandoned," he said. "But that there's a sharp change in the population."

During the great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.

The coincidence of the social upheaval, depopulation in the area and the geologic record of drought suggests climate change might have played a role in the loss of the Sumerian language, Konfirst said.
The findings also suggest that modern-day civilizations may be vulnerable to climate change, he said.

Egypt's Old Kingdom Done in by Massive Drought

Who do you blame if, year after year, the Gods and Goddesses refuse to send the life-giving floods down the Nile River from the highlands to the delta?  If, after years of unanswered prayers and supplications and who knows what kind of sacrifices, the waters still do not come, did people lose faith in their Gods, Goddesses, and the rulers who were supposed to be Gods themselves?

How are we in the 21st century going to deal with rains that don't come when we need them, tornadoes and hurricanes of force we have yet to see, and rising oceans that cannot be held back no matter what we build...  Will Africa starve when America cannot produce enough food to even feed it's own people?  What about China?  India?  Australia?

Unless I discover the Fountain of Youth in my backyard I won't be alive to see the worst effects of the climate changes we are currently beginning to undergo.  They are not reversible; regardless of whether you believe what we're experiencing and will continue to experience to a greater and greater degree in the coming years is man-made or just a natural cycle of the Earth/Universe, they are coming and they will get worse, and for a long long time, before things start to get better.  We're not ready for it, of course.  We're still pissing and moaning about causes rather than ramping up population relocation away from coastal areas and vunerable low-lying lands and river valleys; who wants to leave Manhattan, after all?  But Manhattan will be under water 100 years from now.  Think about that.  And stashing away food -- why aren't we doing that?  Our ability to feed ourselves may decrease by 75% in less than 50 years.  And we're doing - zilch.  Certain political groups think that by trying to force the world back to the mores of the 19th century we will somehow save ourselves.  What a joke.  Unfortunately, a deadly joke for future generations.

There is a reason for the saying that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.  The lessons of the past are all around us, and our clueless leaders wold rather argue about more tax cuts for the rich (who will also die, they'll just last longer than the poor and the average joes who will quickly run out of resources) than face the hard realities of what is coming, indeed, what is happening right now, all around us.

Climate and drought lessons from ancient Egypt

August 16, 2012

Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt's Nile Delta document the region's ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the era known as the pyramid-building time. 
    
"Humans have a long history of having to deal with climate change," said Christopher Bernhardt, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. "Along with other research, this study geologically reveals that the evolution of societies is sometimes tied to climate variability at all scales – whether decadal or millennial."

Bernhardt conducted this research as part of his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Benjamin Horton, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Science. Jean-Daniel Stanley at the Smithsonian Institution also participated in the study, published in July's edition of Geology.

"Even the mighty builders of the ancient pyramids more than 4,000 years ago fell victim when they were unable to respond to a changing climate," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. "This study illustrates that water availability was the climate-change Achilles Heel then for Egypt, as it may well be now, for a planet topping seven billion thirsty people."

The researchers used pollen and charcoal preserved in a Nile Delta sediment core dating from 7,000 years ago to the present to help resolve the physical mechanisms underlying critical events in ancient Egyptian history.

They wanted to see if changes in pollen assemblages would reflect ancient Egyptian and Middle East droughts recorded in archaeological and historical records. The researchers also examined the presence and amount of charcoal because fire frequency often increases during times of drought, and fires are recorded as charcoal in the geological record. The scientists suspected that the proportion of wetland pollen would decline during times of drought and the amount of charcoal would increase.

And their suspicions were right.

Large decreases in the proportion of wetland pollen and increases in microscopic charcoal occurred in the core during four different times between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago. One of those events was the abrupt and global mega-drought of around 4,200 years ago, a drought that had serious societal repercussions, including famines, and which probably played a role in the end of Egypt's Old Kingdom and affected other Mediterranean cultures as well.

"Our pollen record appears very sensitive to the decrease in precipitation that occurred in the mega-drought of 4,200 years ago," Bernhardt said. "The vegetation response lasted much longer compared with other geologic proxy records of this drought, possibly indicating a sustained effect on delta and Nile basin vegetation."

Similarly, pollen and charcoal evidence recorded two other large droughts: one that occurred some 5,000 to 5,500 years ago and another that occurred around 3,000 years ago.

These events are also recorded in human history – the first one started some 5,000 years ago when the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt occurred and the Uruk Kingdom in modern Iraq collapsed. The second event, some 3,000 years ago, took place in the eastern Mediterranean and is associated with the fall of the Ugarit Kingdom and famines in the Babylonian and Syrian Kingdoms.

"The study geologically demonstrates that when deciphering past climates, pollen and other micro-organisms, such as charcoal, can augment or verify written or archaeological records – or they can serve as the record itself if other information doesn't exist or is not continuous," said Horton.                               

More information: The study, Nile delta response to Holocene climate variability, was published in the July edition of Geology.

Journal reference: Geology Provided by United States Geological Survey

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The comments at the end of the article (online at website) are very interesting.  I excerpted one, below:

Shelgeyr Aug 16, 2012
Rank: not rated yet

There are (largely undocumented, possibly neolithic) ruins in Egypt located too far south to really be considered part of the known ancient Kharga/Baris/Khysis area, and yet they occur within vast portions of the western desert, even away from the caravan routes.

The Kharga Aquifer used to underlay this entire region.Examples (use Google Maps/Earth and zoom in):

24.518203,30.704738 (ancient well next to ruins)
24.523928,30.704624 (only the outlines remain)
24.484776,30.706138
24.476984,30.704746
24.455565,30.692710

These remnants are by no means exclusive; ruins run all throughout this region.


Hmmm...  Perhaps the Egyptians called the west the Land of the Dead because it did become, indeed, the land of many dead after the drought of 4,200 years ago -- thus, an actual allusion to an historical memory, not just a metaphorical or religious reference! 
 

Scientists Can't Figure This Out?

Check it out:

Greenland on July 8, 2012 - on the left.  Greenland on July 12, 2012 - on the right.  No, the white color is
NOT ice that totally disappeared in 4 days, so the images are misleading in that respect.  However, on the
right pay attention to the dark pink areas when you read the information below.

These undated handout images provided by NASA shows the extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, left, and July 12, right. Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. Nearly every part of the massive Greenland ice sheet suddenly and strangely melted a bit this month in a freak event that concerned scientists had never witnessed before. NASA says three different satellites saw what it calls unprecedented melting from July 8 to July 12. Most of the thick ice remains, but what was unusual was the widespread area where some melting occurred. (AP Photo/Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory.

So, what was happening with global weather during the week that encompassed July 8 - 12?  Gee, let me think -- IT WAS RECORD BREAKING HOT.  It wasn't just hot in my part of the US (midwest), it was hot EVERYWHERE in the US.  Now what happens to all that hot air (har!) -- it drifts to the east/northeast doesn't it?  And where is Greenland located?  Gee - to the east/northeast of the US.  Did any of these scientists check what the ground temperatures were in Greenland during this time of "sudden and strange melt?"  Well, that's my totally unexpert guess.  Duh!

Mega Droughts in Sierra Nevada Confirmed

The last mega-drought to hit the area was devasting to Native Americans living there.  What would another mega-drought do the current much larger populations living in the region today?  And how would we respond?

Sierra Nevada 200-Year Megadroughts Confirmed
ScienceDaily (June 1, 2012) — The erratic year-to-year swings in precipitation totals in the Reno-Tahoe area conjures up the word "drought" every couple of years, and this year is no exception. The Nevada State Climate Office at the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Nevada Drought Response Committee, just announced a Stage 1 drought (moderate) for six counties and a Stage 2 drought (severe) for 11 counties.

Reno, Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada are no strangers to drought, the most famous being the Medieval megadrought lasting from 800 to 1250 A.D. when annual precipitation was less than 60 percent of normal. The Reno-Tahoe region is now about 65 percent of annual normal precipitation for the year, which doesn't seem like much, but imagine if this were the "norm" each and every year for the next 200 years.

Research by scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno and their partners at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego indicates that there are other instances of such long-lasting, severe droughts in the western United States throughout history. Their recent paper, a culmination of a comprehensive high-tech assessment of Fallen Leaf Lake -- a small moraine-bound lake at the south end of the Lake Tahoe Basin -- reports that stands of pre-Medieval trees in the lake suggest the region experienced severe drought at least every 650 to 1,150 years during the mid- and late-Holocene period.

"Using an arsenal of cutting edge sonar tools, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and a manned submersible, we've obtained potentially the most accurate record thus far on the instances of 200-year-long droughts in the Sierra," Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory said. "The record from Fallen Leaf Lake confirms what was expected and is likely the most accurate record, in terms of precipitation, than obtained previously from a variety of methods throughout the Sierra."

Kent is part of the University of Nevada, Reno and Scripps research team that traced the megadroughts and dry spells of the region using tree-ring analysis, shoreline records and sediment deposition in Fallen Leaf Lake. Using side-scan and multibeam sonar technology developed to map underwater earthquake fault lines such as the West Tahoe fault beneath Fallen Leaf Lake, the team also imaged standing trees up to 130 feet beneath the lake surface as well as submerged ancient shoreline structure and development. The trees matured while the lake level was 130 to 200 feet below its modern elevation and were not deposited by a landslide as was suspected.

The team, led by John Kleppe, University of Nevada, Reno engineering professor emeritus, published a paper on this research and is presenting its findings in seminars and workshops.

"The lake is like a 'canary in a coal mine' for the Sierra, telling the story of precipitation very clearly," Kent said. "Fallen Leaf Lake elevations change rapidly due to its unique ratio between catchment basin and lake surface of about 8 to 1. With analysis of the standing trees submerged in the lake, sediment cores and our sonar scanning of ancient shorelines, we can more accurately and easily trace the precipitation history of the region."

Water balance calculations and analysis of tree-ring samples undertaken by Kleppe, Kent and Scripps scientists Danny Brothers and Neal Driscoll, along with Professor Franco Biondi of the University's College of Science, suggest annual precipitation was less than 60 percent of normal from the late 10th century to the early 13th century. Their research was documented in a scientific paper, Duration and severity of Medieval drought in the Lake Tahoe Basin, published in the Quaternary Science Reviews in November 2011.

Tree-ring records and submerged paleoshoreline geomorphology suggest a Medieval low-lake level of Fallen Leaf Lake lasted more than 220 years. More than 80 trees were found lying on the lake floor at various elevations above the paleoshoreline.

"Although the ancient cycle of megadroughts seems to occur every 650 to 1150 years and the last one was 750 years ago, it is uncertain when the next megadrought will occur. With climate change upon us, it will be interesting to see how carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere will affect this cycle," Kent said.

Professor Paula Noble, in the University's College of Science's Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering, is expanding this research to include the fine-scale study of climate change through out the Holocene (about 12,000 years) using recently collected 40-foot-long sediment cores in Fallen Leaf Lake.

A Mini-Case Study of Climate Change Over Time

I am not in the habit of thinking that the 1930's are like "ancient" days, but sometimes, a slight re-think can be a good thing.  Eighty years - a generation...  Only disappointment in this article is that there was just one photo, and no comparison photo from today so one can see what differences, if any, exist.  Come on, dudes! 

From Science Daily

Discovery of Historical Photos Sheds Light On Greenland Ice Loss

ScienceDaily (May 29, 2012) — A chance discovery of 80-year-old photo plates in a Danish basement is providing new insight into how Greenland glaciers are melting today

Researchers at the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark -- that country's federal agency responsible for surveys and mapping -- had been storing the glass plates since explorer Knud Rasmussen's expedition to the southeast coast of Greenland in the early 1930s.

In this week's online edition of Nature Geoscience, Ohio State University researchers and colleagues in Denmark describe how they analyzed ice loss in the region by comparing the images on the plates to aerial photographs and satellite images taken from World War II to today.

Taken together, the imagery shows that glaciers in the region were melting even faster in the 1930s than they are today, said Jason Box, associate professor of geography and researcher at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State. A brief cooling period starting in the mid-20th century allowed new ice to form, and then the melting began to accelerate again in the 2000s.

"Because of this study, we now have a detailed historical analogue for more recent glacier loss," Box said. "And we've confirmed that glaciers are very sensitive indicators of climate."

Pre-satellite observations of Greenland glaciers are rare. Anders Anker Bjørk, doctoral fellow at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and lead author of the study, is trying to compile all such imagery. He found a clue in the archives of The Arctic Institute in Copenhagen in 2011.

"We found flight journals for some old planes, and in them was a reference to National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark," Bjørk said.

As it happens, researchers at the National Survey had already contacted Bjørk about a find of their own.

"They were cleaning up in the basement and had found some old glass plates with glaciers on them. The reason the plates were forgotten was that they were recorded for mapping, and once the map was produced they didn't have much value."

Those plates turned out to be documentation of Rasmussen's 7th Thule Expedition to Greenland. They contained aerial photographs of land, sea and glaciers in the southeast region of the country, along with travel photos of Rasmussen's team. The researchers digitized all the old images and used software to look for differences in the shape of the southeast Greenland coastline where the ice meets the Atlantic Ocean. Then they calculated the distance the ice front moved in each time period.

Over the 80 years, two events stand out: glacial retreats from 1933-1934 and 2000-2010. In the 1930s, fewer glaciers were melting than are today, and most of those that were melting were land-terminating glaciers, meaning that they did not contact the sea.

Those that were melting retreated an average of 20 meters per year -- the fastest retreating at 374 meters per year. Fifty-five percent of the glaciers in the study had similar or higher retreat rates during the 1930s than they do today.

Still, more glaciers in southeast Greenland are retreating today, and the average ice loss is 50 meters per year. That's because a few glaciers with very fast melting rates -- including one retreating at 887 meters per year -- boost the overall average. But to Box, the most interesting part of the study is what happened between the two melting events.

From 1943-1972, southeast Greenland cooled -- probably due to sulfur pollution, which reflects sunlight away from Earth. Sulfur dioxide is a poisonous gas produced by volcanoes and industrial processes. It has been tied to serious health problems and death, and is also the main ingredient in acid rain. Its presence in the atmosphere peaked just after the Clean Air Act was established in 1963. As it was removed from the atmosphere, the earlier warming resumed.

The important point is not that deadly pollution caused the climate to cool, but rather that the brief cooling allowed researchers to see how Greenland ice responded to the changing climate. The glaciers responded to the cooling more rapidly than researchers had seen in earlier studies. Sixty percent of the glaciers advanced during that time, while 12 percent were stationary. And now that the warming has resumed, the glacial retreat is dominated by marine-terminating outlet glaciers, the melting of which contributes to sea level rise.

"From these images, we see that the mid-century cooling stabilized the glaciers," Box said. "That suggests that if we want to stabilize today's accelerating ice loss, we need to see a little cooling of our own."

Southeast Greenland is a good place to study the effects of climate change, he explained, because the region is closely tied to air and water circulation patterns in the North Atlantic.

"By far, more storms pass through this region -- transporting heat into the Arctic -- than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change brings changes in snowfall and air temperature that compete for influence on a glacier's net behavior," he said.

Co-authors on the study include Kurt H. Kjær, Niels J. Korsgaard, Kristian K. Kjeldsen, and Svend Funder at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen; Shfaqat A. Khan of the National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark; Camilla S. Andresen of the Department of Marine Geology and Glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland; and Nicolaj K. Larsen of the Department of Geoscience at Aarhus University.

Photos, satellite images and other data for the study were provided by the National Survey and Cadastre; The Scott Polar Research Institute in the United Kingdom; the Arctic Institute in Denmark; researchers Bea Csatho and Sudhagar Nagarajan of the Geology Department at the University at Buffalo; and the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center at the USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science Center of Sioux Falls, S.D. Andreas Pedersen of the Danish company MapWork wrote the script for the software used in the study.

This work is a part of the RinkProject funded by the Danish Research Council and the Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland.

Gradual Climate Change Led to Collapse of Indus Civilization

From Popular Archaeology.  This article includes many graphics and images that you should take a look at to get a full picture.

March 2012
Vol. 6 March 2012 - Print the March 2012 Issue

Climate Change Contributed to Ancient Indus Civilization Demise, Researchers Say

Using archaeological data and geoscience technology, an international team of scientists has concluded a study that shows that the great Indus Valley civilization, otherwise known as the Harappan civilization, declined and disappeared in large measure due to climatic and landscape changes. The study results suggest that a major, gradual decline in monsoon rains led to a weakened river system, adversely affecting the Harappan culture and leading to its collapse. The ancient culture relied on river floods to sustain its system of agriculture.

"We reconstructed the dynamic landscape of the plain where the Indus civilization developed 5200 years ago, built its cities, and slowly disintegrated between 3900 and 3000 years ago," said geologist Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). "Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers." Giosan is also the lead author of the study report now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Harappan civilization was the largest of the "big three" early urban cultures of the world (the others being ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia), but less is known about it. Archaeological exploration over the past century has shed much more light on the culture. Its remains extend more than 1 million square kilometers across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges River, over what is now Pakistan, northwest India and eastern Afghanistan. Much like ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Harappan people built and sustained their urban society along the recurring highs and lows of flowing rivers that provided the basis for the production of agricultural surpluses, vitally important for the development and sustenance of great urban centers.

Where the Harappan civilization thrived over 4,000 years ago, one now mostly sees arid desolation. The remains of many of its settlements and urban centers now dot a vast desert, far from flowing rivers. But in its heyday, it boasted a sophisticated urban culture with vaious trade routes and maritime connections with Mesopotamia, standards for building construction and sanitation systems, the arts, and a writing system that still eludes epigraphers.

Says Giosan, "We considered that it is high time for a team of interdisciplinary scientists to contribute to the debate about the enigmatic fate of these people".

The team conducted the research between 2003 and 2008 in Pakistan, from the coast of the Arabian Sea into the fertile irrigated valleys of the Punjab and the northern Thar Desert. The project included scientists from the U.S., U.K., India, Pakistan, and Romania, consisting of expertise in geology, geomorphology, archaeology, and mathematics. Using satellite photos and topographic information from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), they devloped and analyzed digital landform maps of the Indus Valley area. Using this information, they probed the area by drilling, coring, and digging test trenches, collecting samples that would help them determine sediment origins and age. They were able to develop a 10,000-year chronology of landscape change.

"Once we had this new information on the geological history, we could re-examine what we know about settlements, what crops people were planting and when, and how both agriculture and settlement patterns changed," says Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist with the University College London and also co-author of the report. "This brought new insights into the process of eastward population shift, the change towards many more small farming communities, and the decline of cities during late Harappan times."

At first, as the story goes based on the research, the declining monsoon rains actually played a salient role in the rise of the Harappan civilization. Adds Giosan: "The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity – a kind of "Goldilocks" civilization. As monsoon drying subdued devastating floods, the land nearby the rivers - still fed with water and rich silt - was just right for agriculture. This lasted for almost 2,000 years, but continued aridification closed this favorable window in the end."

By about 3900 years ago the river system had dried to the point where the Harappans were compelled to move and disperse eastward toward the Ganges basin, where the monsoon rains were still plentiful and more reliable. The great urbanized Indus civilization, having relied on the bumper crop surpluses along the Indus and the Ghaggar-Hakra rivers to develop and sustain their cities and towns during the earlier, wetter period, thus no longer had the workforce concentration needed to support urbanism.

"We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localized forms of economy: smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams," said Fuller. "This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable. Thus cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished. Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified."

In addition, the researchers believe they have discovered the fate of the mythical river, the Sarasvati. The ancient Sanskrit Vedas scriptures portrayed the Sarasvati as "surpassing in majesty and might all other waters", but it has been long considered lost to history. They have uncovered evidence that they suggest supports the current Ghaggar-Hakra river as ancient Sarasvati, based on sedimentary, topographical, and archaeological data of settlement near the river during the Harappan era. Moreover, the findings suggest that the ancient river was actually fed by perennial monsoons, not Himalayan glaciers, as was previously supposed, and that the increasingly arid climate had reduced it to the short seasonal flows of today.

Ancient Arabic Writings Plot Climate Change

Ancient Arabic writings help scientists piece together past climate

February 26, 2012

Ancient manuscripts written by Arabic scholars can provide valuable meteorological information to help modern scientists reconstruct the climate of the past, a new study has revealed. The research, published in Weather, analyses the writings of scholars, historians and diarists in Iraq during the Islamic Golden Age between 816-1009 AD for evidence of abnormal weather patterns.

Reconstructing climates from the past provides historical comparison to modern weather events and valuable context for climate change. In the natural world trees, ice cores and coral provide evidence of past weather, but from human sources scientists are limited by the historical information available. Until now researchers have relied on official records detailing weather patterns including air force reports during WW2 and 18th century ship's logs.

Now a team of Spanish scientists from the Universidad de Extremadura have turned to Arabic documentary sources from the 9th and 10th centuries (3rd and 4th in the Islamic calendar). The sources, from historians and political commentators of the era, focus on the social and religious events of the time, but do refer to abnormal weather events.

"Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods," said lead author Dr Fernando Domínguez-Castro. "However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow."

Baghdad was a centre for trade, commerce and science in the ancient Islamic world. In 891 AD Berber geographer al-Ya'qubi wrote that the city had no rival in the world, with hot summers and cold winters, climatic conditions which favored strong agriculture.

While Baghdad was a cultural and scientific hub many ancient documents have been lost to a history of invasions and civil strife. However, from the surviving works of writers including al-Tabari (913 AD), Ibn al-Athir (1233 AD) and al-Suyuti (1505 AD) some meteorological information can be rescued.

When collated and analysed the manuscripts revealed an increase of cold events in the first half of the 10th century. This included a significant drop of temperatures during July 920 AD and three separate recordings of snowfall in 908, 944 and 1007. In comparison the only record of snow in modern Baghdad was in 2008, a unique experience in the living memories of Iraqis.

"These signs of a sudden cold period confirm suggestions of a temperature drop during the tenth century, immediately before the Medieval Warm Period," said Domínguez-Castro. "We believe the drop in July 920 AD may have been linked to a great volcanic eruption but more work would be necessary to confirm this idea."

The team believes the sources show Iraq to have experienced a greater frequency of significant climate events and severe cold weather than today. While this study focused on Iraq it demonstrates the wider potential for reconstructing the climate from an era before meteorological instruments and formal records.

"Ancient Arabic documentary sources are a very useful tool for finding eye witness descriptions which support the theories made by climate models," said Domínguez-Castro. "The ability to reconstruct past climates provides us with useful historical context for understanding our own climate. We hope this potential will encourage Arabic historians and climatologists to work together to increase the climate data rescued from across the Islamic world."

More information: F. Dominguez-Castro, J. M. Vaquero, M. Marin, M. C. Gallego, R. Garcia-Herrera, “How useful could Arabic documentary sources be for reconstructing past climate,” Weather, Wiley-Blackwell, DOI: 10.1002/wea.835

Provided by Wiley (news : web)

Scary Headline: Giant Plumes of Methane in Arctic Ocean

From "The Sideshow" at Yahoo News

Giant plumes of methane bubbling to surface of Arctic Ocean
By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow – Wed, Dec 14, 2011

Russian scientists have discovered hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic Shelf recedes, the unprecedented levels of gas released could greatly accelerate global climate change.

Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences tells the UK's Independent that the plumes of methane, a gas 20 times as harmful as carbon dioxide, have shocked scientists who have been studying the region for decades. "Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of meters in diameter," he said. "This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing."

Semiletov said that while his research team has discovered more than 100 plumes, they estimate there to be "thousands" over the wider area, extending from the Russian mainland to the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Semiletov said. "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale — I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometer or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere — the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."

****************************************************************

My first thought upon reading this article was - OHMYGODDESS!  I was pretty sure that methane is produced only by decaying/decomposing organic matter -- I double-checked tonight to make sure -- and the thought that something now is going on in the frigid depths of the Arctic that is releasing this gas is just plain scary to me.  Then I calmed down, and realized that this methane is probably ancient and being released from caches deep in the earth, and that it was created millions of years ago when the earth was much different than it is today.  I certainly hope it's not due to massive die-offs of sea life now rotting away on the floor of the Arctic Ocean...

I have no idea what's going on, but a LOT of methane is now making its way to the surface and being released into our atmosphere.  Maybe it has been doing this for time immemorial, and we're just noticing it now because the ice covering is disappearing and the process has become more obvious!  But, the comments by the scientists about the increasing size of these plumes is particularly disturbing.  Why are the sizes of the plumes increasing?