New Light on the Black Death

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
rnSott.net
rnmie, 19 dic 2007 17:24 UTC 
https://es.sott.net/article/3078-Nueva-luz-sobre-la-Peste-Negra-La-conexion-cosmica 

New light on the Black Death: The cosmic connection by dendrochronologist Mike Baillie of Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland.

I've finished reading it and all I can say is: Wow! This was an intense book! It's not extensive either, only 208 pages including appendices. It is tight and economical, with no extra words or ramblings. Every example and temporary distraction is crucial in the main argument that is (get ready for this), Mike Baillie (yes, a real scientist and not a madman), says that the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history that possibly exterminating two-thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions on the rest of the planet, it was probably not the bubonic plague but rather death by comet(s)!

Oh yeah, that's too much, isn't it?

Maybe not. Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory and his evidence supports what people at the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of fire, damaged atmosphere, and deaths on an unimaginable scale. Today people don't really know what happened just 660 years ago. (mmmmh...the inquiring mind immediately wonders what might happen when 666 years pass. That would be the year 2012...)

In any case, China, where the Black Death is supposed to have originated, lost half of its total population (from 65 million to 123).


Black Death Diffusion Map

Recent research on European deaths also suggests a figure of between 45 to 50% of the total European population dying in a 4-year period, although this varies by location (which is a problem as we will see). 

In Mediterranean Europe and Italy, the south of France and Spain, places where the plague lasted for four consecutive years, it was closer to 70 and 75% of the total population. (In today's United States, that would be equivalent to reducing from 300 million to 75 million in less than four years. It would also mean having to bury or dispose of 225 million bodies!) 

In Germany and England it was closer to 20%. It is believed that Northeast Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary suffered less for some reason (there are some theories that are not entirely satisfactory) 

There are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans so it appears they have suffered little, if not at all. Africa lost approximately 1/8th of its population (80 to 70 million). (These numbers highlight one of the problems Baillie raises: the variability of mortality rates by location.) 

Whatever the death rate in any given place, the bottom line is that the Black Death produced the largest death toll of any known pandemic in recorded history, and, as Baillie points out, no one knows for sure what it is! what it was! OH, of course, for a long period of time, everyone "knew" it was the Bubonic Plague, so how does Baillie question this well-established fact? He's not the only one. 

In 1984, Graham Twigg published The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal, where he argues that the climate and ecology of Europe and particularly England made it almost impossible for rats and fleas to have transmitted the bubonic plague and almost impossible for Yersinia pestis to have been the causative agent of the plague, taking into account its explosive expansion throughout of Europe during the 14th century. Twigg also destroys the common theory of a pneumonic spread. He proposes, based on his examination of the evidence and symptoms, that the Black Death could have been an epidemic of pulmonary anthrax caused by Bacillus anthracis.

Another spoilsport for the standard model is Gunnar Karlsson, who in 2000 stated that the Black Death wiped out between half and two-thirds of Iceland's population, even though there were no rats in Iceland at the time. (History Iceland by Gunnar Karlsson) 

Baillie summarizes the problem below: 
The Black Death of 1347 was believed to be the third major outbreak of bubonic plague; a plague traditionally spread through rats and fleas. The previous instances were the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and the plague of the time of Justinian who arrived in Constantinople in 542 AD. The Plague of Athens was described by Thucydides, while the Plague of Justinian was described by Procopius, among others [...] 

The plague is supposed to have originated in Central Asia, or somewhere in Africa, where the plague is endemic in some rat populations. It is assumed that some environmental stimulus caused the infected rodents to abandon their habitats and infect rat populations, and ultimately human populations, in areas where there was no natural immunity. It is believed that the transfer mechanism was fleas leaving the bodies of dead rats and moving to human hosts that were infected by them. Trade routes are supposed to have brought the disease to the Black Sea region and from there to the central Mediterranean in late 1347. It was then introduced into Europe through northern Italy and southern France. It began to exterminate people in large numbers, spreading at 1.5km per day. Between January and the summer to autumn of 1348 it had spread to the British Isles, and by 1350 to Scandinavia and eventually Iceland. The spread appears to have been directed through France, over Belgium towards Germany and towards southern Europe. The first wave died out in 1351, although there was a second in 1361. 

It is generally believed that the plague struck an already weakened population in Europe. [...] 

At a basic level, the problem is with rats and fleas. For conventional wisdom there must be infected hosts or rats and they have to move at an alarming speed, you almost have to imagine the infested rats running forward (mostly north) distributing, as they died, quantities of infected fleas. The drawbacks with this scenario are legion. For example, there are no descriptions of dead rats lying around (this is explained by suggesting that either the rats were indoors or people were so used to dead rats that it was not worth mentioning; although if they were indoors, how traveled so fast?) It seemed to not matter whether you were a rural pastor or clergyman or villager, everyone was infected. Despite this, strangely with this infectious disease, some cities in Europe were not affected. What's more, these rats must have been happy to move to cold northern areas since bubonic plague is a disease that requires warm temperatures. 

With water barriers, these rats boarded ships so as not to lose momentum. (Baillie)

Benedictow, defender of the rat and flea scenario cited by Baillie, tells us about these amazing creatures: 
 

El genio estratégico de la Peste Negra también hizo otro golpe maestro que aceleró el paso de su conquista de la Península Ibérica. Poco después de sus múltiples invasiones de importantes centros urbanos sobre la costa del Reino de Aragón, realizó un salto metastático extraordinario y arribó triunfante a la ciudad de Santiago de Compostela ubicada en la esquina opuesta de la península. (Benedictow, O. J. 2004 Black Death 1346-1353: Complete History. Woodbridge.)

In 2001, epidemiologists Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan of the University of Liverpool proposed the theory that the Black Death could have been caused by an Ebola-type virus, not a bacteria. His research and discoveries are thoroughly documented in Pest Biology. More recently, researchers published a computer model showing how the Black Death made about 10% of Europeans resistant to HIV. (The Return of the Black Death: The World's Largest Serial Killer by Susan Scott, Christopher Duncan and Plague Biology: Historical Evidence from Populations by Susan Scott, Christopher J. Duncan) 

In a similar vein, historian Norman F. Cantor, in his 2001 book After the Plague, suggests that the Black Death may have been a combination of pandemics that included a form of anthrax and a cattle disease. He cites many forms of evidence including: reports of disease symptoms unrelated to the known effects of both bubonic and pneumonic plagues, the discovery of anthrax spores in Scotland, and the fact that meat from infected cattle was sold in rural English areas. prior to the beginning of the plague.

Samuel K. Cohn, cited extensively by Baillie also rejected the theory that the Black Death was a bubonic plague. In Encyclopedia Population, points out the five weakest points of this theory: 
 

Very different speeds of transmission - The Black Death was reported to travel 385km in 91 days in 664, compared to 12-15km per year for the modern Bubonic Plague which was assisted by trains and automobiles. 

Difficulties with attempting to explain the rapid spread of the Black Death by arguing that it was caused by a rare form of pneumonic disease - in fact this form killed less than 0.3% of the infected population in its worst outbreak in Manchuria in 1911. 

Different seasons - the modern plague can only sustain itself at temperatures between 10 and 26°C and requires high humidity, while the Black Death occurred even in Norway in the middle of winter and in the Mediterranean in the middle of dry, hot summers. 

Very diverse mortality rates - in many places (including Florence in 1348) more than 75% of the population appears to have died; In contrast, the highest mortality for the Bubonic Plague was 3% in Bombay in 1903. 

The cycles and trends of infection were very different between the diseases, humans did not develop resistance to the modern disease, but resistance to the Black Death grew sharply, eventually becoming a disease primarily of children. 

Cohn also points out that while the identification of the disease of having buboes lies in the account of Boccatius and others, they described buboes, abscesses, rashes and carbuncles all over the body, while the modern disease rarely has more than one bubo, more commonly in the groin, and is not characterized by abscesses, rashes and carbuncles which is what Bocacio described!

The essence of Cohn's argument is that what caused the Black Death was not the bubonic plague. (See also: Samuel K. Cohn 2002. "The Black Death: End of the Paradigm" and The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (European History Series) by David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn). 

When we started searching on the subject, we came across a study indicating that dental tissue, in a fourteenth century plague cemetery in Montpellier, tested positive for molecules associated with Y. pestis (bubonic plague). Similar findings were reported in a 2007 study, but other studies have not supported these results. In fact, in September 2003, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford tested 121 teeth from 66 skeletons found in mass graves from the 14th century. 

The remains showed that there was no genetic trace of Y. pestis, and the researchers suspected that the Montpellier study was falsified. 

What these studies do not address is the problem that the apparent means of infection or transmission varied widely, from human-human contact in Iceland (rare for a plague and cutaneous Bacillus anthracis) to infection in the absence of life or recently dead humans such as in Sicily (against most viruses). 

To all the problems with the Bubonic Plague theory, we must add what contemporary writers wrote. Philip Ziegler collected many of these articles in his book Black Death, although he rejects them for being "metaphors." We'll look at some of them just in a moment. 

Mike Baillie didn't start out writing a book about cometary impacts involved in the great pandemics of the past; He alone observed the tree rings with strange patterns that ended up coinciding with this historical catastrophe and thought, perhaps, that there was an environmental decline that weakened the human population, making it susceptible to large-scale viral or bacterial death. But, what he found was a line of research that, once he began to sort it out, unraveled the "accepted knowledge" about the Black Death and introduced him to a search that led him to surprising conclusions. 

As we mentioned, the first key was tree rings - that's natural considering Baillie is a dendrochronologist. He compared these rings with the ice samples analyzed and discovered something very strange: ammonium. There are four occasions in the last 1,500 years when scientists can confidently link ammonium from the Greenland ice sheets to high-energy atmospheric interactions caused by objects from space: 539, 626, 1014 and 1908 - the Tunguska event. In short, there is a connection between ammonium in ice sheets and extraterrestrial bombardment of the Earth's surface. 

Now note that the statement mentions that there are four events that can definitely be related to high energy interactions; Baillie presents the research in this book stating that the same signature is present at the time of the Black Death in both tree rings and ice sheets, AND in other times of the so-called "plague and pandemic." 

It turns out that the ammonium signal in the ice cores is directly related to an earthquake that occurred on January 25, 1348 - and Baillie discovers that there was a 14th century writer who wrote that the plague was a "corruption of the atmosphere!" What happened because of this earthquake!

You may wonder, how can a plague originate from an earthquake?

Baillie points out that we don't always know if earthquakes are caused by tectonic movements; They could be caused by cometary explosions in the atmosphere or even by impacts on the Earth's surface. 

In Rain Iron Ice by John Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, co-director of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering and Research Center, and Head of the Arizona State Space Commission, tells us that the earth is regularly hit by extraterrestrial objects and that many of the impacting bodies explode in the atmosphere as happened in Tunguska, leaving no craters or lasting visible evidence. 

But just because there is no lasting evidence doesn't mean there isn't a significant effect on the planet or its inhabitants! These impacts or atmospheric explosions can produce earthquakes or tsunamis without witnesses knowing the cause. After all, the earth is made up of 75% water and any witness to such an event is more likely to be fried and never told the story, so we have no way of really knowing if all earthquakes on our planet are tectonic in nature or not. 

Lewis notes: 
In an average year there is an atmospheric explosion of about 100 kilotons or more. The vast majority occur in remote areas, or so high in the atmosphere, that they are not observed. Even if they were, witnesses would only see a flash of light in the distance, or hear the sound of distant thunder coming from the open ocean. Even those that are commonly observed are not recognized. (Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice).

As Baillie points out, Lewis is talking about a "typical" year and it's obvious, given other studies, that not all years are the same - some are less typical than others. Baillie writes:

As Lewis pointed out, we know from many lines of evidence that the incidence rate is broadly due to time. Just because the impacts are not in the historical record [or not admitted or debated by historians or archaeologists] does not mean they did not happen. After all, there are a good number of crater fields that formed in the last few millennia in Estonia, Poland, Germany and Italy (which were not recorded historically, their existence is inferred from holes in the ground). So we know the registration mechanism is faulty! What needs to be added... is a key piece of intuitive thinking. Here is a quote from Lewis's Scenario D: 

(In this scenario) In 1946, a 25,000 metric ton fireball explodes at 4:00 AM local time at a height of 11 kilometers above Fergana in Uzbekistan. The 1-megaton explosion damages buildings over an area several kilometers in diameter, covering the area with intense heat and starting thousands of fires. The fires burn out of control, killing 4,146 people. More than 20,000 residents are awakened by the brilliant flash of light and heat to discover their city in flames. Survivors report an 'earthquake'. Several tons of meteorite fragments are mixed with debris from 2,000 burned buildings in which pieces of brick and stone can be distinguished. (Lewis quoted by Baillie)

The point is that there is virtually no way to monitor whether the disaster or catastrophe is definitely an impact or a violent earthquake. The result is that centuries could pass, with constant cometary impacts, without anyone suspecting the real dangers from space! As Baillie points out: there are many earthquakes recorded historically, but NOT impacts! And yet, there is evidence that impacts have occurred – on the ground, and in the ice records. And there is Tunguska. 

Reports of the Tunguska event tell us that it shook the terrain around the explosion/impact area for a radius of about 900 kilometers. At the moment of greatest impact, the earthquake would be proportionately more severe. Anyone far enough away to survive would only have seen a flash, felt a tremor, and heard a loud noise. If they were too far away to see the flash, or inside their homes, they would have only reported an earthquake. 

In short, what Lewis's work brings to the table is the idea that some well-known historical earthquakes could very well have been impact events. Baillie mentions that one obvious possibility is the great Antioch earthquake of 526 AD, which was described by John Malalas: 
 

... those trapped in the ground beneath the buildings were incinerated and sparks of fire rose from the air and burned all those it struck like lightning. The surface of the earth boiled and the foundations of the buildings were shaken by lightning from the earthquakes and were reduced to ashes by fire... it was a huge and incredible wonder with fires coming out of the rain, rain falling from huge furnaces, the flames dissolving into jets... as a result Antioch was desolated... some 250,000 people perished in this horror. (Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M. and Scott, R. 1986, Juan Malala's Chronicle, Byzantina Australiensia, Australian Assoc. Byzantine Studies 4, of Melbourne.)

Baillie also points out that a series of such impacts and explosions at altitude more adequately explain the long-standing problem of the late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean of the 12th century BC. At that time, many - countless - important sites were completely destroyed and burned, and everything has been blamed on the supernatural "Sea People". If that was the case, if it was from invasion and conquest, there should at least be some evidence, such as dead warriors or signs of battle... But for the most part, that's not the case. Almost no bodies were found, nor were any precious objects, except those that were hidden as if someone was waiting to come back for them, or that they did not have time to recover. The people who fled (extraterrestrial events usually give advance warning as a comet can be observed approaching for some time) were also probably killed in the act of fleeing, and the result was the abandonment and total destruction of the cities in question. 

And the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Thus, the possibility that many of the destructions of the past could have been related to impact events has never been taken seriously or tested and this may be a dangerous mistake.

The question Baillie poses but never really answers is: What is it that so successfully prevented people from asking why the deep, traditional fear of comets exists in the psyche of humanity? He points out that there are certainly people outside mainstream academia asking these questions. But why, against all good common sense, is this topic so widely and systematically ignored, marginalized and ridiculed? The strange thing is that even when he points out that many high-level scientists and government agencies are taking these things seriously (Lewis, for example), they are still ignored, marginalized and ridiculed before the general public through the mass media! ! Baillie writes: 
 

In case the reader thinks this is just rhetoric, this is a good time to mention a future event. On April 13, 2029, an asteroid called Apophis will pass by Earth at a distance of no less than 50,000 kilometers. If you are alive by then, and it is not cloudy, you will be able to see it pass with the naked eye. Apophis is more than 300 meters in diameter. If, as it passes by the Earth, it happens to pass through a certain narrow window in space, then in 2036 it will return and hit the Earth (this narrow window is a point at which the Earth's gravity would deflect the orbit of Apophis just enough to ensure an impact in 2036). If Apophis hits the Earth the impact will be in the 3000 megaton class. It is entirely reasonable to declare that such an impact, taking place anywhere on the planet, would collapse our civilization and return the survivors to the Dark Ages, metaphorically speaking (it is believed that in such an event globalized institutions, such as financial and insurance markets, would collapse. collapse, taking with them the interconnected monetary, commercial and transportation systems). Space impacts are not fiction and it seems quite likely that a large number of them have occurred in the last few millennia (beyond the small examples of cratering already mentioned.) It's just that, for some reason, most of the People who study the past have chosen to evade or ignore the issue. (Baillie)

Along with science, Baillie cites contemporary evidence - some of this evidence has been relegated to "myth" - from around the globe indicating that the Earth was indeed subject to bombardment from space during the fourteenth century and that this may well have been not only the cause of the earthquake of January 25, 1348, but also the cause of the Black Death. Baillie cites a large selection of contemporary story material including Ziegler's work cited above: 
 

Droughts, floods, earthquakes, locusts, underground thunder, storms never seen before, curtains of fire, hail of incredible size, fire from heaven, stinking smoke, corrupt atmosphere, a great rain of fire, masses of smoke. (Ziegler)

Ziegler completely discards reports of a black comet that would have been seen before the arrival of the epidemic but records: clouds and thick fog, shooting stars, jets of hot wind, a column of fire, a fireball, a violent earth tremor , in Italy an increase in calamities involving earthquakes, after which the plague arrived. (Baillie) 

It turns out that in the 1340s there was a real eruption of earthquakes. In Rosemary Horrox's book, The Black Death, cited by Baillie, we find that a contemporary writer in Padua reported that not only was there a great earthquake on January 25, 1348, but that it occurred at the twenty-third hour. 
 

In the twenty-first year of Emperor Lewis, around the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25) there was an earthquake through Carinthia and Carniola that was so severe that everyone feared for their lives. There were repeated crashes and in one night the Earth shook 20 times. Sixteen cities were destroyed and their inhabitants killed... Thirty-six mountain fortresses and their inhabitants were destroyed and it was estimated that more than 40,000 men were swallowed or buried.

(The author goes on to say that he received information from "a letter from the house of Friesach to the Prior Provincial of Germany."): 
 

It says in the same letter that in this year [1348], fire falling from the sky consumed the land of the Turks for 16 days; that for some days it rained toads and snakes, for which many men died: that the pestilence gained strength in many parts of the world. (Horrox).

Del libro de Samuel Cohn: 
...a dragon in Jerusalem like that of Saint George that devoured everything that crossed its path... A city of 40,000... completely demolished by the fall from the sky of a large number of worms, as big as a fist and with eight legs, which killed everyone with their poisonous vapors and fumes. (Cohn)

A story by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo: 
...massive rains of worms and snakes in parts of China, which devoured large numbers of people. Also in those parts fire rained from Heaven in the form of snow (ash), which burned mountains, earth and men. And from this fire rose a pestilent smoke that killed all those who smelled it in the space of twelve hours, as well as those who only saw the poison of the pestilential smoke. (Cohn)

Cohn writes: 
Nor were such stories mere introductory chatter from gullible merchants and possibly crazed friars...[even]...Petrarch's closest friend, Louis Sanctus, before embarking on his careful reportage of the plague...declared that in September floods of frogs and snakes across India had presaged the arrival in Europe in January of the three pestilent Genoese galleys... [even]... the English chronicler Henry Knighton... [reported how]... in Naples The entire city was destroyed by earthquakes and storm. Many chroniclers reported earthquakes around the world, which foreshadowed the unprecedented plague. Most placed the event at the evening time of January 25, 1348. [...] 

Of these earthquakes that destroyed many cities, towns, churches, monasteries, towers, along with their people and beasts of burden, the one that received the worst impact was Villach in southern Austria. Chroniclers in Italy, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Poland said that it was completely submerged by the earthquake with one in ten surviving. (Cohn)

A continental text dated Sunday, April 27, 1348 says: 
 

They say that in three months from January 25 [1348] to date, a total of 62,000 bodies were buried in Avignon. (Horrox)

A German treatise discovered by Horrox says: 
 

While mortality arose from natural causes its immediate cause was a corrupt and poisonous terrestrial exhalation, which infected the air in various parts of the world... I say it was the steam and corrupt air that was ventilated - or purged so to speak - in the earthquake that occurred on St. Paul's Day [1348], along with the corrupt air vented in other earthquakes and eruptions, which has infected the air above the earth and killed people in various parts of the world . (Horrox)

As Baillie observes, if this oft-cited earthquake was actually the result of comet impacts then the corrupted air could have had one of two causes: high-energy chemical transformations in the atmosphere or gas emanations from the earth itself. 

The German historian Hecker informs us:

On the island of Cyprus the eastern plague had already begun, when an earthquake shook the foundations of the island, and was accompanied by a hurricane so frightening that its inhabitants... fled in alarm... The sea overflowed... Before the earthquake, a pestilent wind spread a smell so poisonous that many, overcome by it, fell suddenly and expired in terrible agonies. ...and as at that time natural events were transformed into miracles, it was reported that a fiery meteor, which descended on the earth far in the east, had destroyed everything within a circumference of more than a hundred leagues, infecting the air at great distances. (Cohn)

Jon Arrizabalaga compiled a selection of writings in an attempt to understand what educated people were saying about the Black Death while it was happening. Regarding the terms used by doctors and other medical people in 1348 to describe the plague, he writes: 

Agramaont treated it in terms of an "epidemic or pestilence and mortalities of people" that threatened Lerida from "some parts and regions neighboring ours"... Agramont did not say anything concerning the term epidemic, but he developed extensively what he wanted. say with pestilence. He gave the latter term a very peculiar etymology, according to a form of knowledge established by Isidore of Seville (570-636) in his Etymologiae, which became widely accepted throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. He divided the term pestilence into three syllables, each with a particular meaning: pes = tempest: 'storm, tempest'; te= 'temps, time', lencia = clardat: 'brilliance, light'; Therefore, he concluded, the pestilence was 'the time of the tempest caused by the light of the stars.'

It so happens that Isidore of Seville lived not long after another period of comet bombardment of Europe that is also evident in studies of tree rings and ice cores. On August 17, 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by Robert S. Boyd titled: Comets could have caused the fall of Earth's great empires, including the following: 
 

Analysis of tree rings shows that in 540 AD in different parts of the world the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to slow the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America. 

A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from heaven during the same period, it is claimed. There was a reference to a "comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire" in 540-41. 

According to legend, King Arthur died around this time and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hint at luminous gods in the sky and jets of fire. 

In the 530s, both Mediterranean and Chinese observers recorded an unusual meteor shower. Meteors are caused by fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 saying that the Earth must have been at risk of comet bombardment between 400 and 600 AD. [...] 

Famine followed the failure of crops, and right after came the bubonic plague that swept Europe in the mid-sixth century. [...] 

At this time the Roman Emperor Justinian was attempting to regenerate the declining Roman Empire. But the plan failed in 540 and the Dark Ages and the rise of Islam followed.

There is a lot of material from that period that consistently points to a "corrupt atmosphere," "breathe the air and you die," and somehow the ocean was involved as were earthquakes and comets and fireballs in the sky. A report from the Paris Faculty of Medicine prepared in October 1348 says: 

Another possible cause of corruption that needs to be kept in mind is the escape of rot trapped in the center of the earth as a result of earthquakes - something that has indeed occurred recently. (quoted by Baillie)

In short, the French were aware of a series of earthquakes at the time that may have been caused by comet impacts. One report from that period says that an earthquake lasted six days and another states that the period was ten days. Such events could also produce off-gassing of all sorts of nasty chemicals that could be deadly. Consider the following: 

The Lake Nyos gas explosion, Cameroon 1986

[...]Although a sudden release of CO2 gases had already occurred at Lake Monoun in 1984, killing 37 residents locals, a similar threat from Lake Nyos was not anticipated. However, on August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption occurred in Lake Nyos that triggered the sudden release of around 1.6 million tons of CO2. The gas spread downslope into two nearby valleys, displacing all the air and suffocating about 1,800 people within 20 kilometers of the lake, most of them rural villagers, as well as 3,500 head of livestock. Some 4,000 residents fled the area, many of whom developed respiratory problems, burns and paralysis as a result of the gases. 

It is not known what triggered the catastrophic gas release. Most geologists suspect an avalanche, but some believe a small volcanic eruption may have occurred at the bottom of the lake. [...] 

It is thought that up to a cubic kilometer of gas was released. Because CO2 is denser than air, the gas flowed from the mountain flank on which Lake Nyos lies and descended into two adjacent valleys in a layer ten meters deep, displacing the air and suffocating all the people and animals before it could dissipate. The lake's normally blue waters turned deep red after the gas erupted, as iron-rich water rose to the surface and was oxygenated by the air. The level of the lake dropped by around one meter, equivalent to the volume of gas released. The release probably also caused the lake's waters to overflow. Trees near the lake were blown down.

Hmm... one wonders if similar events occur as a result of comet impacts and if the outgassing of oceans could be equally dangerous and deadly. One also wonders, considering that the trees were "felled", whether this emanation would not have been an impact event.

Baillie takes us through the science with figures and graphs and shows us how those who experienced the Black Death spoke of these things plainly, but for some reason, all modern historians thought that these comments about rains of fire and death and air that could kill were just metaphors for a horrible disease. In the end, it is science that must prevail in this because all the people who work completely independently studying comets, tsunamis, carbon dioxide, ice cores and tree rings observe in their data that something very strange occurred at the level. global around the time the Black Death decimated the human population on Earth. 

In his conclusions, worth reproducing here, Baillie observes: 
 

It is increasingly evident that in intellectual terms the world is divided in two. There are those who study the past in the fields of history and archeology and see no evidence that human populations have been affected by impacts from space. In a diametrically opposite position are those who study the objects that pass near this planet and sometimes collide with it. Some serious members of the latter group have no doubt whatsoever that numerous devastating impacts must have occurred over the past five millennia; the period of human civilization.

And yet no one talks about it.

There is actually enough data in Baillie's book to support the theory that the Black Death was due to an impact of comet debris similar to the impacts on Jupiter by fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy in 1994. As to how these deaths occurred, there are many possibilities: earthquakes, floods (tsunamis), fire rains, chemicals released by high-energy explosions into the atmosphere, including ammonium and hydrogen cyanide, and even possibly disease pathogens brought by comets. 

If it has happened as often as Baillie suggests, it may happen again. And if, as we suspect, Earth is destined to be bombed in the not-too-distant future, it seems there are more ways to die in such an event than simply being hit by a comet fragment.

If it has happened as often as Baillie suggests, it may happen again. And if, as we suspect, Earth is destined to be bombed in the not-too-distant future, it seems there are more ways to die in such an event than simply being hit by a comet fragment.

Dr Mike Baillie is Emeritus Professor of Paleoecology in the School of Archeology and Paleoecology at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. 

Baillie is an expert in dendrochronology, or determining dates using tree rings. In the 1980s he helped construct a year-by-year chronology of tree ring growth, stretching back 7,400 years. 

Sobre el autor
Laura Knight-Jadczyk is a seventh-generation Floridian American, Historian/Mystic, and author of 14 books and many articles published in print media as well as online. She is the founder of SOTT.net and the inspiration behind the Cassiopaeo Experiment. She lives in France with her husband, the mathematical physicist Polcao, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, four of her five children, her extended family, eight dogs, five birds and a cat.