The first year of the famine was Europe’s fourth-wettest year on record between 1290 and 2000
Europe’s Great Famine of 1315–1317 is considered one of the worst population collapses in the continent’s history. Historical records tell of unrelenting rain accompanied by mass crop failure, skyrocketing food prices, and even instances of cannibalism. These written records strongly suggest Europe’s Great Famine was caused by several years of devastating floods that began in 1314, but they can’t tell us how this flooding compares to historic averages, or its full geographical extent.
Now, new research using tree ring records confirms the historical data, showing the years of the Great Famine were some of Europe’s wettest. A team of researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University quantified the extent of Great Famine flooding and found the years 1314, 1315, and 1316 were the fifth-wettest sequence of summers on record over a 700-year period.
The findings help scientists understand this historic event in the context of Europe’s long-term climate trends for the first time, according to the researchers. The findings also help scientists better understand how an overabundance of rainfall has impacted agriculture in the past, when the other extreme—drought—often gets more attention.
“When we think about extreme hydroclimate events, we talk a lot about drought,” said Jason Smerdon, a paleoclimatologist with Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. “But this was a deluge. And both of those things are going to be more frequent as a consequence of climate change.”
Continue reading at American Geophysical Union
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