The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when".

Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).

It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

I know this is pedantic, but based on the order of events in the article wouldn’t 543 be the worst year to be alive? By then you would have experienced the cumulative horror of starving and freezing through two volcanic events and watching a third to half of your friends and family die of plague. 536 would have a been frightening and confusing as the volcanic fog began to roll in, but you couldn’t know the terror of what was to come.

How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption?

After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months?

Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/forecast.html) How often do geologists cry wolf?

I’ve recently gotten through this period in the “History of Byzantium” podcast series. Justinian had just recently retaken many of the old western Roman provinces, not least of which was Rome itself, and the breadbasket of North Africa. Things were finally looking good for the Romans again when the plague hit. The armies were unfortunately overextended and now half their ranks were dead or dying. It was an irresistible target for the Persians, the steppe horsemen and the Goths which ultimately weakened them all just in time for the Arab invasions.

I don't mean to be too precise, but the article is slightly undermined by the claim in the graphic that the 543 Justinian plague hurried the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The 'Eastern' Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the walls of Constantinople were breached by the Ottomans. Very difficult to claim that the Romans fell in the 6th Century. I mean nearly 500 years later Basil is rolling back into Syria on the back of repeated victories over the Bulgarians. Always feel let down by these sorts of overblown claims that are easy to slap into an info-graphic.

Two things strike me as odd in this article:

> 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months

I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1].

> 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.

The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size.

1: https://kvennabladid.is/2018/11/20/ekkert-bendir-til-ad-risa... (Icelandic)

While an 18-month fog sounds terrifying, I'm absolutely fascinated by the amount of clues we can gather from geological formations like glaciers. The universe has encoded information in so many neat ways, and our ability to cross-reference these measurements with written histories is pretty cool.

Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)

The worst year to be alive _so far_

Not just the worst year to be alive, but also the beginning of the worst century to be alive:

"The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640."

Imagine the kind of horror and suffering that a century of global economic stagnation inflicts on generations of people.

These kinds of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions could happen today right?

What's.......our intended process for dealing with this?

Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere?

I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.

Hmm, you know you feel lucky to live in the present when a sign of coming out of the worst time in history was a rise in "airborne lead".

How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.

Could we use this against global warming? Artificially put something in the atmosphere that bounces part of the sunlight back?

> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Hastening its collapse several centuries later?

And this is why we, as a species, need to embrace science and technology, and engineer solutions to ensure our survival and prosperity.

We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.

"What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says."

Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?

From 536 through the end of the Justinian plague in 543... what level of mortality are we talking about?

The article indicates that the plague killed 35%–55% of the population.

Don't disagree with the facts but the suffering of humans depends as much on the content of their thoughts as it does on material conditions. A civilisation at the apparent height of its power and security can eat itself from the inside and decline rapidly. A wealthy individual living a privileged life can be beset by anxiety, and so on. Both of these things are strongly affected by the ideas that predominate in a given era. These include subtle ideas which can't readily be identified and which nevertheless spread and cause harm. So those ideas are a relevant part of the environment when considering which was the worst year so far.

Note, that after this period (536-600), there were huge swaths of Europe that was depopulated, and or decimated, and this enabled major migration movements...

Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas....

So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events....

I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history....

The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....

Reminds me of the year without a summer[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Since this article, there has been new research indicating that the Plague of Justinian may not have been as bad as previously thought.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/12/02/maybe-first-plague...

It's interesting to imagine that the ramifications of this were still felt in the 620s when Mohamed united the Arab tribes and he and his successors pretty much overran the Byzantine and Persian empires.

Obvious, yet still interesting to imagine IMO ... all of us here had ancestors who suffered and survived that year and we're all, in some way, a result of what they went through in 536.

Discussed, a little, at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891

> Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.

I couldn't help but notice an ambiguity in the phrase

> Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C

While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536).

Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the graphic shows the years increasing downwards, where if you take this to graphically depict the ice core dug out of the ground, going down is decreasing in years (going back in time, earlier)? Things lower in depth were laid down earlier.

> Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years.

Yikes! What can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Oh, right, nevermind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535–...

Maybe not for Americans :) The eruption was hypothesized to have occurred in North America but did the team try to cross reference with native accounts of that time period?

What are the estimates for those volcanic eruptions on the volcanic explosivity index? Was it an VEI-8? If it wasn't, what would a VEI-8 eruption cause?

Good thing I wasn't alive in 536 then.

"Winter is coming"

Not for me it wasn't.

2020: “Hold my beer”

The Christian revolution around that time in Europe also put civilisation back there. See “The Darkening Age” by Catherine Nixey

I noticed there are a number of popups/stickies/banners on this site. How do folks feel about blocking them with uBlock considering it's a nonprofit, and one of those banners was asking for a donation?

The page in incognito: https://i.imgur.com/EHhGjJ9.png

The page with uBlock, sticky elements removed, and the sidebar removed: https://i.imgur.com/mNJFMyj.png