An atmospheric dust veil covered the earth in the years 535/536 CE and brought about death and hunger to millions.
It is believed to have been caused by volcanic eruptions in the tropics or an impact disaster from space; regardless, the devastation had to be overcome by those with the will to survive.
The words from those who wrote about it tell a story we may live someday if another deathly dust veil encircles our world.
The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536, in his report on the wars with the Vandals.
“For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this thing happened, men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”
As you can see in his description, the people at that time had resorted to waring with one another as a pestilence (a fatal epidemic disease) fell upon them. Starvation was pushing them to their moral limits just as we would be today.
Michael the Syrian, of Byzantine, also wrote of the veil.
“The sun was eclipsed for 18 months. For only three hours in the morning, it would give light, but a light that resembled neither day nor night.”
In his writings, we see that the sun only gave light for three hours in the morning. Can you imagine the fear most people would have felt not knowing the cause fo their suffering?
A cloud, dust veil, or dry fog that darkened the earth for a year was mention by others, saying that it caused cold, drought, and food shortages.
Michael the Syrian also wrote.
“During that year, fruit did not reach the point of maturity, and all the land became as though transformed into something half-alive, or like someone suffering from a long illness.”
The Gaelic Irish Annals recorded the following:
“A failure of bread in the year 536 AD” – the Annals of Ulster
“A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD” – the Annals of Inisfallen
It also snowed in August of that year, in China, which ruined crops in Qingzhou and other provinces, and a dense, dry fog entered Eygpt.
The 536 events and ensuing famine may have also been responsible for the deposition of hoards of gold by Scandinavian elites at the end of the Migration Period. Their gold appears to no longer hold value for them as they sacrifice it to appease the gods trying to get the sunlight back.
Nothing was more important to them than the life-giving rays of the sun.
Other various historical sources from the sixth century describe “a sun that hardly cast a shadow.”
Some today believe this event could be the source of the Legend of the Fimbuwinter, the harsh, cold period of three years of winter without a summer that takes place before Ragnarock, the twilight of the gods–the end of the known world and the birth of a new era.
I can certainly believe the people of that time must have felt as if they were reborn into a new era after the veil lifted returning life to the planet.
Will the sun be taken away from us again one day? I don’t know, but there is no need to live in fear because there is nothing we can do about it. What we can do is live a prepared life and strengthen our minds to become the survivors of our time.
A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the sun and raising earth’s albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a massive, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon the injection of sulfur gasses into the stratosphere, where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid, which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling results in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation. Reference Wikipedia.com
Timothy French 