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As far as crap years go, 2020 is probably not as bad as the year an asteroid hit the earth and killed all of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but it's definitely up there.
As far as the worst year in human history? 2020 still ain't it. In fact, it doesn't even medal. The experts have weighed in and decided that the gold for Worst Year Ever be awarded to 536 AD when God apparently just gave up and said, "Eh, screw it." According to medieval historian Michael McCormick, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive." Now to make ourselves feel a little bit better about the steaming pile of trash we're currently living in, let's learn about an even bigger steaming pile of trash.
The 'Dark' Ages Get A Whole New Meaning
Some time in early 536 AD, something funky was going on. A mysterious fog had rolled in through Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, covering the sky and even dimming the sun. The fog lasted for 18 months, and no one could really tell the difference between night and day. Byzantine Greek scholar Procopius wrote about it (probably in the dark):
"And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place, 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 that it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed."
In layman's terms, the people of 536 AD were straight up not having a good time, and nobody could see shit. Scientists at the University of Maine studied ice core samples (which act as a backlog of climate records) from a Swiss glacier and ultimately found that this mysterious "fog" was really a plume of ash from a massive volcanic eruption in early 536 AD that the wind pushed from Europe all the way into Asia. There's a pretty broad consensus that there were one or two additional massive eruptions around 540 and 547 AD, respectively, but scientists are still arguing about some details, like where in the world they happened.
McCormick believes there were two volcanic eruptions in total, the first occurring sometime in 535 or 536 AD in the Northern Hemisphere, and the second in 539 or 540 AD in the tropics. The first was probably in Iceland, according to McCormick, and the second in Ilopango, El Salvador (now a caldera). But in the second school of thought, David Keys, a writer on historical climate change, thinks the culprit was probably a 535 AD eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which would've been the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 1,500 years.
The Littlest Ice Age
As if being in the dark for a year and a half straight wasn't bad enough already, the volcanic particles blocking out the sun led to a 35.6 F (2 C) degree drop in temperature, making for the coldest decade in 2,300 years. This period became known as the "Late Antique Little Ice Age," which honestly sounds a little too cutesy considering the frigid tea bagging that was to follow. Snow fell in China in the summer, and there were crop failures across Europe and Asia that led to widespread famine (the Irish Annals, for example, reported an absence of bread from 536 through 539 AD). Originally, researchers thought that the ice age only lasted a couple of years, but, surprise, its effects were felt for more than a century, leading to even more crap getting flung at humanity, including (spoiler alert): plagues, more famine, political unrest, and total collapse of empires.
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source https://earn8online.com/index.php/131257/the-worst-year-ever-not-2020/
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