Scientists have linked the pollution of the ancient ice of Greenland with lead to major events in the history of the Roman Empire and its Spanish mines.
The economy of Ancient Rome was largely based on silver, an important source of which was the mines in Spain, which the empire inherited after the victory over Carthage. Local ore reserves were developed rapidly, it was smelted to obtain the noble metal, and the remains inevitably ended up in the environment. Some of this dust reached the far north, settling in the frozen ice of Greenland.
Do not think that history is an "unreliable" science. The evidence from some sources is supported by others; estimates made on the basis of some data are correlated with those obtained by other methods. Thus, the scrupulous records of ancient Roman bureaucrats about the amount of silver mined in Iberia correlate well with the level of pollution of the Greenland glacier in the corresponding years: back in the 1990s, it was shown that the height of production falls exactly at the peak of lead accumulation in ice cores.
In a new work by Oxford archaeologist Andrew Wilson and his colleagues, this accumulation is traced in detail for the first time - with a resolution of two years - and over a long period of time: from 1100 BC. until 800 AD Scientists had to melt the ice to a depth of 400 meters, carefully lifting the liquid to the surface for analysis. Not all of the lead found was artificial, but the authors adjusted for the action of natural sources, such as volcanoes.
In an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wilson and his colleagues presented an impressive chronology of 1900 years of lead pollution in Greenland, correlating it with documented events in ancient Roman history. So, they note that pollution reached its highest point during the heyday of the empire (1st century AD) - then it was six times more than in the pre-Roman period (XI century BC). Only after 165 years (the terrible epidemic of the Antonine plague), production drops sharply to the same initial level, at which it remains for many centuries.
The remaining moments of the differences are associated with other historical events: increased exploitation of mines with the arrival of the Carthaginians in Spain, the fall during the Punic Wars, the growth of the Roman period. It is worth noting that even at its peak, the scale of pollution remained extremely low - by modern standards. It was 50 times lower than in 1900, when the massive use of coal filled the atmosphere with a much more significant amount of lead.
Sergey Vasiliev
