The worst year to be alive in human history? It’s not what you think – National Post

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This specific year was marked by every human nightmare you might dread freezing temperatures, famine, drought and plagues upon plague

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In 1347 CE, the Black Death had settled upon Afro-Eurasia and went on to kill as many as 200 million people around the world.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 wrecked the lives of 500 million people in a world still recovering from the devastation of the First World War.

The years of the Holocaust have been deemed by many to be one of the darkest periods in human history.

Some may even say 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic began, should join the ranks of the worst years in human history. The pandemic has since killed over three million people worldwide.

However researchers say human civilization went through a year much worse than any of these events, a year they say was the worst-ever to be alive 536 CE.

To most people, its a relatively obscure year. It marked the 10th year of Byzantine rule, under the emperor Justinian The Great, and apart from the constant struggles for more power among the world rulers at the time, there wasnt much going on that that would be politically interesting.

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Meteorological experts, however, would beg to differ.

At the time, a mysterious fog began to cloud the skies of Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, a fog so dense and dark that it blocked sunlight for a year-and-a-half.

And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place, wrote Byzantine historian Procopius, For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, likethe moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed.

In turn, the diminished sunlight set off a series of cataclysmic events that took human civilization at least 100 years to recover from, until 640 CE, researchers found in a study published in 2018.

Temperatures drastically fell, beginning one of the coldest decades in the past 2,300 years, medieval historian Michael McCormick told Science Magazine.

Chinas summer was marked by snow and crop failure. The Irish could not grow wheat for bread for the next three years.

Drought and famine spread everywhere. And then in 541, the first plague pandemic struck Pelusium, a Roman port in Egypt. Named the Plague of Justinian, it would continue until 750 or 767 and be followed by another 15 or 18 major waves of plague.

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It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year, Michael McCormick, a Harvard University archaeologist told Science Magazine.

Historians long knew about this period in the sixth century, since called the Dark Ages, but not until 2018 were they able to figure out what caused it to happen.

According to McCormick, it was a catastrophic volcanic eruption in Iceland that spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere in 536 CE. Two more massive eruptions would follow in 540 and 547 CE.

Scientists stumbled upon the answer by analyzing ice cores in Colle Gnifetti glacier on the border between Switzerland and Italy. The layers of ice deposits in the core are a valuable resource to archaeologists because each layer can provide information about what was happening in the atmosphere at the time.

Researchers found that around the years of 536 and 540 CE, quantities of ash and debris had been deposited into the ice, signalling large volcanic events during the time.

But by 640 CE, they noticed a encouraging sign in the ice lead, indicating that humans had begun to mine and smelt silver from lead ore.

This unambiguously shows that, alongside any residual pool of Roman bullion and imported metal, new mining facilitated the production of the last post-Roman gold coins debased with increasing amounts of silver and the new silver coinages that replaced them,the researchers wrote in their study.

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The worst year to be alive in human history? It's not what you think - National Post