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Almost a millennium ago, there was tremendous turmoil in Earth’s atmosphere. A huge cloud, rich in sulfur particles, flowed through the stratosphere for months, but perhaps darkened the sky for years until it finally fell back to Earth’s surface. Because of this, the full moon suddenly disappeared from the sky, as can be seen in some contemporary chronicles.
“On the fifth night of May, the moon shone brightly at night, and then its light began to fade little by little, and by nightfall, it was completely extinguished, and there was no light or celestial body visible,” he writes. an eyewitness in the 12th century Anglo-Saxon Peterborough chronicle. .
Astronomers have long known that there was a full lunar eclipse that night, so the moonlight would have significantly decreased in a reddish hue anyway, but so far they couldn’t find a reassuring explanation for why the moon had disappeared. completely from heaven.
It seemed highly likely that an atmospheric event due to some significant volcanic phenomenon could have caused a complete eclipse. This was mentioned in the descriptions in the contemporary chronicles, which reported the reddish darkening of the sun and / or the appearance of fish (rings of light) around the reddish one between 1108 and 1110.
It was a blow that researchers did not know about a large volcanic eruption. The only significant eruption was the eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland in 1104, but it was thought that it could not have had such an effect on the planet’s atmosphere.
However, in the course of examining ice samples, a new trail has now emerged. In 1108, the Japanese Asama volcano erupted, which may have been a major volcanic activity that lasted for several months. Although few documents are available about the eruption, it is true that the following year, 1109, was an extremely cold year, as evidenced by the narrower annual rings of the trees.
Other historical and social documents suggest that the years 1109-1111 were heavier than average due to bad weather conditions, severe crop shortages, which also confirms that the 1108 eruption had a greater impact on the atmosphere than before. they thought.
From all this, the researchers concluded that the sulfur gases released into the atmosphere when the Japanese volcano erupted caused a significant climatic effect, which also included the “disappearance” of the moon from the sky.
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