There’s no use sugar coating it: According to one scribe in medieval England, A.D. 1110 was a “disastrous year.” Torrential rainfall damaged crops, there was an extreme shortage of food — and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, on one fateful night in May, the moon simply vanished from the sky.
“On the fifth night in the month of May appeared the moon shining bright in the evening, and afterwards by little and little its light diminished,” the scribe wrote in the Anglo-Saxon script known as the Peterborough Chronicle. “As soon as night came, it was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen. And so it continued nearly until day, and then appeared shining full and bright.”
Clouds weren’t the problem; if they were, the scribe would not go on to describe how bright and twinkling the stars appeared while the moon faded from view. Nor was the moon being blocked from view by Earth’s shadow — if it was, the skywatcher would have seen the orb become a coppery “blood moon,” not an eerie blank spot in the sky.
So, what made the moon disappear in an already terrible year? According to a study published April 21 in the journal Scientific Reports, the explanation for both the moon’s mysterious vanishing act and the rain-ravaged summer that followed may be one and the same — volcanoes.
Those volcanic events, which the researchers call a “forgotten cluster” of eruptions because they were documented by historians at the time, may have released towering clouds of ash that traveled far around the world for years on end, and simply blocked the moon from view.
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