Ever warmer waters could eliminate chance to prepare for protection against bleaching

Heat may outpace corals’ ability to cope






By Sarah Schwartz

WHITEOUT When waters get too hot too quickly, corals can bleach, losing their symbiotic (and colorful) bacteria. Periods of less intense heating, followed by cooling, often help corals prepare for and withstand temperature surges — but such prep time might soon disappear, a new study suggests.

Corals are in hot water — and may soon lose their ability to handle the heat.

In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, most past bouts of warming allowed many corals to adjust their physiology and avoid serious damage. But as waters warm even more, corals could run out of wiggle room, researchers report in the April 15 Science.

“One of the things that we have been striving for is trying to figure out the rate and limit of … physiological adjustments that corals have, how far you can push them,” says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University, who was not involved with the study. Corals may not be able to cope with much more ocean warming, Palumbi says. “I would take this paper as being the first real indication that we have half a degree at most.”

If water temperatures surge quickly, corals may bleach, losing the bacterial residents that provide them with nutrients and oxygen (and color). But if waters warm slightly — less than the roughly 2 degrees Celsius above average heat spike where bleaching begins — and then cool for a brief time before heating up to a greater extent, corals are better prepared to survive the heat. In the lab, corals exposed to this two-step heating process experienced less bleaching and less cell death than corals suffering a high initial heat wave, the researchers found.

“We liken it to the idea of training for a marathon,” says study coauthor Scott Heron, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch in College Park, Md. “If they have a little bit of exposure, and then the recovery period after that … they’re better prepared for the race when it comes.”

From 1985 to 2011, around 75 percent of warming events on Great Barrier Reef sites occurred in this stepwise fashion, probably allowing corals to steel themselves and survive warmer waters. But with climate models predicting a 2-degree increase in sea temperatures by the end of the century, warming events could soon push corals past their bleaching point with no chance to prepare.

Computer simulations predicted that as waters grow warmer, reef heat waves will increase overall. But the fraction of such events that could condition corals to withstand bleaching will fall from 75 percent to 22 percent, the team reports. Most reefs that have experienced preconditioning in the past will start losing the ability to prepare when water temperatures increase by 0.5 degrees, the team predicts. Warming trends suggest that the added half degree should appear within 40 years. “If that protective mechanism does get lost going into the future, then what we’ve seen so far as being bad impacts could become worse,” Heron says.For now, preparation may help some corals survive in warming seas, but reduced carbon emissions will also be required to sustain coral cover throughout the century, the team’s data suggest. Palumbi says these predictions are very important. “If we get a handle on emissions, there are substantial predicted differences in the way that coral populations live in the future,” he says. “We are still in a position to choose how the future of coral reefs works out

Orchestral Musicians Bring Whales To Surface – This Will Take Your Breath Away

Optus, the second largest telecommunications company in Australia, has a long association with nature so M&C Saatchi, Sydney set about exploring communication between humans and animals, specifically Humpback whales.

“Whale song is a form of communication,” says Ben Welsh, executive creative director, M&C Saatchi Sydney. “It’s a form of communication that the scientists at The University of Queensland have been able to decipher and learn. I was intrigued by this fact and so we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to emulate a male humpback: to write our own love song and then play it, using the instruments of an orchestra? Could we serenade a humpback ourselves? Then imagine what could happened if the whales were to hear our song. We thought that would prove that when it comes to communication, anything is possible.”

US Beekeepers Lost 40% Of Bees Last Year Alone

by Josh L Davis
Photo credit: Pakhnushchy/Shutterstock

 
Honey bees are critical not just to the ecosystem, but to our agricultural business. It’s thought that they contribute an estimated $10 billion annually to the economy through pollinating crops. But the plight of the honey bee is in a dire state. Over the past few decades, the number of honey bees has declined by a shocking 60% in the United States alone.

Unfortunately, the preliminary results from a new report of American honey bee survival rates brings more bad news. Beekeepers across the U.S. saw a further loss of over two-fifths (42%) of their honey bee colonies during the past year. What’s more, the greatest loss was—to the surprise of the researchers—over summer. This is in stark contrast to what is normally expected, with the greatest number of losses usually occuring during winter, and could be a worrying new trend.

The study, conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, surveyed over 6,000 commercial and small-scale beekeepers, asking them about the state of their colonies over the past year. They found that whilst there was a modest increase in survival of colonies over the winter when compared with the year before, the survival rates over the summer took a troubling turn.

“We traditionally thought of winter losses as a more important indicator of health, because surviving the cold winter months is a crucial test for any bee colony,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, project director for the Bee Informed Partnership. “But we now know that summer loss rates are significant too. This is especially so for commercial beekeepers, who are now losing more colonies in the summertime compared to the winter. Years ago, this was unheard of.”

The survey results covered an estimated 14% of the country’s managed bee colonies. What they found was a drop in losses over winter compared to last year, but this was negated by a huge increase in losses over summer, growing from 19.8% to 27.4%. Interestingly, the losses for commercial and small-scale beekeepers did not follow the same pattern. Commercial keepers took a greater hit during the summer months, whereas the small-scale keepers saw greater losses over winter.

Whilst the researchers think that the deadly varroa mite (Varroa destructor) is to blame for the colony declines of the small-scale keepers, they are at a loss to explain what is causing the decline of the commercial keepers' colonies. “Commercial keepers were particularly prone to summer losses. But they typically take more aggressive action against varroa mites, so there must be other factors at play,” explained vanEngelsdorp.

This is the ninth year they have surveyed the winter colony survival rates, and the fifth year they've looked at summer survival, but the authors say that these results highlight the importance of continuing to collect these long-term data sets. It also adds to the growing concern surrounding the health decline of honey bee colonies, not just in the United States, but the world over.

Scientists Identify Genetic Difference Between Early Risers And Late Sleepers

by Josh L Davis
Photo credit: Illarionva/shutterstock

Do you prefer getting up at dawn, or staying awake to the small hours? 

Your answer to this probably depends on your age, but as is becoming increasingly clear, it also depends on your genes. Being an early riser or a late nighter has been seen to run in families and shows a strong genetic link. And now, researchers have started to unravel the underlying causes that make you either a “lark” or an “owl.”

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, used fruit flies to look into the genetic variations that could play a role in determining whether an individual falls into either of these distinct categories. These model organisms have a very similar ‘genetic clock’ to humans, so the researchers think that the genes that control it in them may serve a similar function in us. After scouring their genomes, they were able to identify close to 80 genes linked to the differences in behavior.

“Most people find that their performance is at peak at specific times of day,” explained Dr. Eran Tauber, one of the co-authors. “The impact of this preference on health and behavior is well documented, but the molecular basis is largely unknown.”

The team of researchers from the University of Leicester identified the two differences in the flies' behavioral preference, or chronotype, by observing at what point in the day they emerged from their pupal case. Most do this in the morning, but some come out later in the day. The fact that the researchers were then able to breed the late risers to produce more chronotypes like themselves indicated a genetic basis to the behavior.

From that, they then ran a DNA analysis on the flies during the 24 hours leading up to their emergence, and found that it wasn’t just the same genes being active at different times in both chronotypes, but that the genes themselves displayed differences.

As Tauber says, “looking at gene expression was only part of our research. An obvious question is what causes the different expression in the larks and owls. This difference is largely due to genetic variations in their DNA sequences - different gene versions that are present in larks and owls.”

This means that the molecular processes that contribute to the genetic clock in late risers is not merely delayed when compared to early birds, as was previously assumed, but entirely different. “Once a gene expression is delayed in Larks, a completely different cascade of molecular events is carried... The end point might be similar, but the different molecular routes result in a different journey time,” Tauber explains.

The research is of interest because, according to the authors, we are out of synch with our natural rhythms, and understanding how our genetic clock functions could help how we live and work. In the modern era, we have fallen into a system in which we work 9 to 5, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that this might not be the most productive or efficient structure for all workers.

Why Do Cats Love Boxes So Much?

by Stephen Luntz

 

And lo, it has come to pass: All those images of cats that power the Internet have been put to scientific use. Well not all kitten photos, but the ones of them squeezing into boxes that barely fit them. Like this:

Credit: Renata Apanaviciene/Shutterstock.

Or this:



Credit: Nataliya Kuznetsova/Shutterstock

Or this:

Big Cat Rescue

Veterinary scientists from the University of Utrecht have answered the question we have all be asking, “Will a hiding box provide stress reduction for shelter cats?” They provide their answer in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Spoiler warning: The answer is yes. In the authors' words, “The application of hiding boxes decreases stress in shelter cats, at least on the short term.”

As much fun as this research sounds, it has a serious purpose. “Domestic cats (Felis sylvestris catus) can experience serious stress in shelters,” the authors write. These not only make for unhappy cats, but also affect their immune systems, increasing outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The team led by Dr. Claudia Vinke randomly divided a sample of cats arriving at a shelter into a group that would be provided with a hiding box and one that would not. The behavior of the cats was observed over a fortnight and assessed using the Kessker and Turner Cat-Stress-Score (CSS). Yes, that's a thing.

By day 3, the cats with hiding boxes had lower CSS scores on average, as well as less variability. Some cats without boxes were just fine, but others showed signs of stress much greater than any of the box-provided cats. Stress levels for the cats without boxes fell with time, and by day 14, they caught up with the luckier members of their species.

The sample size of just 19 cats was small, but the paper concludes, “The hiding box appears to be an important enrichment for the cat to cope effectively with stressors in a new shelter environment the first weeks after arrival.” They hope to extend the work to longer term studies and to consider cats housed collectively.

Exactly why cats love boxes so much is a harder subject for scientific explanation, although Wired explores some theories, including that they like the warmth and that it is a way for a relatively solitary species to hide from social engagements.

The finding is already being put to use by one charitable organization, who are seeking donations to buy “Cat Castles” for shelter cats.

Now that you know you've actually been contributing to scientific awareness all this time, and maybe helping inspire some actual research, here are some more photos:

Credit: 26kot/Shuttersock



Credit: Dainis Derics/Shutterstock. It seems not everyone got the memo.

H/T Phys.org

How the Natural World has Helped Influence Culture and Society

by Justine Alford
Photo credit: Golden Birdwing Butterfly, courtesy of the Natural History Museum

Biophiles (lovers of life, to save you googling) around the world may relish the sights, smells and sounds that nature provides us, but many of us probably take for granted just how profoundly some aspects of the natural world have impacted our culture and society throughout history.

To showcase some of the weird and wonderful ways nature has influenced the human race, the London Natural History Museum has teamed up with BBC Radio 4 to produce a fantastical series for your learning pleasure. IFLScience has been picking at some of the museum’s brilliant brains to give you a snippet of some of the awesome examples to come, and here they are:

How Brambles Help Forensic Investigations

Starting off on a rather grim topic, but did you know that brambles, those prickly shrubs that bring to us delicious blackberries and raspberries, can be used to help murder enquiries or suspicious death cases? Yep. Provided, of course, that the body ends up outside, these scrambling vines can help determine how long it’s been there, as they have a tendency to “grow in areas where people do bad things to other people, like railway sides or shrub lands,” Dr. Mark Spencer, British and Irish Herbarium senior curator, told IFLScience.

“If, for example, someone is murdered or dies, and their remains aren’t discovered relatively quickly, they can be taken within the landscape quite quickly by plants.” And if the skeletal remains of the corpse are still there a few years on, brambles and other vegetation growing in the area can provide a useful calibrator to assess how long someone has been in the landscape, he adds. A more traditional way to identify a body, which could then help date it, would be to use dentition, but over time these can become damaged and sometimes teeth are absent altogether.

So how do scientists use these shrubs? Brambles are highly organized plants; on average, an individual plant will send out one or two arching vegetative growths annually, increasing the size and territory of the bramble. The following year, these stems will again produce side shoots, and it is this repetitive annual growth pattern that can help inform detectives of how long a body has been there. So if a body is underneath or interspersed among brambles, the interplay between the number of stems and the remains can serve as a useful indicator for scientists.

This cost-effective technique therefore helps the police narrow down dates, but it is not used in isolation. Rather, scientists will take information from whole plant communities—brambles just happen to be widespread in the UK.

Corepics VOF/ Shutterstock

Willy Wonka’s Never-Fading Paint, Thanks to Butterflies

Nature provides us with some awesome colors, from brilliant blues and fiery reds to emerald greens and passionate pinks. But not all of these are the result of pigments; some are the result of the interaction between light and microscopic surface nanostructures. These so-called structural colors tend to be brighter and more vivid than those that arise from pigmentation, and include the shimmering shades we see on butterfly wings and some bird feathers.

Agrus/ Shutterstock

Aside from the dazzling beauty structural coloration can create, why are scientists interested in it? Remarkably, the NHM’s Professor Andrew Parker tells IFLScience that some 50-million-year-old insects that display structural coloration have retained their iridescence, leading scientists to believe that if they can replicate it, they could produce colored products like paint that won’t fade.

“If you learn the principles behind nature’s colors you can start to produce any color you want—something bright, flashy, or even something that can change color depending on the angle you view it from,” said Parker.

To discover the secret behind the shimmering wings of butterflies, Parker’s team first took cells from the part of a chrysalis that goes on to become a wing and started culturing them in petri dishes. By observing how the scales form in the lab, the scientists can see how the tiny structures that produce color develop over time, with the overall goal of emulating that process. The end product would be tiny flakes, etched with structures that produce colors of desire, that will be mixed with a transparent medium.

Interestingly, the butterfly scales arise under ambient temperatures and low pressures, but when scientists try to make these dainty structures themselves, high temperatures and pressures are required. However, if scientists can pinpoint the suite of conditions that cells require in nature, then they may be able to run the process without the need for huge amounts of energy, or the toxic mix of chemicals usually required to produce paint. And as an added bonus, paint made using this technique would also biodegrade faster than traditional paints, Parker says.

Nikola Rahme/ Shutterstock

How Insects Have Influenced Technology

It’s not just butterflies that scientists are keen to learn from; a tiny, humble-looking beetle found scurrying across southern Africa’s parched Namib Desert is helping scientists provide water to communities in need.

Although a moist fog blows across this desert’s sandy dunes, the tiny water droplets contained within aren’t heavy enough to fall to the ground as rain, thus most thirsty animals won’t benefit from it. But the Namib beetle sports a unique, bumpy shell with both hydrophobic (water-hating) and hydrophilic (water-loving) points that act as a “seeding point,” instantly growing droplets until they are large and heavy enough to roll towards the insect’s mouth—with the help of a little headstand—and quench its thirst.

Ch.Gerber/ Shutterstock

Parker’s team has been endeavoring to copy this little bug in order to produce a simple, fog-harvesting net that could bring water to both remote villages and hospitals located in arid areas. Working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they have come up with a cheap and simple material that can be printed using special hydrophilic inks on a hydrophobic surface, or vice versa, Parker tells IFLScience. Tests are currently underway in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and it’s already proving to be a success.

But these aren’t the only two pies Parker has his fingers in: His team is also copying the anti-reflector design found on a 45-million-year-old fly eye, which sports a special grating that prevents light reflecting from the surface. Using the eye as a basis for design, they have managed to produce sticky plastic sheets that can be adhered to solar panels, which resulted in an impressive 10% increase in energy capture due to the reduction in reflection.

How Historical Bird Egg Collections Help Scientists Monitor Environmental Changes

The NHM is proud to be home to over 200,000 clutches of eggs, all of which come with information on when and where they were found and to which species they belong. This mega-archive has been built up over the past 250 years and, with more than 5,000 species, represents well over 50% of the world’s bird species.

But these don’t just sit there looking pretty; they’re a “3D biological library, ready to be investigated if a question arises,” Douglas Russell, NHM senior curator of birds, tells IFLScience. So what kind of questions are we talking about? Around half a century ago, British naturalist Derek Ratcliffe began to use this collection for his pioneering work on the effects of certain pesticides, like DDT, on birds of prey.

After noticing that peregrines and other species often had broken eggs in their nests and abnormally small clutches, Ratcliffe began examining the collection of egg shells. He discovered that those gathered after the late 1940s had experienced thinning, a time that coincided with the introduction of DDT. Others began replicating his work in other regions, and the evidence for the role of DDT in shell thinning became so convincing, as highlighted in the graph below, that pressure to ban these chemicals eventually led to their progressive phase out over the next 25 years.

D. Ratcliffe, 1970.

Even though we have learned our lesson about DDT and other so-called organo-chloride pesticides, thanks to this pioneering work, scientists today can still use this ever-growing collection to answer other questions, for example how climate change affects breeding trends. Although they can’t tell us how something is causing these changes, Russell says that they can act as a motivator to understand the driving forces. “It’s the beginning of a story, not the end,” he adds.

Syrian Ostrich Egg, courtesy of the Natural History Museum

From Witches to Harry Potter: Myths and Medicines of Mandrakes

Mandrakes have been used medicinally for centuries, but these plants also have a lot of mythology associated with them. If you’re a fan of Harry Potter, you may recall them being used in a Herbology class in which the students had to repot them using earmuffs to prevent their deathly screams from being heard. This story is actually rooted in traditional belief about these plants, Dr. Sandy Knapp, merit researcher of the NHM’s Life Sciences Plants Division, tells IFLScience.

Mandrake, courtesy of Sandra Knapp

These plants appear in 16th-century (Age of Enlightenment) herbals, used medicinally for all kinds of things, such as sedatives or anesthetics. They were therefore highly sought after in their native Mediterranean habitat and efforts were required to protect them from theft, which is thought to have contributed to one of the main myths associated with them.

It was believed that the extensive mandrake roots were inhabited by a demon, likely also fueled by their bizarre resemblance to a human figure, which would possess and kill whoever uprooted them. This necessitated some careful gardening: In order to remove them from the ground, you had to dig around them and then tie your dog to the roots, which would then run away and pull out the plant (apparently the dog was impervious to the demon…).

Mandrake, from De Materia Medica. Courtesy of the Natural History Museum.

Mandrakes belong to the nightshade family, which contains many staples that we eat—such as tomatoes and aubergines—but also slightly less edible things like deadly nightshade and tobacco. Some members of this family produce toxic, ring structure compounds called tropane alkaloids that can be potent hallucinogens. They can be absorbed through mucous membranes on the body and often bestow the sensation of flying, which is why they have been associated with witches’ broomsticks. Many 15th-century paintings depict witches gallivanting around on their brooms, naked, and it was written that this is how they would apply the ground up plants to their bodies, allowing the chemicals to soak up through their … areas… Lovely.

So there you go, a truly diverse collection of examples of how the natural world has influenced the society we live in.

If you’re keen to find out more, the series continues on 09 June at 11:00 BST, with this week’s fascinating topic being sharks. You can listen to it here.

In the meantime, here’s a bit of comedy to brighten up your day:

Warming Lethal For Extinct Megafauna

by Stephen Luntz
Photo credit: Mammoths may have had more to fear from warm climates than humans. Credit: AuntSpray/Shutterstock.

The great hairy beasts of the Pleistocene disappeared during sharp warming spikes, a new study in Science reports. The timing of these extinctions may absolve humans of responsibility, but one of the paper's authors says that our activities may still have been a contributing factor.

The history of life on Earth is one of extinctions and new arrivals, but the last 50,000 years have seen a great loss of land-based megafauna, defined as animals weighing more than 45 kilograms (100 pounds), everywhere outside of Africa, without replacement.

One theory, popularized by Jared Diamond, is that our technology made humans lethal to anything large, tasty-looking and unsuited to being tamed. Consequently, when we arrived in new locations we proceeded to wipe out many of the large herbivores, and carnivores subsequently starved to death. African animals, however, had a chance to get used to us as we were evolving, and produced defenses of their own. An alternative view blames changes in climate.

The disappearances of Australia's three-ton wombats and demon ducks of doom have produced famously hostile camps, although many paleontologists think that both contributed. Now some of the most prominent scientists in this debate have turned their attention to the disappearance of Eurasia's mammoths, giant bears and woolly rhinoceroses, and placed the blame on dramatic bursts of warming known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

“The Ice Age wasn't one continuous cold era,” coauthor Professor Chris Turney, of the University of New South Wales, told IFLScience. Turney acknowledges that Dansgaard-Oeschger events' causes are unknown, but says the matching between the temperature upswings and disappearance of large species is striking.

Dating extinction is hard, Turney admits. This is not just because “There is always a question of whether you have the last specimen that ever lived,” but because the radioactive carbon that paleontologists use to date bones is better at ordering events than at matching them to exact dates. Dansgaard-Oeschger events, on the other hand, can be dated precisely from the record of annual Greenland snowfalls.

Turney and his colleagues used sediment cores from Venezuela's Cariaco Basin to bring the two timelines together. These cores, they claim, “capture a climate record via shifts in the trade winds associated with northward migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone in the tropical Atlantic, alongside a comprehensive suite of radiocarbon ages from planktonic foraminifera in the sediment core.”

This produced a remarkable match between warming events and extinctions, but surviving species appear to have shrugged off subsequent bouts of cooling. Turney says that this may be because temperatures went up by the elevator and down by the stairs, taking much longer to come back down than they did to rise. However, he also says that the greater vulnerability to warming should arouse concerns today.

Turney agrees that humans may have proven a problem for species trying to migrate to escape climatic changes, but thinks that the warming influence was dominant. In this context the more stable tropical temperatures over much of Africa may have had more to do with megafauna survival than familiarity with humans.

5 Myths About Sugar That Everyone Needs To Stop Believing

by Danielle Andrew

Photo credit: White, or brown sugar? Shutterstock

Every day we're fed new and often conflicting information on our health and diets; what's good for you, what's bad, what to eat in moderation and what to avoid completely. As a result of poor education coupled with laziness, obesity rates are rising like never before. Obesity has doubled since 1980, and in 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.

So are we totally to blame for our ever expanding waist lines? Or are we being subjected to a barrage of misinformation and misdirection in the form of health advice and advertising?

Those of us that try to eat balanced diets and watch their weight are likely to be limiting or removing sugar from their diets completely, switching to "healthier" options like cane sugar, artificial sweetners and "sugar-free" options which are better for us. Right?

Wrong

Why is the global climatic cataclysm of the sixth century virtually unheard of?

There was a sign from the sun, the like of which had never been seen and reported before. The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months. Each day, it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again.
Historiae Ecclesiasticae

Between the years 535 and 536, a series of major global climatic events that took place that could easily be described as a global cataclysm with catastrophic consequences. The above abstract is from the sixth century historian and church leader, John of Ephesus, in his historical work, Church Histories (‘Historiae Ecclesiasticae’).

John of Ephesus is not the only one that mentions this event. Procopius lived between 500 and 565 AD and he was a late antiquities scholar and one of the main historians of the 6th century. He also refers to the strange behaviour of the sun and believed that it was a bad sign and the beginning of other events.

… during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness...and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.,
History of the Wars: The Vandalic War.

And we have yet another reference from the sixth century writer, Zacharias of Mytilene, who authored a chronicle that contains a section referring to the ‘Dark Sun’ for the period of 535/536 AD.

The sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night, while the ocean was tumultuous with spray from the 24th of March in this year till the 24th of June in the following year... And, as the winter was a severe one, so much so that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the birds perished... there was distress... among men... from the evil things,
Zacharias of Mytilene (Chronicle, 9.19, 10.1)

 

These three extracts are just a representative sample of numerous accounts from all over the world, written in the same period of time. In all cases, the sun was described as getting dimmer and losing its light. Many also described it as having a bluish colour. The effects were also observed with the moon – it wasn’t as bright anymore. The reduction of the light resulted in the reduction of heat on the planet; no rain and a very long winter resulted in crop failures and for birds and other wildlife to perish, as Zacharias of Mytilene writes. Famine and plagues struck many areas and there were a huge number of deaths.

In China and Japan, the event was also recorded in great detail. Massive droughts and thousands of deaths. The water wasn’t enough for the people and the land. Hundreds of thousands of square miles became infertile. In the Beishi chronicles, the official history of the Northern Dynasties, mentions that in 536, in the province of Xi’an, 80% of the population died and the survivors ate corpses to survive.

The catastrophic event struck Korea, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Australia. While written records do not exist for all countries, archaeological and geological data revealed evidence of the climatic changes. Studies done on the trunks of trees, for example, showed that 536 AD had been the coldest in 1,500 years.

The important question in all of this is, why did it happen? While there are no definite answers, one theory that has been put forward is that there was a large asteroid or comet impact which landed in the sea (if it hit land there would be evidence of a crater). Geologist Dallas Abbott is one proponent of this view and bases his view on evidence that he found studying ice cores from Greenland. However, this wouldn’t explain the dim light of the sun, and no tsunamis have been recorded for this period, which would have occurred if an asteroid landed in the ocean.

Another theory that has been put forward is a gigantic volcanic eruption – the dust thrown up into the atmosphere could have caused the dimming of the light. One candidate is Krakatoa, located between the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. Indeed, the Book of the Ancient Kings or Pustaka Raja Purwa, written in 1869, describes an ancient volcano.

There was a furious shaking of the earth, total darkness, thunder and lighting.
… Then came forth a furious gale together with torrential rain and a deadly storm darkened the entire world.
… When the waters subsided it could be seen that the island of Java had been split into two, this creating the island of Sumatra.

However, this manuscript refers to the year 416 AD and not 535 AD. Nevertheless, the fact that it was written in the 19th century could account for inaccuracies in the time reference.

Whether or not the answer will ever be found is unknown. It is unclear whether scientists are even continuing to pursue research on this event. One thing that is quite peculiar about this global cataclysm is that it is a very little known event. Why is it that this climatic event is not taught in schools? Why isn’t there a plethora of research examining it? Perhaps it is because it reminds us of our fragility as human beings and the fact that no matter how powerful and ‘advanced’ mankind becomes, we are still at the mercy of nature.

By John Black

References

• AD 536: The year that winter never ended
• Global Cataclysm in 535 AD
• Catastrophe: An investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, David Keys, Century, London
• Read more: http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/why-global-climatic-cataclysm-sixth-century-virtually-unheard-001360#ixzz3gBhaX1ll
• 
  

From the Animals kingdom ...