black death

A surprising study has uncovered a link between a massive volcanic eruption in 1345 and the onset of the Black Death, Europe's deadliest pandemic. The discovery reveals how a catastrophic chain of climate-driven events inadvertently brought the plague bacterium to medieval Europe through grain trade routes, killing between 75 and 200 million people across Eurasia. The research findings, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, challenges previous assumptions about how the pandemic began and demonstrates the complex interplay between natural disasters, climate change, and human society. According to the study a yet-unidentified tropical volcanic eruption around 1345 AD injected approximately 14 teragrams of sulfur into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing severe temperature drops across Europe for several consecutive