Unfortunately for Cleopatra, Mount Okmok erupted at a time when her regime was politically vulnerable. In years of good flood, Egypt was the wealthiest grain-bearing land in the world.īy contrast, prolonged poor summer flooding on the Nile was associated with famines, riots, disease outbreaks, reactive tax and trade policies, and food price spikes, often contemporaneous with large-scale organized revolts, according to our peer-reviewed research. The information was communicated throughout the region so that planting could be synchronized with the timing and magnitude of the coming flood. So important was the flood that a large measuring device called a Nilometer was constructed to track the water’s height along the river. When people in the region speak of the Nile today, they bring their fist to their heart, indicating the incalculable importance of its water for the existence of life in the desert.īefore the Aswan and other dams were built in the 19th and 20th centuries, the regular summer flooding of the Nile River made farming possible, and civilization flourished along its banks. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story. The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Italy endured severe cold summers that disrupted agriculture and military campaigns.Īnd in Egypt, the Nile failed to flood for several years in a row. Tree ring records from the White Mountains of California mark the decade between 43 and 33 BCE as the second-coldest in the Northern Hemisphere in human history. It produced a sudden and massive drop in global temperatures that persisted for a decade. It was the largest eruption in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,500 years. In one of the most remote places on Earth, the Aleutian Island chain in the north Pacific Ocean, in the winter of 43 BCE, Mount Okmok erupted. Our work is revealing how a single event occurring at a specific location can trigger a powerful cascade of changes that can unravel across continents and seas – affecting not only plants and animals, but also the social, political, and economic dynamics of human societies. We are part of an interdisciplinary research team that is detailing the fingerprints of that eruption, which set a series of global climate changes in motion during the first century BCE, one of the most critical political transition periods in the history of Western civilization. Cleopatra wouldn’t have seen the clouds of ash darken the sky from her throne in Alexandria, but the effects of the eruption of an Alaskan volcano rippled through Egypt and the rest of the ancient world in 43 BCE.
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