Collapse of ancient city's water system may have led to its demise
The Cambodian city of Angkor was once the largest in the world... then the vast majority of its inhabitants suddenly decamped in the 15th century to a region near the modern city of Phnom Penh. Historians have put forth several theories about why this mass exodus occurred. A new paper in Science Advances argues that one major contributing factor was an overloaded water distribution system, exacerbated by extreme swings in the climate.
Angkor dates back to around 802 CE. Its vast network of canals, moats, embankments, and reservoirs developed over the next 600 years, helping distribute vital water resources for such uses as irrigation and to help control occasional flooding. By the end of the 11th century, the system bore all the features of a complex network, with thousands of interconnected individual components heavily dependent on each other.
[...] "The water management infrastructure of Angkor had been developed over centuries, becoming very large, tightly interconnected, and dependent on older and aging components," says co-author Mikhail Prokopenko, director of the Complex Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney. "The change in the middle of the 14th century CE, from prolonged drought to particularly wet years, put too much stress on this complex network, making the water distribution unstable."
[...] There is a lesson here for our modern-day cities in the fate of Angkor. Our cities are larger, more complex—and our infrastructure is aging rapidly. This makes cities more vulnerable to the rippling effects brought on by climate change, most notably an increase in extreme weather events. "If we don't build resilience into our critical infrastructure, we may face severe and lasting disruptions to our civil systems, that can be intensified by external shocks and threaten our environment and economy," says Prokopenko.
DOI: Science Advances, 2018. 10.1126/sciadv.aau4029.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday October 27 2018, @10:36AM (3 children)
-re":
The New York City blackout I think in the fifties, and the Quebec blackout in the Winter I think it was 1997 - being winter, lots of people froze to death - were the results of instability in a high connected electrical grid. Just like my three servers at Octel Communications, which one of my coder friends called a "Cluster Fuck" because all three were hard-mounted on the other two, so if any one server failed they all did.
Our electrical grid would be a whole lot more resilient if it weren't connected to every other electrical grid. They're all kept connected so power shortages can be relieved by power surpluses elsewhere. But at time this has a cost in human lives.
My father studied Electrical Power Engineering for his MSEE at the U Of Idaho. The whole time he was in school he was endlessly in his home office poring over this huge stack of FORTRAN Hollerith Cards. He told me that they were a simulation of the North American Power Grid. If the code has to be that thick a deck maybe the grid shouldn't be complex.
A partial solution would be for solar and wind generation to not sell their excess power to the power company, but to mine crypto. That would eventually pay off the cost of installation, and would, over time, greatly simplify our grid.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 27 2018, @03:43PM (1 child)
There are several mostly-independent grids in the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_U.S._power_transmission_grid [wikipedia.org]. Supposedly they've learned from history and even a major failure won't bring down a whole section of the country.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Saturday October 27 2018, @08:30PM
I'm skeptical that power grids are terribly resilient, but I'm biased by my memory of the 2003 blackout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday October 28 2018, @06:19AM
In any case the paper has followed a completely wrong path, everyone who was there at the time remembers what actually happend, damn Indravarman IV promised everyone fast broadband when he overthrew Indravarman III, and never delivered. All the inhabitants, who were already fed up by the waste of tax money on the Indravarman Theme Park, had had enough and left for Ayutthaya, which had fibre in most districts.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 27 2018, @11:00AM (2 children)
If people loved their city, you would think they would bury the cadaver when the city dies. But, these folk just left it lying there, for later generations to stumble over. The Atlanteans truly loved their cities. They went to the trouble of burying their dead cities at sea.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @07:28AM (1 child)
he Atlanteans truly loved their cities. They went to the trouble of burying their dead cities at sea.
Say whaaa? I thought they burned it down, and out of the ashes... rose, Phoenix? Wait, that's not right... Let me come in again...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 28 2018, @07:35AM
Why not ask the bird itself? https://soylentnews.org/~Phoenix666/ [soylentnews.org]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:37PM (5 children)
Ghost towns are everywhere. Abandoned cities are less common, tend to be older and to have lived much longer and suffered extended declines. A few were destroyed in war and not rebuilt.
Will Detroit die? Its population peaked at about 1.8 million. Now it's down to less than 1/3 of that. I really can't see it being completely abandoned, unless it is swept up into a much larger disaster.
The Dallas Fort Worth metroplex has the dubious distinction of being the largest metropolis that is not on a navigable river. It sits on the Trinity River, at the bottom of the headwater areas, just outside the Mississippi watershed. Some 100 to 150 years ago, Waco, not Dallas, was the big city in the area. I have read of calculations that a perfect storm could top the levees in Dallas and flood the downtown area. The storm would have to move down the length of the Trinity watershed at just the right slowness to keep the rain pouring in where the flood crest is. Not too likely to happen. A prolonged drought is more likely, and potentially more difficult to survive. They've built a lot of reservoirs to assure a steady supply of water, and in a pinch they can get a little water from the Red River in the Mississippi watershed, should that for some reason not be suffering from drought at the same time.
But I suppose all that is small potatoes next to the water problems Los Angeles and other large cities in the west have. Los Angeles is at least on the coast and can turn to desalination of seawater if they must. Other western cities though....
(Score: 1) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 27 2018, @03:32PM
Kansas City, on the Mississippi River, is at a higher altitude than Dallas. This looks to me like an invitation for a huge civil engineering project should the Dallas region suffer a prolonged drought.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Farkus888 on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
My thoughts go to the ecological impact. All of the environmental impact of leaving cities to rot then building new ones on virgin land. Can it really be cheaper in real cost than repairs? Not the people who get caught holding the cleanup bag.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tibman on Saturday October 27 2018, @08:51PM
If you owned a store and it was getting robbed every weekend because "the cops don't come down here anymore" then you would certainly move. Probably to a better part of the city. But if the city continued to decline then you'd pack up your wares and move to the next city. When you move there will be fewer jobs in the old city. It just gets worse and worse.
I think it's more about the people. Good hardworking people want to progress the city and improve it (bridges, roads, civil structures, stores, restaurants). If the other citizens resist (rob workers, vandalize, obstruct progress, disrupt business) then those good hardworking citizens will leave for some place else that wants their labors. If most of the people who give a shit (and were willing to actually do something) about the city have moved away then who is left behind? Mostly people who won't/can't fix the city. That would be death to a city-state. A city like Detroit won't ever completely fail because it has state and federal organizations to keep it straight.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
What is now Iraq is the cradle of our civilization. Just saying...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:55PM
On a Top Ten List of major US Cities soonest to be abandoned, I'd put New Orleans in the #1 spot. Lot of Sumerian and Babylonian cities were abandoned when rivers changed course and left them if not high, at the least dry. The Mississippi is overdue, and would have switched to the Atchafalaya by now if humans hadn't intervened to hold it to its current course. And, not only is New Orleans on the coast and therefore vulnerable to sea level rise, delta land is more prone than most to subsidence, and even more so if the main flow shifts away and stops bringing sediment.
I'd say Miami is #2, and the rest of the Florida coast is not much better off. New York City is high on the list as it has a subsidence problem as well, but from glacial rebound further inland, not from being located in a major delta.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:50PM (1 child)
The BBC had a decent documentary on Angkor I saw: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04jmx7j [bbc.co.uk] and https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kn99x [bbc.co.uk]. They go to great length reconstructing the waterways and reservoirs from wide area LIDAR scanning. Might be of interest in the context of this topic.
One thing I didn't get from those two hours was not how they got their freshwater supply, but how they got their sewage away. Anyone care to elaborate?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 27 2018, @06:01PM
Just a quick guess, but maybe there was swampland nearby, and they dumped it there? Swamps are great places to dump sewage.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @08:52PM
So climate change wiped out Angkor? Well the Cambodians seem to be doing pretty well now, so I guess that proves global warming is a scam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @12:28PM (1 child)
it is always amazing how such massive cultures just "vanish" without leaving a trace or record of "WHY?"
one would think that all the blood and tears and sacrifice that went into building such a thing and
the subsequent FAILURE would leave a record so as to leave a hint of "what not to do" when building a city or culture.
one explanation might be shame. pure and simple a collective amnesia of the "shit" that was perpetrated.
my explanation is a "more modern" one: a culture is governed by a "wet-ware" A.I.. the culture-spirit, so to speak.
it's made of language, customs, ethics (not obvious, but human sacrifice seems to have been normal for aztecs) and also aesthetics.
the seed of this civilization might have had all the right factors in the right balance so it grew and thrived.
the demise was that this A.I. grew "old" in the sense that language, costumes, ethics and aesthetics weren't allowed to change.
though this rigid frame work was a successful scaffold to grew it was fundamentally flawed because it didn't allow CHANGE!
the idea that "this is the only and only correct way" probably lead to a lot of problems.
one of them might have been the water problem, another might have been inbreeding and all the problems that
follow (diminished intellect).
the danger might even exist today; though we have easy and fast global travel, resettlement (and subsequent genetic intermingling) has in no way kept pace in comparison.
modern examples are: switzerland, japan ... usa (WUT?)?
last note: maybe book-keeping and burocrazy ERROR and UPKEEP was to blame? i dread the paper and pen solution in running a roman, aztec, cambodia or aegyptian empire ...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday October 28 2018, @01:38PM
How much better documented will the collapse of this civilization be? Flash drives probably won't withstand the ravages of time very well. On the other hand, copies of the Onion recovered by future archaeologists will paint a rather accurate picture of how it went down.
Washington DC delenda est.