Did the Black Death flow from a volcanic eruption?

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":8.18,"text":"The writer is a science commentator"}],[{"start":12.02,"text":"The fall of one domino can produce a cascade of tumbling pieces. On a planetary scale, geohazards like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can potentially set in train sequences of physical, social and political upheaval."}],[{"start":30.62,"text":"That might be the story behind the Black Death, the wave of bubonic plague that hit medieval Europe and killed up to half its population. According to new research, the 14th-century pandemic could be rooted in a series of volcanic eruptions that cooled the climate. This caused crops to fail, prompting Italian city-states like Venice to import grain from further afield. "}],[{"start":59.17,"text":"Those imports, from across the Black Sea, also included fleas carrying Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. On arrival, the disease swept through a population weakened by malnutrition. "}],[{"start":76.02000000000001,"text":"That devastating episode makes visible a profound interconnectedness between the environment and societal flourishing, linking natural hazards, climate, food supply, politics, trade and disease. The research, recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, also highlights how quickly environmental change can destabilise societies. The message is clear: when lava flows, empires can fall. Leaders ignore nature at their peril.  "}],[{"start":117.01000000000002,"text":"To investigate how and why the bubonic plague spread so rapidly after 1347, Martin Bauch, a historian of medieval climate at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, teamed up with Ulf Büntgen, a Cambridge university geographer. Tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees, they found, showed evidence of something unusual: three consecutive years, starting in 1345, of anomalously cold and wet summers. "}],[{"start":152.25000000000003,"text":"The researchers also studied ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, which contain geochemical signatures of eruptions in the form of sulphate concentrations (deposited from volcanic sulphur dioxide belched into the atmosphere). They found a sulphate spike in 1345, with evidence of more modest eruptions in 1329, 1336 and 1341. "}],[{"start":183.65000000000003,"text":"Chronicles around 1346 and 1347 record food shortages and famine in parts of Spain, France, Italy, Egypt and the Levant. Italian grape harvests failed; cereal and wheat prices soared."}],[{"start":201.83000000000004,"text":"In 1347, meanwhile, Genoa and Venice eased hostilities with the Mongols of the Golden Horde to lubricate grain trading routes across the Black Sea. Cruelly, this plan traded starvation for the Black Death, with the disease arriving as grain embargoes were lifted. Italian trade ships loaded with grain returned to home shores in the second half of 1347, with the first human plague cases in Venice reported soon after. The circumstantial evidence linking trading routes and outbreaks is persuasive: the resumption in March 1348 of Venetian grain exports to Padua coincided with a plague outbreak there."}],[{"start":255.02000000000004,"text":"The researchers conclude that the sequence of eruptions, climate downturn and subsequent food shortages “can provide a mechanistic explanation for the synchronised onset of the second plague pandemic in many major Italian sea ports in 1347 CE”."}],[{"start":275.42,"text":"Oxford university historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed, which explores how a changing climate has shaped the rise and fall of civilisations, describes the research as “very exciting stuff”. The evidence of a 1345 eruption, he tells me, “is the smoking gun many of us have been looking for”. The pattern echoes the multiple 6th-century eruptions thought to have triggered the Justinianic Plague (the first recorded pandemic of bubonic plague)."}],[{"start":315.20000000000005,"text":"By some accounts, there is a one-in-six chance of a major eruption this century. Frankopan and several volcanologists have been trying, unsuccessfully, to win funding to study the implications of such an event on the global economy and international security, as well as on biodiversity and climate. Research like that conducted by Bauch and Büntgen should not be seen solely as fascinating historical anecdote, the historian warned, but also as “clarion calls for the sorts of ways that history can offer important insights for the present and future”. "}],[{"start":355.38000000000005,"text":"The past indeed holds lessons for today. The Black Death tarnished the rulers of the Golden Horde; it is not complicated to imagine how the Justinianic plague weakened the Byzantine Empire. An Icelandic eruption is a suspected trigger, via food shortages, of the French Revolution. "}],[{"start":375.4200000000001,"text":"When nature goes rogue, the social and political aftershocks can reverberate for centuries."}],[{"start":392.40000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1765753979_8068.mp3"}