Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands.
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Chaos and conflict roiled the Mediterranean in the first century B.C. Against a backdrop of famine, disease and the assassinations of Julius Caesar and other political leaders, the Roman Republic collapsed, and the Roman Empire rose in its place. Tumultuous social unrest no doubt contributed to that transition — politics can unhinge a society. But so can something arguably more powerful.
Scientists on Monday announced evidence that a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.
In recent years, geoscientists, historians and archaeologists have joined forces to investigate the societal impacts of large volcanic eruptions. They rely on an amalgam of records — including ice cores, historical chronicles and climate modeling — to pinpoint how volcanism affected civilizations ranging from the Roman Republic to Ptolemaic Egypt to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
There's nuance to this kind of work, said Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University who has studied the falls of Egyptian dynasties. "It's not 'a volcano erupts and a society goes to hell.'" But the challenge is worth it, he said. "We hope in the end that we get better history out of it, but also a better understanding of what's happening to the Earth right now
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Roughly 1,500 volcanoes are potentially active right now, meaning that they've erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. While scientists today have sophisticated tools to monitor volcanoes, the vast majority of historical eruptions have gone unrecorded, at least by modern scientific instruments. Sussing out those eruptions requires patience and ingenuity, and a willingness to manage a lot of ice.
At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it's not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit "cold room." Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.
