The volcano that caused famines in ancient Rome? It was in Alaska

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Err
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The volcano that caused famines in ancient Rome? It was in Alaska

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06 ... -republic/

This is crazy to think about. A volcano so far away affected two empires so dramatically.
While farmers along the Mediterranean coast were dealing with too much rain, farmers along the Nile in Egypt faced the opposite problem. Egypt’s survival has always depended on the Nile’s summer floods, which bring water and fertile soil to the narrow strip of land along the river’s banks. But for two years in a row, 43 and 42 BCE, the floods didn’t come. Documents from the period describe a terrible famine in those years.

The climate models run by McConnell and his colleagues suggest that when Mt. Okmok cooled the Northern Hemisphere, it also short-circuited the weather systems that produce the Nile’s annual flood. “The differential cooling moves the equatorial rain belts north or south,” explained McConnell. “High northern latitude eruptions like Okmok cause a failure of the East African Summer Monsoon, which results in drought in the headwaters of the Nile and so a failure in the all-important summer flood.”

Meanwhile, Octavian (who would become Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first emperor) and his ally Marcus Antonius were still fighting Brutus (the one with the knife) and Cassius for power, and neither side could get grain from Egypt to feed their armies. Cassius reportedly asked Cleopatra for military aid, and she turned him down because her country was already struggling with famine and disease.

But the volcanic eruption in Alaska may have ultimately helped make Cleopatra the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt. Military conflicts raged, and nearly every corner of the old Roman Republic was desperately short of food, which likely made Egypt look very appealing as a potential “breadbasket.” At the same time, the failure of the Nile floods in 43 and 42 BCE probably made Cleopatra’s Egypt much more vulnerable to outside attack.
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