Huge Drought Struck 16,000 Years Ago

Have you ever wondered just how bad the climate can change within a world that is constantly getting hotter? The results would be absolutely staggering. These results come from the journal known as Science.

With Curt Stager leading a professional team of international scientists, more than four dozen paleoclimate records were compiled. These records are samples of sediment cores in Lake Tanganyika and many other areas across Africa. The records that were compiled also explained much of the very extreme droughts that happened over the past 50,000 years. These droughts were known to have struck Africa and Southern Asia more than 16,000 years ago.

Climate change is just a natural phenomena

Around 17,000 years ago, cool melted water spread throughout the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. Now, while this caused a large amount of cooling in this region, in tropical areas, they were slammed with massive droughts.

These massive droughts were strongly connected in the Afro-Asian monsoon areas. This was a potential problem for many of the Paleolithic humans that lived in this area during this time.

There were many lakes involved in this “H1 megadrought”. The world’s largest lake known as Lake Victoria in Africa, completely dried out, as did Lake Van in Turkey, and even Lake Tana in Ehthiopia.

Other rivers like the Congo and the Nile rivers also withered in size during the time of the megadrought.

While no one really knows what “exactly” caused this mega drought to happen, there is much speculation. The main thought is that there was a shift in tropical rains.

Stager, himself, believe that there is nothing to worry about in the future because there is not much ice left to actually melt away. For the sake of much of the world today, many really hope that he is absolutely right about this idea.

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