“Dear diary, it was frozen outside today…” If someone wrote it in their diary today, it might look like a harmless line. But what if 500 years from now, scientists use that entry on the weather to answer the mystery of climate?
Researchers looking at the past have done it to look at diaries and other old documents to reconstruct the climate of 16th century Transylvania, part of modern Romania. You can get a glimpse of what they find The cooling period known as Little Ice Age may have affected people In the region, the team reported on February 12th Climate frontier.
Previous studies of pollen, sediments and other materials have been used to reconstruct past climate change. But “What we wanted to do is focus on how people felt at the time,” says Tudor Caciola, a climatologist at Oradea University in Romania.
The small ice age was a centuries-long climate event where temperatures dropped from the 14th to the mid-19th century, suggesting that the average temperature in Europe has dropped by 0.5 degrees since 1560. Although it is a Western European phenomenon, researchers have a hard time gathering information about events in Eastern Europe.
Thus, the width of records maintained by those living in Transylvania in the 16th century presented opportunities. Caciora and his colleagues looked into diaries, chronicles and other records from the 1500s in search of clues about the local climate.
The documents were handwritten in a variety of languages, including Hungarian, Turkish and Latin. Searching for keywords like “hot climate” was not an option as the team discovered people often write about the weather in a clear way. For example, the passage explaining the effects of heavy rain during the siege read, “a large river flowing through the city, swelling every day, and not allowing passages for hours.” Researchers had to read the entire document, even if there were sparse references to the weather in it.
This document paints a picture of Transylvania in the 16th century, marked by heat and drought in the first half of the century, followed by increased rainfall. Researchers also came across vivid written explanations showing how climate has affected people by affecting calamities such as hunger, locusts and disease.
It describes the hunger in the summer of 1534 caused by a severe drought. People were “losing their hearts due to hunger,” relying on eating herbs, bark and carrion. The skeletal corpses were described as having grass relics in their mouths.
Warm weather recorded during the century suggests that the team may have been delayed in the region compared to Western Europe.
Not only does it provide a better understanding of how small ice ages have affected people in the past, but studies like Caciora say how extreme events are experiencing climate change in the future It may predict whether it will affect the
“Imagine what happens when there is a similar event in an average of two degrees warmer climate,” says Ulrich, a climate scientist at Glaz University in Austria, who was not involved in the study. Forsche says. “These studies of past climates are especially important to understand climate and extreme variability and to better understand what will happen in the future.”
