The Worst Year to Be Alive

2020 was probably one of the worst years that most of us have ever experienced. China has identified the cause of the mysterious new virus, Corona virus covid-19. A pandemic took the lives of millions, forced us to stay isolated indoors for months, shut down the globe, and forever changed the way we live and work. Some of us, like Anad Del Prior, who lived to 108, not only experienced the chaos of covid but also lived through the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people around the world.

For Anna, the worst year ever award might be tough to give, but what if I told you that there was a time in recorded history that was far, far worse than both 2020 and 1918? Medieval scholar Michael McCormack and his team at Harvard have found one year that rises above every other truly terrible year as the worst year to be alive: 536 AD. I want to preface this by saying that the worst year is different for everyone. Some people lose all their loved ones in a single year, while others survive through two pandemics unscathed. But what we're talking about in this video is the worst year worldwide, a year when the most tragedies happened on average.

With that out of the way, what exactly made 536 AD so bad? For starters, there was the eerie fog that blocked out the sun, perpetual winter, famine, plague, and well enough bad things that my research for this video quickly devolved into an overwhelming cluster of open tabs. Luckily, I had just gotten a new browser called Opera, which made getting to the bottom of this question much more manageable. I started by using the tab Islands feature, which allowed me to easily organize all my tabs into separate groups based on relative topics.

Then I cleaned up things even more by dividing my research into two separate workspaces that I could easily toggle between. But the Opera feature I like the most was Arya, the AI integrated right into the browser sidebar. This was like having a research assistant at my fingertips. When I wanted to learn more about Anad Del Prior, I simply opened up the chat window, and it was able to answer any questions I had. And if I wanted to dive further into anything within the answers, I just used the highlight tool, which offers brief explanations, overviews, and translations of any text you highlight online.

When diving into a complicated topic like the worst year in human history, it's essential to have tools that can perform a variety of tasks all in one place. On top of the features I already mentioned, Opera also offers a sidebar music player that connects to your favorite streaming services, a social messenger, an ad blocker, and a VPN with no extensions needed. Unlike anything I've ever seen before, they also have an effective tool called Lucid mode, which can sharpen blurry online videos right inside the browser with one click. I do highly recommend you click the link in the description to discover Opera for yourself. Without it, you'd never know which year it was truly the worst to be alive in.

536 AD, the balance of power in the Mediterranean was in flux. Vandals had sacked Rome in 455, which led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Justinian I, the Byzantine emperor, was trying to reclaim lost territories and sent an army to retake Italy in the 530s. But then something happened: the Earth went dark. In the spring of 536, the Northern Hemisphere turned dark and cold, and suddenly humanity found itself in the worst year to be alive.

Now, this wasn't your run-of-the-mill cold spell or what people from Seattle might call typical weather, but this darkness went far beyond a gloomy cloud cover. It resulted in the most severe climate cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2,000 years. For 18 months, the world went dark; a mysterious fog deposited itself over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The sun still came out but was blocked all day, which led to temperatures dropping by up to 2 1/2° C on average. Now, that might not seem like a lot, but try telling that to a plant.

The dense fog and colder temperatures meant that crops failed, which in turn meant people got sick, tried to migrate, started wars, and died by the millions. The globe was thrust into a literal Dark Age that had far-reaching effects on the environment, agriculture, and entire societies. A mysterious and society-altering cloud was, for the most part, a puzzle to anyone alive at the time, but that didn't stop them from writing lengthy accounts of Earth's bizarre behavior during this year.

A most dread portent took place, for the sun gave forth its light without brightness, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear. This account from the Roman historian Procopius was echoed through other firsthand accounts of this not metaphorical dark cloud. Imagine what you would do without access to modern communications and science if suddenly the sky went black, the temperature dropped, your crops stopped growing, and people around you started suffering. How would you even make sense of that? They tried.

Michael the Syrian, a Byzantine scribe, wrote that the sun became dark, and its darkness lasted for 18 months. Each day, it shone for about 4 hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. He wrote of fruits not ripening and that wine tasted like sour grapes. The lack of good-tasting wine was definitely not the only struggle Michael the Syrian would face. The Roman statesman Cassiodorus, who wrote the most detailed account in Latin, said that the sun's rays were weak, there were no shadows, they experienced unseasonable drought, the seasons jumbled together, and he described a sky blended with alien elements.

In China, it rained dust in the 6th Century Chronicle. Noni named the freak weather Hui, the word for dust. The summer frost overtook China, and in August it snowed. The catastrophe even extended to Peru, where the mysterious climate event destroyed the Mochica civilization. They were avid fishermen and developed an advanced irrigation system, allowing a variety of crops to grow. But in 536, an abnormally strong weather system caused the water to warm, which killed the fish, and flooding ruined the civilization's necessary irrigation.

As the lack of sun darkened the land, the air began to thicken; a thick fog of dust cast a veil over much of the globe. The effects were felt from Constantinople to Peru, from Ireland to China. Despite not knowing what caused it, people knew something was wrong. The accounts written about this horrific year could be mistaken for ancient mythology—acts of God so powerful and unlikely that it's hard to believe they were real. But they were very real for the people who lived through them.

So, what caused the beginning of this miserable Dark Age? Surprisingly, the firsthand accounts weren't taken very seriously until the 1990s, and even then, the answers were mostly theoretical. Several explanations were brought forward, including that an asteroid impact sent dirt into the atmosphere. In recent years, scientists narrowed in on the likelihood that it stemmed from volcanic eruptions because volcanoes don't just send lava flowing down into nearby communities; they also shoot soot and debris into the air.

Researchers hypothesize that this eruption would have sent massive amounts of ash into the air, causing mass destruction and thrusting people into the miserable Dark Ages they found themselves in. As the ash floated through the air, the sun's radiation would have been blocked from the surface, and the atmosphere would have cooled for several years. This would have had a direct impact on plants, which need sunlight and thawed ground to grow and survive. In fact, all of the summer cooling events in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 2,500 years can be traced to volcanoes.

Even in recent history, we've seen dark skies emerge after volcanic eruptions. But rest assured, they've been nothing close to what appeared in 536. That year, there was so much soot in the atmosphere it created a fog that ground civilization to a halt. But where did this eruption even happen? Sadly, ancient historians like Procopius aren't around to see science finally fleshing out their historical account. Still, the truth is that without those essential historical accounts, no attention would have ever been paid to why the year 536 was so horrific.

There are a couple of physical studies that help fill in the gaps. If you've ever seen the beautiful spirals inside a tree, you've seen a relatively accurate map of our global climate history. Tree rings can tell us about what rainfall and temperature were like thousands of years ago, and they allow us to find abnormalities in our past. 536 is a perfect example of that kind of abnormality.

Tree ring samples from around the world point to colder temperatures, increased rainfall, and drought in different parts of the world. So, not only did Procopius and his friends report how cold and miserable the weather was, but trees confirmed their accounts. The reality is that this type of climate trauma caused real human suffering. If the trees, which have withstood centuries of climate irregularities, were showing such strong signs of distress, imagine how much stress would have been on an annual crop like wheat.

With the GIC, Irish wrote, "was a failure of bread." In AD 536, it was one of the first signs of large-scale famine that would follow. But for us to really understand why 536 was the worst year to be alive, we have to look deeper than the trees. Samples of ice cores contain air particles from as far back as there's been ice. In the case of the catastrophe of 536, ice cores can show sulfur particles that fall to Earth and get incorporated into polar and glacial ice.

Ice contains a log of natural disasters and human pollution that serves as a record for understanding the humans and natural causes that led to important parts of history. Researchers took ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and discovered sulfate deposits from 536, evidence of the acidic dust fall that humans had written accounts about, was the previously missing piece of the puzzle that explained what happened in the worst year ever.

But which volcano is responsible? Initially, the culprit was thought to have been in Latin or North America. However, a team of scientists at Harvard concluded that the eruption was most likely in Iceland, occurring in early 536 and spreading ash across the Northern Hemisphere. By melting ice cores and analyzing the melted water, the scientists were able to match ice core data with the tree ring data and they determined that something weird did indeed happen that would have been big enough to alter global climate patterns.

Of course, whether you were living in a small community in 536 or even if you were a military general trying to expand your empire, you'd have no idea why the sky went black. There would be no explanation for your suffering. Even though we've solved the mystery with modern science, it doesn't diminish the helplessness in the firsthand accounts of that time. And although 536 may have been the worst year to date, it arguably kicked off the worst era to be alive.

Temperatures remained cold, and famine and plague spread. There have been discoveries of gold deposits pointing to possible sacrifices to the gods to get the sunlight back. Archaeologist David Key speculated that the climate trauma of 536 had an incredibly lasting and destructive aftermath that led to a series of societal changes. The first was the plague of Justinian, named after the Byzantine emperor, which affected the entire Mediterranean Basin. Because people's immune systems had been so weakened by a lack of sunlight and a shortage of food, they were susceptible to illness.

Since this was a time before there were organized systems for safe mass burial, Emperor Justinian didn't know how to deal with the bodies piling up on the streets. He ordered bodies to be picked up and removed from cities, but as people carried away the dead infected bodies, they inevitably caught the plague themselves, worsening the spread. An estimated 50 million people died from the Plague of Justinian that swept the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 542 AD.

He's also connected the disasters of 536 with other monumental global shifts: the decline of the Avars, a group of Eurasian nomads, the migration of Mongol tribes west, and the end of the Sasanian Empire, the last Iranian Empire before the Muslim conquest. Then there was the collapse of the Gupta Empire, the ancient Indian empire considered to be the Golden Age of India, and the fall of Teotihuacan, the ancient Mesoamerican city located northwest of modern-day Mexico City.

Finally, the 6th century witnessed the rise of Islam. The direct correlation that Key has made between these crucial moments of the 6th century and the 536 eruption that covered the world in dust and darkness isn't entirely proven. Regardless, the 6th century was a time of profound change around the globe, and it's plain to see how the suffering brought on by 536 could contribute to that kind of mass change.

But in the end, we did recover, didn't we? Well, yes, but it took a long time. What began in 536 lasted until about 660 to 680 AD, depending on what part of the world you lived in. That 130-year gap might seem insignificant to us now, but imagine the lives of those who only ever experienced the dusty darkness in that time frame. It was one of the worst periods to be alive, and it was some people's entire time on Earth.

However, it shows the resilience of Earth. It shows that even the darkest, most Earth-altering catastrophes can be overcome. Crops regrow, healthy babies are born, and new civilizations are built on the rubble of old ones. Dark clouds clear, volcanoes settle, and life continues until the next disaster arises.

Will there ever be another year quite like 536? Well, of course, there could be. One of the more than 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth could erupt at any moment, covering us in a blanket of darkness, ruining lives for many of us and ending life for others. Even if we knew what it was, where it came from, how bad it might get, we'd still feel helpless, don't you think? Some of us would sit down and write in a notebook or record a voice note about the darkness outside your window.

We'd leave behind accounts of what it felt like to live through the worst year to be alive, and sometime down the line, those accounts would be found and studied. They'd be compared to scientific samples to unearth new truths about our world, because what's life on Earth if not one giant cycle of struggle and recovery?