I would like to see
more detail regarding the constituents of this dust. We may have a much better signature than
suggested so far.
In the meantime we can
conjecture an atmospheric explosion that filled the upper atmosphere with fine
dust for several years. This could explain
the temperature drop. It may also
explain the advent of a new infectious agency that ripped through the Roman
Empire and severely depopulated it and led to collapse.
I had been looking for
a terrestrial cause but that has proven elusive. Finding dust and tropical ocean dust in the
ice core is suggestive and a comet impact which would explode incoming while
still landing portions is exactly what we expect. Recall Tunguska.
The impact must then
have been in the Pacific allowing it to be not observed. Yet a global noise
event should have been recorded.
Why Halley's Comet May
Be Linked to Famine 1,500 Years Ago
By Mike Wall, Senior
Writer | December 18, 2013 07:53am ET
SAN FRANCISCO —
The ancients had ample reason to view comets as harbingers of doom, it would
appear.
A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536,
blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably,
a new study suggests. This dramatic
climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world, which may have
made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D.
541-542 — the first recorded emergence of the Black Death in Europe.
The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and
540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this
seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth.
"I have all this extraterrestrial
stuff in my ice core," study leader Dallas Abbott, of Columbia
University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told LiveScience here last week
at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Certain characteristics, such as high
levels of tin, identify a comet as the origin of the alien dust, Abbott said.
And the stuff was deposited during the Northern Hemisphere spring, suggesting
that it came from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower — material shed by Halley's
comet that Earth plows through every April-May.
The Eta Aquarid dust may be responsible for
a period of mild cooling in 533, Abbott said, but it alone cannot explain
the global dimming event of 536-537, during which the planet may have cooled by
as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). For that, something
more dramatic is required.
Ice core data record evidence of a volcanic
eruption in 536, but it
almost certainly wasn't big enough to change the climate so dramatically,
Abbott said.
"There was, I think, a small volcanic
effect," she said. "But I think the major thing is that something
hit the ocean."
She and her colleagues have found
circumstantial evidence of such an impact. The Greenland ice cores contain
fossils of tiny tropical marine organisms — specifically, certain species of
diatoms and silicoflagellates.
An extraterrestrial impact in the tropical
ocean likely blasted these little low-latitude organisms all the way to chilly
Greenland, researchers said. And Abbott believes the object responsible was
once a piece of Halley's comet.
Halley zooms by Earth once every 76 years
or so. It appeared in Earth's skies in A.D. 530 and was astonishingly bright at
the time, Abbott said. (In fact, observations of Halley's comet go way back,
with research suggesting the ancient Greeks saw the comet streaking across their skies in 466 B.C.)
"Of the two brightest apparitions of
Comet Halley, one of them is in 530," Abbott said. "Comets are
normally these dirty snowballs, but when they're breaking up or they're
shedding lots of debris, then that outer layer of dark stuff goes away, and so
the comet looks brighter."
It's unclear where exactly the putative
comet chunk hit Earth or how big it was, she added. However, a 2004 study
estimated that a comet fragment just 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide could have
caused the 536-537 cooling event if it exploded in the atmosphere and its
constituent dust were spread evenly around the globe.
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