The Chinese dynasty founded by the Hongwu emperor crumbled in part because of a severe drought, which was prolonged by a volcanic eruption. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty
Climate sciences
The collapse of China’s prosperous Ming dynasty, one of the most stable in Chinese history, has been attributed, in part, to the 1641 eruption of a volcano thousands of kilometres from the imperial capital in Beijing.
Geoscientists have long known that a mega-drought that parched eastern China between 1637 and 1643 was the most severe to affect the area during the last millennium, but they did not know precisely what made it so bad. Liang Ning at Nanjing Normal University in China, Zhengyu Liu at Ohio State University in Columbus and their colleagues looked at records of past temperatures, as well as ice-core records and climate models, to unravel the mystery.
The drought kicked off as a standard dry spell. Four years later, Mount Parker in the Philippines erupted. Volcanic particles blanketed the region, cooling the air more than the ocean’s surface and setting up weather patterns that weakened the East Asian monsoon. The monsoon rains were much lighter than usual and the drought lasted for another three years.
The Ming dynasty’s fall ushered in the Qing dynasty, which imposed conservative policies and ruled for nearly three centuries.
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August 26, 2020 at 02:06AM
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The eruption that helped to destroy one of China's great dynasties - Nature.com
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