Pink Floyd inspired research into medieval monks and volcanology | Hacker News Reader

Pink Floyd inspired research into medieval monks and volcanology

arstechnica.com

29 pointsBerislavLopac10 comments

Interestingly, the impact of the Black Death in Europe in the 1300s was known to have been exacerbated by poor harvests caused by years of bad weather. I wonder if the lingering effects of those eruptions in the later 1200s played a part.

As far as I understand, the harvests were not much worse than "usual" bad harvests, but Europe was reaching its peak population, given the technology of the epoch, and a bad harvest had just a worse outcome than before.

I find it interesting how carefully the title of this article is curated. It's a pure (harmless) clickbait. I wonder if it necessarily attracts the right eyeball. Or any eyeball is a good eyeball?

It does somewhat bury the lede:

> The darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions.

Which if correct, has predictive power about future eruptions, since future lunar eclipses can be accurately predicted.

It’s the other way around. The eclipse is darker than usual because of volcanic ashes in the atmosphere.

You can certainly predict a darker-than-usual lunar eclipse (if a volcano recently erupted), if that’s your thing.

I see! thanks for explaining the mechanism. I should have read more.

So the "darker than usual" aspect won't be from astronomical calculations, but from the historical records. Seems like it: "By putting together the information from ice cores and the descriptions from medieval texts we can now make better estimates of when and where some of the biggest eruptions of this period occurred."

Lovely indeed.

Imagine the title if the idea came up while on the toilet.

You see it as clickbait, I see it as signaling a deeper understanding of Floyd’s work as it indirectly references the moon (the most famous work) as well as their iconic Live at Pompeii.

To me, it’s a great title.

Alternate title: Researcher gets baked and thinks about the moon and volcanoes.

yeah who would click on that?

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