Word: droughts
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...volcano and a drought destroy the world's first empire...
...mystery may have been solved by researchers from the U.S. and France. In last week's Science, they put forth evidence that the empire was undone by a combination of climatic catastrophes. First a volcanic eruption blanketed the region in ash. Then a drought, which eventually lasted 300 years, crippled the farming communities on which the cities depended, forcing urban dwellers to abandon their empty granaries and silent temples. Refugees migrated to southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), which had escaped the disaster. But the unexpected influx of people from the north so strained the region's resources that the Akkadian empire...
According to legend, the Mesopotamians blamed their woes on Sargon's grandson, whose hubris had supposedly angered the gods. But the American and French researchers, led by Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss, offer a more scientific, if no less surprising, explanation. They believe the drought was part of a major shift in weather patterns that affected the climate in many different areas of the globe 4,000 years ago. From Egypt to the Aegean to India, rainfall diminished and temperatures dropped. "This is opposite to what you might expect from global warming," explains George Kukla, senior research scientist at the Lamont...
...inch thick, underneath 8 to 20 inches of silt. The layers showed no evidence of having been disturbed by earthworms and also showed patterns characteristic of soil that has settled after a dust storm. It looked like a volcano had erupted, perhaps in nearby Turkey, and a long drought had followed...
...volcano cause the ancient drought? "That's unlikely," Weiss says. "Volcanos are not known to generate climatic changes of this duration or intensity." So, with one mystery solved, researchers find themselves trying to explain how a drought can persist for three centuries. At least one thing seems certain. The ancient Mesopotamians did not cause the heavens to dry up. That raises the ominous possibility that it could happen again. And that modern humanity, by dumping pollutants into the atmosphere, is tinkering with a climatic system more complex and random than humans have realized...