Can you imagine that you are looking at a clear night sky, the stars are shining, and suddenly the moon disappears from it? If it didn’t scare you outright, it at least confused you. But that really happened, more than nine hundred years ago. Today, scientists offer a different explanation than a sign from God, as was believed at the time.
From a period chronicle…
“On the fifth night of the month of May, the moon appeared, shining brightly in the evening, and then its light gradually faded,” a scribe recorded this event in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript Peterborough Chronicle. “As soon as night came on, it went out so completely that neither light, nor orbs, nor anything at all could be seen from it. And so it went on almost until the day. Then he appeared shining in full and bright light.” it is written further in the chronicle.
Astronomers knew about this strange event, but over the centuries no reasonable explanation came up. A team of paleoclimatologists tried to figure it out Sebastiena Guilleta from the University of Geneva. He published his findings on Scientific Reports.
“Sometimes you can spend days reading old texts without finding relevant information about, say, weather or climate…,” explains Guillet. Nevertheless, the search for the “thief” of the moon began with scientists in the chronicles, because this event took place in a period full of disasters. And they found the clues…
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The moon is waning in a gloomy time
In 1110, very cold weather hit large areas with torrential rains that destroyed crops and famine ensued. For example, the Irish manuscript Annals of Inisfallen states that, “… to ward off heavy rains and bad weather in summer and autumn” people fasted and gave alms to God. In the French chronicle Morigna, the scribe mentions that the famine “…he has destroyed many people and made countless rich people miserable.” And that in the year in which the moon disappeared! How are these related?
Watch the waning moon in the following interesting video:
Source: Youtube
The search continues
From the above-mentioned Anglo-Saxon manuscript, it follows that the disappearance of the moon is not due to the cloudy sky, nor the well-known phenomenon of the “eclipse of the moon”, when the earth eclipses it when they are in a straight line, because “the moon was completely extinguished during the whole night.” Swiss scientists, as write in their study, so they went through records of the “darkest lunar eclipses” since the 1600s and found that they were all related to volcanic eruptions. This led them to search further into the past, and they found a file of a high-ranking Japanese official who recorded the repeated eruptions of the Asama volcano from late August to October 1108. From that time, the team also tracked down at least thirteen other records of catastrophic weather and crop failure.
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The sudden disappearance of the moon in 1110 is due to the Japanese volcano Asama
“Thief” caught?
The sudden disappearance of the moon in 1110 could therefore be caused by the Japanese volcano Asama. However, in order for scientists to “convince” her, further research was necessary. Therefore, they focused on other clues. Among them were tree rings. The records showed anomalies that are undoubtedly a response to the climatic changes of the given period, i.e. rain and cold. They also studied the increase in sulfate aerosols in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which the scientists say are “… a treasure trove of information about past climate, including volcanic eruptions that can spray ash and aerosols around the world.”
It was discovered that the disappearance of the moon – in scientific terms an “eclipse” – was actually caused by a “dust veil” caused by a volcano that spewed an unusually high amount of ash, dust and mainly sulfur into the atmosphere, which also resulted in climate change. As the researchers report in their study, further research is needed to trace the true sources of this ancient stratospheric dust veil. It is possible that many more eruptions contributed to it that were not (or are not yet) documented. It had to be not only Asama, but indirectly also the originally suspected Icelandic volcano Hekla, which erupted in 1104 and could have caused a chain of explosions of other volcanoes.
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“…therefore, there is still much work to be done to better understand the impact of large eruptions on the climate system and the extent to which these eruptions may or may not have affected past societies,” the scientists conclude the current investigations.
Resources: www.vice.com, www.livescience.com, www.studyprobe.in
2023-07-05 05:39:03
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