The Mystery Of The Dark Age's Global Climate Disaster | Catastrophe | Timeline

I’m 83 years old and find these programmes informative and fascinating.

I'm reminded of the quote by the great historian Will Durant -"Civilisation exists by geological consent -subject to change without notice."

I have a lot of nostalgia watching this. I was in high school when this was released--25 years ago! I wonder how the people featured in the documentary look like today. Likely, some have already passed. It's still really watchable. Life was simpler then before our cell phones.

Some added details from Wikipedia: The storms and unseasonably cold weather resulted in 1816 being referred to as the Year Without a Summer. It is now known that the exceptional global weather conditions that year were caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, notable because Lord Byron rented it and stayed there with Dr. John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had rented a house nearby, were frequent visitors. Because of poor weather, in June 1816 the group famously spent three days together inside the house creating stories to tell each other, two of which were developed into landmark works of the Gothic horror genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, by Polidori.

These types of scientists like this guy who painstakingly studied and entered all that tree ring info into a computer program over decades is invaluable information. It amazes me.

I'm always amazed what our ancestors came through. Wars, famines, diseases like the Bubonic Plague and others plagues.

Crazy how it takes all these various disciplines to come together to solve a simple question …what happened to make the trees not grow so well in mid 500 AD. I love science cause none of this would have been possible without other scientist researching their own curiosities. Who knows how or when this slice of knowledge will be useful to some other scientist some where.

This is one of the most exciting and informative documentary I've seen. Very interesting and extremely impressive how this event was decoded. Hats off to everyone.

The Plague of Justinian which hit the European world has been dated 541-549 AD. That would correspond almost exactly with this volcanic eruption. Obviously, if food and nutrition is globally interrupted by a massive volcanic eruption then weakened immune systems would result and make plagues a lot easier to happen. Just a thought.

I love all these science based documentaries by Timeline. Some of the last quality left on YouTube for this genre.

Thank you to all the scientists who put the pieces together. Y'all rock.

Wow! I was on the edge of my seat through this whole presentation-masterfully done!

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun".

The Eruption of the Tambora in 1815 was pretty impressive too. It is reckoned to be the largest explosion in recorded history and ejected around 200 cubic kilometres of volcanic dust into the atmosphere. It caused worldwide climate change for years and resulted in the worst famine of the century.

The oldest recorded living tree on record is a Great Bristlecone pine, believed to have a lifespan of over 5,000 years. Located in the White Mountains of California, this unnamed tree is considered the oldest living tree in the world.

Hats off to all the human beings that endured such a horrific time in our earths history!

Amazing how a person would spend many years of their life deeply investigating a mystery just out of curiosity, that most people would find completely trivial, the hallmark of a good scientist.

The worst thing to me would be not knowing why all those terrible things were happening.

I went to HHRC school we were taught about the little ice age as well as the volcano that caused it.