Thanks. I just watched the entire video though this documentary pins the culprit on Krakatoa and not an Icelandic volcano. It was interesting nonetheless.
I’m amazed by the amount of historical information held in ice. Activities from silver mining to volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago can be found as chemical traces in the cores.
There’s just a few years where this kind of research will be possible. I hope we can maximize our discoveries before the world loses most of its ice.
The ice in Antarctica and Greenland is not going to melt altogether and it would take thousands of years for it to melt away at current pace even if trends aren't reversed by another series of similar volcanic events.
Not at ice divides (like hydrological divides) where ice cores are taken (ice cores are almost always taken at divides because the ice flows apart, so the stratigraphy is not as disturbed). It's too cold to melt out there anytime soon. These are high-elevation locations, so there is either no melting (East Antartica ones ~3000 m) or extremely minimal melting, rarely, during the height of summer (Greenland and some other places in Antarctica). In Antarctica, surface melt is a rounding error everywhere, and response to climate change is almost entirely due to ice sheet-ocean interactions with a warming ocean and changing currents, and a thing called the marine ice-sheet instability.
At any rate, these locations will always be accumulation zones where more snow falls then melts (with the mass balance preserved by diverging flow so as to continuously thin the ice, to approximately compensate), with melt events occuring only rarely. The concern there is that meltwater could contaminate near-surface compacted snow (firn) layers, but even then it wouldn't be enough to do much. As such, stratigraphy will be reasonably preserved even if the ice sheet as a whole draws down significantly (including at divides).
Really extreme climate change (which is in the cards long-term) could eventually change this, especially if the ice sheets reduce enough in height such that a significant ice sheet-elevation feetback occurs. However, we'd have much bigger things to worry about at that point.
We have the most extensive data available for recent years, though. Ice core samples are also nothing new, they've been extensively studied for decades. Many of these cores are carefully removed and placed in ice cold storage warehouses: https://qz.com/1590747/an-antarctic-ice-core-may-show-1-5-mi...
Again, the physical ice core samples are permanently kept in giant freezer warehouses. And we know how to store binary archive data for thousands of years securely.
The ice in Greenland is up to 3000 meters thick, and Antarctica is up to almost 5000 meters. Are you suggesting the net melt could average up to half a meter a year?
"Thousands of years" is clearly wrong, so it is at best several centuries.
About "decades": I'm not saying it will, but that it could.
It is completely in the plausible, and scientists have been proven to be too much conservative, to the great surprise of everyone including themselves.
That says that the fastest plausible scenario has the ice sheet melting in 1000 years, while the greater likelihood is 10,000 years. And that's if/after we cross temperature thresholds we're not guaranteed to cross.
Nowhere does it entertain the whole thing going in decades. If you have credible sources that argue for the possibility of decades, or even a century or two, you should add that to the page.
It doesn’t mean the population fell that low. It means some sub population that size happened to be the ancestors of today’s humans. Nothing is proven about why the other sub populations aren’t represented today or when they died out. It could have been gradual, after our common ancestor group had successfully outcompeted the other groups.
> The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples—some 50,000 from each meter of the core—is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to pinpoint storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov.
How do they know for sure that the ice samples are chronological? What happens if in a given year the top layer of ice melts away?
They match the ice samples up with tree rings. There exists tree ring data of 7k+ years, the ice contains more info, but the tree rings allow for absolute pinpointing on a year. They match them on common info.
It might be even more bleak because we have 100X the population. I live near San Francisco and yesterday it rained more than usual which resulted in some highways literally shutting down and hours long traffic diversions. I have pretty low faith in us.
Coordination of governing bodies at the regional level is really bad in the US. A different agency manages the highways than the roadways than the waterways, each having their own incentives and budgets.
In this case the problem (other than weather) was 100% infrastructure: many of these roadways are built below grade, which means that when it rains, they flood. Floods are generally not part of the threat model for Bay Area infrastructure (though perhaps they should be), so when civil engineers trade off drainage vs. earthquake safety vs. land use vs. traffic, drainage is usually the first thing sacrificed. The mid-peninsula had 5 consecutive avenues underneath El Camino & the Caltrain tracks washed out; most of them have been recently rebuilt as grade-separated underpasses as part of the Caltrain electrification project, so that traffic would not need to cross the tracks. They probably would not have flooded as at-grade intersections.
Arguably this was the right choice, as everybody just stayed home during this storm, so real impacts were relatively light. By contrast, Bay Area traffic is a disaster every rush hour, so getting a few folks to take Caltrain instead of driving or avoiding just one collision on the tracks already puts you ahead of the cost of this weekend's storm.
Most of the northern world would not have much trouble buying its food wherever possible. For a high price, of course, but USA, Europe, Japan and even China are so extremely wealthy compared to others that they can outbid the majority of the South on the global food market without much difficulty. Thus, a decline in food production in the North would primarily affect the global South.
The rich countries are also going to be outbidding each other though. Some nations may decide not to sell it all because they need to eat themselves. This would be worse due to limited supply and no way to quickly ramp up.
Countries like the US and Canada, who are net food exporters, would basically be fine. China would face huge problems. Failed states would experience catastrophic famine.
I agree rich countries could buy food up to a point, but if the us and canada had drastically lower yields for a few years, there would be world wide shortages, countries would limit exports eventually.
I asked the question about what would northern countries do because the volcanic eruption impacts seemed to be more focused on the north in the article. But of course the world is connected, and the south is relatively poorer, and we are all connected, and there's not that much excess food. When a huge eruption does occur, or other destructive things like a CME, it will affect the world.
They are currently net food exporters, but with catastrophic harvest failures that would probably change. I'm not sure if anyone has run a detailed analysis taking all the factors in to account, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume they would "be fine".
You can't eat electricity or insulation. There's close to 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. If we were to suffer a decade of volcanic winter, large parts of the midwest would become non-productive. If the reports of the sun being as dim as the moon due to the ash are true, there would be massive crop failure. One or two years like that, we might be ok. But any longer than that and our stores would be rapidly depleted. Famines can knock out huge percentages of populations and have led to the collapse of civilization on several occasions in the past few millenia.
No it's not. This is false. First of all, for example, WRT to soybeans, only 20% of the bean can be used to derive oil, which is the ingredient most often used in processed human foods (not the healthiest but I digress). The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs [1]. But if the beans do not grow at all you don't get meal or oil. Same is true of corn silage. These parts of the plant are not edible by humans.
But by far the biggest fallacy in your argument is that you don't recognize that animals are eaten by humans and provide valuable nutrition and essential nutrients. If the livestock is dying off because there's not enough feed, there are humans downstream of that who will not be getting fed. Livestock and crops have symbiotic relationship with humans and with each other. A lot of wasted plant matter that humans would have to discard (not to mention grass that cows, deer and other ruminants eat) can be consumed by farm animals. And animal manure can be used as fertilizer to re-invigorate soil and improve crop yields. In addition, animals upcycle crops into higher quality proteins and essential amino acids.
Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans.
>The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs
No. That is how it is currently used, but in an emergency you could make soy flour, tofu, etc. The calories are consumable even if it's not what we typically eat.
Or, more relevantly, the land that is used to grow soy could instead be planted with corn (or perhaps winter wheat in a post-volcanic scenario). Right now we're planting out crops to optimize for market value, which is driven by livestock feed use. If we instead optimized for human nutritional value, we could easily double output by mostly eliminating livestock (even accounting for the loss of nutrition provided by the livestock).
>Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans.
Yes, but our economy is flexible, demand for commodities will fluctuate widely shortly after any catastrophic event, having a likely negative cascading effect on the rest of the economy.
Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.
I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas).
Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).
That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience.
Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...
To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives.
I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.
That is a common misconception. But! Field Corn is 100% edible by people. All varieties of corn are. We eat it as corn meal, corn syrup, corn flakes, etc.
It isn't quite a sweet as, well, sweet corn when boiled/roasted on the cob. But it's no problem at all as a food.
More likely Quorn style fungus fermented/grown in dark vats connected to nuclear reactors for power. Might be tricky to ramp up in time but eventually could actually lower the cost of food, if more boring food. Flavoured fungus burgers all the time, kids might actually like it...
Modern LED grow lights require minimum 35 watts per square foot to grow things beyond just lettuce, which is around 1.5 million watts per acre. Americans currently consume a bit over 2.5 acres of farmland produce per year, however you could get that down to 1 acre without much problem by cutting out some of the less land efficient crops likes fruit trees, especially when talking indoor grow.
So I would expect bare minimum energy requirements to be near 1.5-2 million watts per person for 12-16 hours a day for indoor food sustainability.
This is of course not accounting for fertilizer which has large energy requirements or anything more than the most simple and basic of climate control.
wow, if that is all true then vertical farming is even less relevant to this scenario than I thought. I'm not sure I'm qualified to check your figures and I suspect some of your assumptions are more pessimistic than mine, but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs. amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).
(Just to preempt some likely replies from other people: I'm sure there is a big difference between "Americans consume" (including livestock grazing, which can't be magic-ed into anything else) and "You can get by on" (measured in hypothetical perfect-acres) - it would take esoteric casuistry to make these really comparable anyway. Nevertheless the gap is so large that AngryData's fundamental point is extremely robust: growlamp-ing everyone's basic needs is fantasy-land. I thought that, but didn't realise the case against it was as strong as I now suspect it might be)
> but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).
Solar panels produce about 150 watts of energy per square meter since most solar panels operate at 15% efficiency this translates to 15 watts per square foot.
Which is 100 Watts solar energy per square foot, so 35 Watts certainly has the right order. (LEDs are not 100% efficient, sunlight is not 100% efficient with chlorophyll, some edible plants grow in shade).
And how soon would their building be turned into yet another polarizing issue, or their building farmed out to contracting companies who would make most of the money disappear?
A global response on the scale of Covid to build vertical farms would reduce the severity of the famine dramatically.
It would be expensive, but the alternative would be burning cities and food riots. I can hardly imagine the USA avoiding a civil war considering how divisive and hostile things already have gotten
You can get hydroponics going fairly quickly, the bottleneck would be the supplies and supply chain — materials to build the with
Definitely! The Byzantine and Parthian empires had just fought a long war, and were very weak. That left the near East easy pickings for the Muslim invaders coming up from the Hejaz.
I read a book called like Justinian’s Flea I believe that argues the plague was the real end of any chance at a Roman state in the west because it stopped the East’s reconsolidation of the west and wounded the successor kingdoms.
A different book on the collapse of Britain I will always remember for the quote “the horseman ride together.”
Anyway, I still doubt this is true. The worst year was probably long before 536.
I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.
If 536 was particularly bad due to a massive volcanic eruption blotting out the sun, they can't have been having a great time in the Americas or Africa either.
536 would have stiff competition from every year of the century following 1492 for the title of "Worst Year to be Alive in the Americas".
That's not an unfair assumption to make, but it is an assumption, since no records pertaining to conditions in Africa or South America are mentioned (or Australia and on Pacific islands, for that matter). That's where my despair comes from; a consideration of the peoples of those regions was not included, even though the headline seems to be a general statement about human life on Earth in 536.
We know how bad things were in Europe and East Asia because written records survive which describe the crop failures etc. We don't have records from that time period from Africa or South America. All we can do is assume that people there suffered as well, due to the global nature of the problem.
Sometimes people get left out of historical narratives because there just aren't any written records. You can make assumptions, or you can try to make stuff up, but an intellectually honest historian is also likely to just say "we can't know."
In contrast, archaeologists will try to make a case for how hierarchical a society was, or whether it was male-dominated, or what kind of religion it had, on the basis of a few tombs belonging to "high-status individuals" and a couple of pieces of pottery. It's always a bit of a stretch. A lot of what archaeologists believed about prehistory. especially migrations of people groups, has been overturned by genetic studies in the past decade. David Reich wrote a good book about it several years ago, which is probably itself outdated now due to the pace of discovery in that field.
"The global nature of the problem" is also an assumption; there is the chance that, should oral histories in West and Central Africa have survived, or more was known about surviving, undeciphered Mesoamerican and Andean records, we might have learned of differing conditions outside of the Global North. In both cases, our inability to access those sources of information is not an accident of nature, but the result of several historical campaigns of cultural or total genocide.
I think you're missing my point, which is that the erasure of these regions from the record (which runs through the history of archaeology, up to the publishing of this article) was a purposeful and avoidable tragedy. If we are to talk about the conditions of human life and civilization, we should aspire to do one better than the example of your intellectually-honest historian, and affirm that we simply don't know, not that we could not have.
Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.
Could we handle a similar eruption these days? Should we be building more nuclear power stations as well as solar, because if this happens, solar even with batteries is going to be useless?
"By June 24 – The Black Death pandemic has reached England,[1] having probably been brought across the English Channel by fleas on rats aboard a ship from Gascony to the south coast port of Melcombe (modern-day Weymouth, Dorset);[2][3] by November it will have reached London and by 1350 will have killed one third to a half of its population."
It wasn't until the 1800s that hand washing was tied to health (Semmelweis). The 1300s would have been a filthy, filthy existence it's not a great surprise the plague spread like wildfire (past its initial vector). Basic hygiene has helped humanity massively.
> Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough
That is how you die, regardless of events it's ultimately brain death due to lack of oxygen to the brain - pray your heart stops one day (everything else is worse).
> Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough
I know you were making a reference to c19. Yes, being kept in solitary confinement while you suffocate to death by order of the state would be a miserable way to go (tax extracted and left in an "exit room").
Here in NZ the state forced an elderly man to watch from the roadside as his wife was buried but politicians were allowed to go swimming during the same lock down... Disgusting.
Plague of Justinian is assumed to be related, as it spread through crop-failure-driven migrations across a population already weakened by famine. There's a reason the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are depicted as riding together: famine, war, plague, and death usually accompany each other.
How interesting that a bunch of tech nutcases now want to geoengineer the planet by dispersing sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the sun to 'tackle' climate change. Mind-blowing stupidity.
Maybe so, but please don't fulminate or call names on HN. You may not owe tech nutcases better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I apologise. In my defence, it's only geo-engineering which gets me so riled up. But of course you're right, and I should, and will, tone it down completely.
(I'm not sure I have been guilty of 'fulmination' though :) )
The climate change we have right now has been caused by geoengineering too -- accidental geoengineering.
Intentional, careful geoengineering is the only real chance we have of holding back climate change. Human societies simply will not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to roll back climate change solely by reducing emissions.
A combination of politically acceptable emission cuts, geoengineering, and acceptance of/adaptation to higher temperatures and their consequences is the only possible outcome in the real world. So hold back on the knee-jerk reactions to geoengineering and take it seriously.
Nobody knows. Which is why it's colossally reckless to propose anything around this as a guaranteed solution, instead of a proposal that needs more research.
This is irrational pearl clutching. If sulfur is added, it will be done gradually, with the results monitored. There would not be some sort of catastrophic cooling.
The real sticking point would be that some countries would not want the cooling. Russia, say.
So let me get this straight: in the face of a failure to control global warming by other means, you'd prefer your anxiety about possible risks to prevent any attempt to counter the warming by this approach, dooming the world to potentially catastrophic temperature increases?
We have natural experiments where sulfur aerosols were injected. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for example. It injected 17 megatonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, causing a global cooling of 0.4 C and a northern hemisphere cooling of 0.5-0.6 C. This also affected ozone, which suggests aerosols other than sulfuric acid droplets might be a better idea.
Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments)
Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments)
536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments)
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)
Others?