Did Climate Change Kill the Roman Empire?

Dec. 10, 2008— -- Scientists have discovered extraordinarily precise data on rainfall in the Mediterranean region from 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. which suggests that the decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires may have been partly caused by climate change.

It is not likely to end the debate among historians, some of whom believe the fall was more of a transformation than a collapse, but it is a tantalizing bit of evidence. And the way it was collected is as intriguing as the fact that researchers can now analyze rainfall on a year-to-year basis, season to season, even many thousands of years ago.

For more than 15 years scientists at the Geological Survey of Israel and Hebrew University have been studying stalactites from a cave near Jerusalem. Recently,Ian Orland and geology professor John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison began the study of oxygen isotopes in these samples. The Israeli scientists have dated some of the stalactites to about 185,000 years ago, and they have reconstructed broad climate fluctuations over many years because the formation of the calcite deposits depends partly on rainfall.

But those records indicate averages over long periods of up to a century, and Valley wanted more precise data because of the current interest in global climate change. He can do that now, thanks to a new instrument that he has been trying to develop for over 20 years.

The first in a new generation of "ion microprobes" in the world arrived in his lab two years ago, just as an enterprising graduate student, Ian Orland, started working on his master's degree in geology.

"The advantage of the ion microprobe is it allows us to analyze samples that are a million to a billion times smaller than we could in the past," Valley said in a telephone interview. It the old days, say a couple of years ago, scientists used dental drills to collect samples from the stalactites, but those samples were about the size of a pencil point. A pencil point, in the growth of stalactites, can cover an entire century.

The ion microprobe uses a tightly focused beam of ions to analyze microscopic points in a cross section of a stalactite. These samples were first imaged with a laser to show annual bands that look somewhat like tree rings. Orland developed techniques to use the laser to image those points, even separating a single year down to individual seasons. The age is determined by measuring isotopes of uranium and thorium that decay at a known rate.