Historical Scriptures reveal how people wet the little ice era

“Dear diary, it was frozen outside today …” If someone today were to write that in their diary, it may seem like a sufficient innocent line, maybe never be considered carefully. What if, 500 years now, scientists used that introduction to the weather to respond to the mysteries of the climate?

Researchers seeking the past have done exactly it, combing through diaries and other old documents to rebuild the climate of 16th-century Transylvania, part of modern day Romania. What they found offers a brief appearance on how a cold period called the Little Ice Age may have affected people in the region, the team reports February 12 Limits in climate.

Previous studies of pollen, sediments and other materials have been used to rebuild the change of the previous climate. But “what we wanted to do is focus on how people at that time feel the climate,” says Tudor Caciara, a climate at the University of Oradea in Romania.

The small ice age was a long-term climate event that led to the cooler temperatures from 14 to the middle of the 19th century, with studies suggesting that average temperatures in Europe fell at 0.5 degrees Celsius after 1560. Some studies have tracked the effects of the phenomenon in Western Europe, but researchers have fought to gather information about the event in Eastern Europe.

So the width of the registers held by people living in the 16th century in Transylvania presented an opportunity. Caciara and his colleagues were created through other diaries, chronicles and records from the 1500s to seek local climate data.

The documents were written manually in various languages, including Hungarian, Turkish and Latin. Searching for key words like “hot weather” was not an option, as the team found that people often wrote about the weather in distinct ways. A passage describing the effects of large rains during a siege, for example, read “a large river flowed through the city, which was inflated daily and did not allow for a few hours to pass.” Researchers had to read documents in their entirety, even if there were few weather mention within them.

Documents paint a photograph of a 16th -century Transylvania that was marked by heat and droughts in the first half of the century, followed by a period of rainfall. Researchers also encountered vivid written accounts showing how the climate could have affected people affecting disasters such as hunger, shrimp and diseases.

One describes a hunger in the summer of 1534 caused by an intense drought. People were “losing their minds because of hunger”, addressing them to eat herbs, tree bark and chairs. The skeletal corpses were described as they had remnants of grass in their mouths.

Warm weather recorded throughout the century led the team to suggest that the small age of ice may have been delayed in the region compared to Western Europe.

Beyond providing a better understanding of how the small age of ice can have affected people in the past, research like cacia can predict how extreme events can affect people who experience climate change in the future.

“Imagine what happens when we have a similar event in a climate that is already warmer 2 degrees on average,” says Ulrich Foelsche, a climate scientist at the University of Graz in Austria who was not involved in the study. “These past climate studies are especially important for understanding climate and extreme variability, to know better what can come in the future.”