The Worst Year to Be Alive
the internet says 536 was the worst year in human history. its receipt was frozen in a glacier for 1,500 years.
Ask the internet for the worst year in human history. It won't say 1347 or 1918. It says 536. And every time, someone calls it exaggerated. So we pulled the records. Out of a glacier.
In 536 the sun went dim for 18 months. The historian Procopius, watching from Constantinople, wrote that the sun "gave forth its light without brightness" — like the moon. Snow fell in China in summer. Crops failed from Ireland to the Middle East — the Irish annals record "a failure of bread" for three straight years. Tree rings show summer temperatures fell as much as 2.5°C: the start of the coldest decade in 2,300 years.
For fifteen centuries nobody knew why. Then in 2018, a Harvard-led team drilled 72 metres into the Colle Gnifetti glacier in the Swiss Alps. In ice that fell as snow in spring 536, they found two grains of volcanic glass smaller than dust. X-ray fingerprinting matched their chemistry to a volcano in Iceland. The sky had been ash.
Five years later, while the world was still starving, the first great bubonic plague sailed into the Mediterranean.
Harvard historian Michael McCormick calls 536 "the worst year to be alive."
Verdict: NOT BS. The worst year ever is real — and its receipt was frozen in a glacier for 1,500 years.
The receipts are at bskiller.com/reels.
Sources: Science/AAAS (Gibbons 2018), Harvard Initiative for the Science of the Human Past, The Conversation.
Every claim in the film, checked against the record.
The full receipts — every claim, every source, checked against the record — are for BSKiller members. That is the whole point of the show: the receipts.