Cheer up, folks

I f you’re ever despairing about the state of the world, you can — at least, according to some scholars — be thankful it’s not the year 536 CE. To be fair, it’s medieval scholars, not 21st-century ones, who called 536 CE the worst year to be alive. But hear them out, because it sounds pretty bad. That year, a massive volcano erupted, historians believe, filling the air with volcanic ash. Of course, the majority of people affected by the disaster had no idea what was happening — they just knew it was very suddenly very dark for a very long time. The sun didn’t shine in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia for 18 whole months — or as the Byzantine historian Procopius put it, “The sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.”
That summer, temperatures dropped more than 30 degrees in parts of Europe and Asia (it even snowed in China), so crops failed, leading to widespread famine, starvation, and economic stagnation. Many people who were literate wrote about this at the time — the sun disappeared overnight, after all — but academics didn’t take the accounts seriously until the late 20th century. In 1983, a volcanic eruption was theorized to be the source of the darkness, and researchers examining tree rings in Ireland in the 1990s noted a severe temperature drop occurred in the sixth century. In 2018, researchers published a study pointing to a volcano as the likely culprit after analyzing ice cores drilled from glaciers.