Late Antique Little Ice Age
The Late Antique Little Ice Age was a long-lasting Northern hemisphere cooling period in the 6th and 7th century AD, proposed as theory in 2015, and subsequently confirmed as the interval from 536 to about 660 AD.[1] This period followed three immense volcanic eruptions in 536, 540 and 547. One of the suspected volcanic sites for those events is the Rabaul caldera, which erupted around 540. The extreme weather events of 535–536 were the early phenomena of the century-long global temperature decline.
The evidence comes from a temperature reconstruction from the Euro-Med2k[2] working group of the international PAGES (Past Global Changes) project,[3] using new tree-ring measurements from the Altai Mountains, which closely matches the temperatures in the Alps in the last two centuries.[4][5]
References
Secondary sources
- Büntgen; et. al. (2016). Ulf Büntgen, Vladimir S. Myglan, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Michael McCormick, Nicola Di Cosmo, Michael Sigl, Johann Jungclaus, Sebastian Wagner, Paul J. Krusic, Jan Esper, Jed O. Kaplan, Michiel A. C. de Vaan, Jürg Luterbacher, Lukas Wacker, Willy Tegel & Alexander V. Kirdyanov, eds. "Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD". Nature Geoscience 9.: 231–236. doi:10.1038/ngeo2652.