Has Climate Changed the Fate of Great Empires -New Research Says "Yes"

The decline of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes.

Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.
 

The researchers, led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geology graduate student Ian Orland and professor John Valley, reconstructed the high-resolution climate record based on geochemical analysis of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave, located in the Stalactite Cave Nature Reserve near Jerusalem.

"It looks sort of like tree rings in cross-section. You have many concentric rings and you can analyze across these rings, but instead of looking at the ring widths, we're looking at the geochemical composition of each ring," says Orland.

Using oxygen isotope signatures and impurities — such as organic matter flushed into the cave by surface rain — trapped in the layered mineral deposits, Orland determined annual rainfall levels for the years the stalagmite was growing, from approximately 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D.

While cave formations have previously been used as climate indicators, past analysis has relied on relatively crude sampling tools, typically small dental drills, which required averaging across 10 or even 100 years at a time. The current analysis used an advanced ion microprobe in the Wisconsin Secondary-Ion Mass-Spectrometer (Wisc-SIMS) laboratory to sample spots just one-hundredth of a millimeter across. That represents about 100 times sharper detail than previous methods. With such fine resolution, the scientists were able to discriminate weather patterns from individual years and seasons.

Their detailed climate record shows that the Eastern Mediterranean became drier between 100 A.D. and 700 A.D., a time when Roman and Byzantine power in the region waned, including steep drops in precipitation around 100 A.D. and 400 A.D. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," Valley says. "These things were certainly going on at the time that those historic changes occurred."

The team is now applying the same techniques to older samples from the same cave. "One period of interest is the last glacial termination, around 19,000 years ago — the most recent period in Earth's history when the whole globe experienced a warming of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius," Orland says.

Formations from this period of rapid change may help them better understand how weather patterns respond to quickly warming temperatures.

Soreq Cave — at least 185,000 years old and still active — also offers the hope of creating a high-resolution long-term climate change record to parallel those generated from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores.

"No one knows what happened on the continents… At the poles, the climate might have been quite different," says Valley. "This is a record of what was going on in a very different part of the world."

Posted by Casey Kazan from materials from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Comments

[Nisho]

How can you write again and againt "both Roman and Byzantine" when they're the same one?
The Byzantine empire is the name historians call the Eastern Roman Empire from three argued points in it's history.

[claudio]

Dear Nisho, You are somewhat right....'somewhat' however.
The Byzantine empire (Costantinopoli = actual Istambul) was a spin off of western empire of Roma.
But soon after the spin off the two empires split in a remarkable manner and never in the History they had a war as allies versus common enemies and there were quite few issue between the two empires.

Regarding the article that infers that climatic changes may have affected the life and collapse of the Roman empire...that may be a contributing element...
However the Roman History analysts support and maintain that the Roman empire was based and expanded on the Taxes they got from the conquered regions.
At the border of the empire they started to find more and more difficult to cash from the local invaded population the taxes they needed to maintain their presence and armies and legions there.

Example ?? The Adrian wall in England: costed a fortune to be built and in addition the romans could not keep armies there as the taxes they collected were negligible and inadequate.

In addition they had issues with northern barbarian populations...continuous fights...need of new legions ..: WHO was paying for the new legions ???
NOBODY.

They had to leave while the remnants of the wall are still there.

Good theory on climate having influenced to some extent the history...good theories.

Regards

[democratsarefascists]

I just got off the phone with Algore, and he's confirmed that this was anthropoidal global warming, caused by the demon known as the internal combustion engine.

He hasn't worked out the timeslip emboitment that caused it, but with enough taxpayer funding, he says he can.