NunyaBidness on Nostr: The Ravages of Global Cooling As the population of the Americas collapsed from ...
The Ravages of Global Cooling
As the population of the Americas collapsed from European diseases so did any kind of land management by human hands.
Vegetation went wild and drew down such amounts of CO2 that atmospheric chemistry changed. So much so that Europe itself froze in what is now known as the Little Ice Age (from approximately 1500 to 1750 AD). This era ended the Medieval Warming period when the Amazon was not a jungle but a savannah.
The force of growing things tore through the wide highways Orellana spoke of and engulfed facades of any buildings. Rain soaked through any roof timbers and fungus rotted them away. It all happened so fast that by the time the Amazon was explored again, nothing that had been described remained. It would be centuries before modern technology such as LiDAR could "see through" the jungle to find what Orellana saw.
(A 3D render created using data from LiDAR shows the urban center of Cotoca.)
(a, Location of lidar transect for the El Cerrito area. b, Canals (blue) and causeways (red) found in the area, some of them connecting the pre-Hispanic sites (red triangles). c, Lidar image of El Cerrito.)
As the population of the Americas collapsed from European diseases so did any kind of land management by human hands.
Vegetation went wild and drew down such amounts of CO2 that atmospheric chemistry changed. So much so that Europe itself froze in what is now known as the Little Ice Age (from approximately 1500 to 1750 AD). This era ended the Medieval Warming period when the Amazon was not a jungle but a savannah.
The force of growing things tore through the wide highways Orellana spoke of and engulfed facades of any buildings. Rain soaked through any roof timbers and fungus rotted them away. It all happened so fast that by the time the Amazon was explored again, nothing that had been described remained. It would be centuries before modern technology such as LiDAR could "see through" the jungle to find what Orellana saw.
(A 3D render created using data from LiDAR shows the urban center of Cotoca.)
(a, Location of lidar transect for the El Cerrito area. b, Canals (blue) and causeways (red) found in the area, some of them connecting the pre-Hispanic sites (red triangles). c, Lidar image of El Cerrito.)