“Dear newspaper, he was freezing outside today …” If someone today wrote that in his diary, it may seem a line innocuous enough, perhaps never carefully considered again. But what would happen if, within 500 years, the scientists used that entry about the climate to respond climate mysteries?
The researchers who look at the past have done exactly that, combing through newspapers and other old documents to reconstruct the Transylvania climate of the 16th century, part of modern Romania. What they found offer a look at How a cooling period called Little Ice Age may have affected people In the region, the team reports February 12 in Climate borders.
Prior pollen studies, sediments and other materials have been used to rebuild past climate change. But “what we wanted to do is focus on how people at that time felt the climate,” says Tudor Caciora, a climatic of the University of Orada in Romania.
The Little Ice Age was a climate event of centuries that led to colder temperatures from the fourteenth to the mid -nineteenth century, with studies that suggest that the average temperatures in Europe fell into 0.5 degrees Celsius after 1560. Several studies have tracked the effects of the effects of the effects of the effects of the effects of the effects of the effects of the effects. Phenomenon in Western Europe, but researchers have fought to collect information about the event in Eastern Europe.
Then, the amplitude of the records maintained by the people living in Transylvania of the 16th century presented an opportunity. Caciora and his colleagues reviewed newspapers, chronicles and other records of the 1500 to search for local climatic clues.
The documents were handwritten in different languages, including Hungarian, Turks and Latinos. Finding keywords like “warm climate” was not an option, since the team discovered that people often wrote about the weather differently. A passage that describes the effects of heavy rains during a siege, for example, said “a large river flowed through the city, which increased every day and did not allow the passage even for several hours.” The researchers had to read documents in their entirety, even if there were scarce climate mentions within them.
The documents paint an image of a 16th -century Transylvania that was marked by heat and droughts in the first half of the century, followed by an increased rainfall. The researchers also found vivid written stories that indicate how the weather may have affected people by influencing calamities such as famine, lobsters and diseases.
One describes a famine in the summer of 1534 caused by an intense drought. People were “losing their minds for hunger,” turning to eat herbs, trees cortex and carr. It was described that the skeletal bodies had the remains of grass in the mouth.
The warm climate recorded throughout the century led the team to suggest that the small ice age may have been delayed in the region compared to Western Europe.
Beyond providing a better understanding of how small ice age may have affected people in the past, research such as Caciora can presage how extreme events could affect people who experience climate change in the future.
“Imagine what happens when we have a similar event in a climate that is already warmer in 2 degrees on average,” says Ulrich Foelsche, a climate scientist at the University of Graz in Austria who did not participate in the study. “These studies of past climates are especially important to understand the variability of the climate and the extremes, to know better what could be arising in the future.”
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