from the I-don't-know-I-was-really-drunk-at-the-time dept.
Ars Technica is reporting on a new (published 5 April 2023) paper combining ice core, tree ring and textual analysis to "more accurately date medieval volcanic eruptions."
The primary author's inspiration to pursue this line of research included:
Sébastien Guillet, an environmental scientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, was rocking out to Pink Floyd's classic Dark Side of the Moon album one day when he made a prescient connection. The darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions. And astronomers know the exact days of those eclipses. So medieval historical accounts of lunar eclipse sightings should be able to help scientists narrow down the time frame in which major eruptions occurred during the High Medieval period spanning 1100 to 1300 CE. Guillet collaborated with several other scientists to conduct such a study, combining textual analysis with tree ring and ice core data. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.
"Climate scientists usually identify past volcanic eruptions by measuring the acidity and amount of volcanic ash in cores drilled from polar ice, or by inferring abrupt temperature changes in tree ring records," Andrea Seim (University of Freiburg) and Eduardo Zorita (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) wrote in an accompanying commentary. "However, these sources sometimes disagree, because the location, intensity, and timing of eruptions can produce varying results, as can circulation of the atmosphere. Guillet and colleagues' approach offers an independent—and perhaps even more direct—source of information about the timing of volcanic eruptions, which could resolve some of these disagreements."
[...]
Guillet's critical insight stems from the impact volcanic eruptions can have on the appearance of a lunar eclipse. If there are a lot of aerosols, the moon will appear dark during the eclipse; if aerosols are scarce, the moon will have a bright reddish appearance. So one should be able to estimate how much volcanic aerosols were in the atmosphere from medieval descriptions of the color and luminosity of the moon during lunar eclipses, and use that information to more accurately date medieval volcanic eruptions.
It's an interesting combination of science and analysis of historical writings to arrive at a better understanding of some of the forces acting on the climate in Medieval Europe.
N.B.: The Nature journal reference appears to be the full paper, not just an abstract.
References:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05751-z
Study Data/Code Availability: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6907654
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Gaaark on Friday April 07, @09:21PM (3 children)
Devo's "Pink Pussycat" inspired me to search out my wife! ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday April 07, @11:06PM (2 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08, @12:31AM
Same, only mine was "Compared to What" Eddie Harris and Les McCann (live)
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday April 09, @12:43AM
My wife's an Educational Assistant, so i guess "Hot for Teacher" (Van Halen) works as well! ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Friday April 07, @11:43PM (3 children)
Get better records, Europeans were under the spell of Aristotle (and Catholicism) and believed the sky was inmutable.
For example, they failed to report a supernova [harvard.edu] that appeared in the sky for a couple of years.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday April 09, @03:39AM (2 children)
Where does Aristotle claim that the sky is immutable?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Sunday April 09, @04:17PM (1 child)
Read the argument at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Tuesday April 11, @04:23AM
Thanks, that did send me down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole. It was an odd claim, because the ancients, if nothing else, were aware of what was going on around them in the natural world and the heavens are clearly not immutable. It seems there was a realm or sphere of fire which accounted for the dynamic elements (according to Wikipedia). Reading some of the talk pages there appears to be disagreement between physicists, who see Aristotle's work as being superseded by moderns physics, and contemporary philosophers who interpret Aristotle in the context of his time and place, with the former being more dominant on Wikipedia.