Researchers have just dated large volcanic eruptions that took place in the Middle Ages, thanks to the observations of the moon by monks.
Revelations centuries later… Researchers have just dated major volcanic eruptions that took place in the Middle Ages, thanks to observations of the Moon by monks. These discoveries on the dating of volcanic eruptions have just been published in the American journal Nature.
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For five years, Swiss scientists analyzed manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages. At the time, Christians observed the Moon with attention, and in particular the total lunar eclipses which make it reddish. Because according to the Christians, the “blood red” Moon could be a harbinger of the Apocalypse. Monks in the West, but also Crusaders in the East have therefore scrupulously recorded almost all these eclipses, that is to say about fifty between 1100 and 1300. They note for five of them a particular phenomenon: the Moon was not red, but dark , she had almost disappeared.
stratospheric dust
This mystery has been solved by Sébastien Guillet’s team. This paleoclimatologist in Geneva, with long hair like a rocker, says he had the click while listening to… the album Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd. He understood that this vision of a dark Moon is created by stratospheric sulfur dust that veils the sky.
This dust comes from the volcanic eruptions that took place a few months earlier. Some have happened thousands of miles away. This is the case for one of the eruptions that has been identified, that of the Salamas volcano, in Indonesia in 1257. Thanks to the observations of monks, we now know how to date, not the Apocalypse, but five of the greatest medieval eruptions.
This discovery was also confirmed by the same sulfur found and dated in ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland. The researchers already knew that the activity of volcanoes on Earth was very strong, very intense during this period.
Among the hypotheses, some of them argue that the eruptions would have caused a drop in temperatures, called “the little ice age”. Thus, this recent dating of eruptions will make it possible to better understand this phenomenon, to understand whether volcanic eruptions have modified the climate and, consequently, affected at the time, agriculture, crops and the life of societies on Earth.