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536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

sciencemag.org

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Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#21

Post by castis »

deanCommie wrote: post #10

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.

one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans.

in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#22

Post by yesco »

umaar wrote: post #18

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

Personally I find them obnoxious, if they weren't glued to the bottom of the screen it'd be better. In fact if they weren't already being blocked by ublock I would have immediately added them to my filter list manually.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#23

Post by SllX »

deanCommie wrote: post #10

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, well we saw something like it recently and it mostly just stranded people in Europe from what I recall. Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland about 10 years ago and there wasn’t anything we could do but wait it out, and it was a lot less severe than what’s described in this article.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#24

Post by mc32 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #19
deanCommie wrote: post #10

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.

> Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere? Seems like the dispersal of the ash is the problem, and you'd want to be collecting it.

That would be quite the challenge since fine silica and other particles would foul just about any kind of machinery.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#25

Post by thaumasiotes »

anonAndOn wrote: post #9
jandrese wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.

Doesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.

Having a writing system and using it to record history are surprisingly independent. For example, in ancient India they wrote all kinds of stuff down, but virtually none of it is history. Most of what we know about the history of India comes from the records of other peoples who came into contact with the Indians.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#26

Post by yorwba »

anonAndOn wrote: post #9
jandrese wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.

Doesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.

Writing developed in America long before Europeans showed up and continued to be used until Europeans showed up, but the Europeans destroyed most books they could find and forced the natives to learn the colonizers' languages. That's the main cause why so many native languages are dying/extinct.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#27

Post by chrisco255 »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #17

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: h…

Forecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination.

One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic eruptions is: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano_news.html . It provides real-time updates on volcano advisories.

I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#30

Post by michaelmrose »

vkou wrote: post #3
danharaj wrote: post #2

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?

Given that ~90% of native Americans were killed over the first decades of European contact by smallpox, measles, and war, it's entirely possible that there had been a worse year for them.

This is an interesting point context matters.
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