Posted on 01/12/2003 11:28:32 AM PST by blam
How weather brought down Mayan empire
Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday January 12, 2003
The Observer
Climate change is inevitable, unpredictable, and has been responsible for bringing down some of the world's greatest civilisations. Soon it may do the same to ours. That is the conclusion of researchers who have found that the Mayans - whose empire reached its peak around 700AD - were destroyed because central America was afflicted by a 200-year drought.
The discovery has been made by the American archaeologist Richardson Gill, who argues that the Mayans - famed for their massive stepped pyramids and astronomy - simply starved to death when their water supplies ran dry, a fate that has profound implications for the future of humanity.
Gill's research, based on studies of ice cores taken from glaciers in the Andes, is controversial. Many historians believe only cultural changes such as war, trade or rebellion affect the course of history and that people can always adapt to climate change. In the case of the Mayans, it is generally assumed they were destroyed by invaders.
Gill's work challenges this. 'I have seen with my own eyes the devastating effects of drought,' he says in Scientific American. Deprived of water, the Mayans could no longer grow crops and perished.
Gill and his contemporaries argue that humanity is much more vulnerable to weather changes than realised. Studies of tree rings and ice cores taken from glaciers have created a detailed pattern of climate fluctuations going back a thousand years. When matched against historical events, these have revealed startling correspondences.
The Vikings colonised Iceland, Greenland and North America at a time when Europe was enjoying warm weather. Then, around AD1300, the weather worsened and the Little Ice Age began, gripping the world until around 1880. Its worst periods coincided with the Irish potato famine, the destruction of the Spanish Armada, and the French Revolution, while the Viking settlements in America and Greenland were wiped out.
'The weather of 1788 didn't start the French Revolution,' historian Brian Fagan says, 'but the shortage of grain and bread contributed in large measure to its timing.' Similarly, it wasn't the navy that saved England from the Armada in 1588, it was the lousy weather.
Even small fluctuations have had an impact that still affects us, adds Fagan. For example, in 1816, summer temperatures fell to winter levels. Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley, stuck in Switzerland, had to entertain themselves. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was born in an atmosphere of dank climatic failure. Similarly, Charles Dickens's experiences of bitter winters influenced his stories, including A Christmas Carol, from which we still derive our snow-decked yuletide imagery.
The new research indicates even cultures in the tropics are vulnerable to climatic disruption.
'The reasons for the collapse of the Mayan civilisation have always been controversial,' bio-geographer Philip Stott says. 'But this indicates that drought was a critical factor, even though the Mayans were based in a part of the world considered to be hot and wet.
'And if the weather killed off the Mayans, what other great tropical civilisations might have suffered? The cause of the demise of Angkor, home of the great Khmer kings of Cambodia, has always puzzled historians. Drought may well have caused their collapse.'
If the world has been so vulnerable in the past, it is certainly at risk in future. With the world's population heading towards nine billion, and global temperatures rising, the danger is increasing.
'More than 200 million people now live in marginal lands - round the Sahara and in Bangladesh, for example,' Fagan adds. 'Another major fluctuation and the death toll could dwarf anything that has affected humanity before.'
Stott says: 'The fluctuations indicate the cold periods are the calamitous ones - which suggests all our fears about global warming may be misplaced.'
Did these scattered groups retain any of the Mayan culture? Centers of Roman civilization remained in the wake of its collapse and were transformed. Israel is another example of this. If Mayan civilization ended in this way, wouldn't there be a residue?
Accurate weather records only go back for no more than 200 years. Yet the earth is 4 billion years old?!?!. How can we possibly know the extent of climate changes? 200 years is only a blink of an eye in geological times.
It was a ( choose one )
Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy______
Vast, Left -Wing Conspiracy______
A Rosicrucian Conspiracy ______
An Environmentalist Plot ______
There was an exceptionally bad drought in what is now the North Carolina/Virginia part of the Mid=Atlantic that lasted from about the time Sir Walter Raleigh founded his colony until John Smith, et al, arrived. That drought was so bad that the Raleigh colony had to move away. It almost destroyed early Jamestown since the water in the James River had become saline all the way to the Spanish mission at Hopewell. The Powhatan Indians relocated up the Potomac to Great Falls where there was fresh water above the fall-line.
Now that's weather for you!
Something tells me that "Gill and his contemporaries" would argue would with just about anything/anyone who didn't agree with their (Green) believes.
The one-word answer is "geology". There is LOTS of data in the "past-historical" record for changes of climate. The problem has been getting it refined sufficiently so as to look at time-slices as SMALL as 200 years.
Of course, we can look directly at the RECORDED HISTORICAL record and find the time-period around 900-1300AD when the earth was significantly warmer than now--grapes growing in England, land clear and warm enough to farm in Greenland, etc. All the historical evidence (and now much geological and archeological evidence as well) indicate that this warmer period was a paradisical "boom period" for the human race.
Yup, 10,000 years worth and expanding. The tree ring data indicate five major worldwide effecting events in the last 10k years, they are: 3195BC, 2354BC, 1628BC, 1159BC and 540AD(Dark Ages), there were smaller events at 207BC and 44BC. All but the 540AD event are also recorded in the Ice Core data, acid layers(volcanoes). Some speculate that the 540AD event was a comet fragment due to the lack of an acid layer in the Ice Core samples.
Very true. Another major factor overlooked in this discussion is the perpetual warfare that went on between Mayan rulers: the endless captive-takings, ritual sacrifices and depletions of treasuries. This was a huge factor in the demise of the "high" Mayan culture but Mayan descendants are everywhere in the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, etc.
Also not mentioned is that for some reason many large Mayan cities like Caracol depended mainly on stored runoff water kept in small reservoirs hacked out of the native limestone. This storage simply wasn't sufficient to sustain a large urban population through any prolonged drought. Exhausted by warfare and with only a slim water surplus on hand, Maya civilization was already in big trouble when the drought came.
Yup. Santorini/Akatori/Thera....I happen to believe it also provided the fireworks for The Exodus. The ash from this explosion has been found all over Egypt, the ruins of Jerico lie just above this layer and the plume could have been seen in Egypt if it were thirty miles high.("Staff by day, torch by night")
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