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What 500-Year-Old Transylvanian Diaries Teach Us About the Climate

Accounts from the 16th century show how extreme climate events affected communities — and could help us prepare for the future.

Jenny Lehmann
ByJenny Lehmann
The ‘society’s archive’ – contain reports and observations about local climates in bygone centuries.Credit: Gaceu et al., 2024.

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Our planet offers many sources of information on how past climates influenced the environment, such as glaciers, sediments, tree rings, and pollen. But to reconstruct past climate events, researchers in the field of historical climatology go beyond these natural indicators to examine those of society: the records and everyday-life reports of people who lived in those times.

Together, these insights from the past help to make more accurate predictions about how climate change will impact our environment and society today and in the future. A new study published by Romanian researchers in Frontiers in Climate presents just such findings from historical documents dating back to 16th-century Transylvania, shedding light on the socio-economic impacts of extreme climate events from that era.

Read More: Ice Core Represents 1.2 Million Years of Earth's Climate History

Researchers extracted climate-related data from diary and journal entries, chronicles, travel reports, and social records. These meteorological records ...

  • Jenny Lehmann

    Jenny Lehmann

    Jenny Lehmann is an assistant editor at Discover Magazine who writes articles on microbiology, psychology, neurology, and zoology, and oversees the Piece of Mind column of the print issue.

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