- Nineteen prisoners use cutlery to break out of cells at Winchester prison
- France wants progress in Ukraine before Russia returns to G7
- Italy president begins talks to seek way out of government crisis
- Italian PM expected to resign as political chaos deepens
- Russia says US cruise missile test ‘regrettable’
- Kremlin - No date set for Normandy talks on Ukraine despite Macron meeting
- Egypt court hands out 6 death sentences on terror charges
- Putin says Russian nuclear explosion poses no threat
- Russian panel eyes alleged foreign interference in protests
- Gran Canaria wildfire triggers evacuation of thousands of people
- PM Johnson calls on Germany and France to compromise on Brexit
- Sudan's ex-president Bashir arrives at corruption trial
TEHRAN, Feb 02 -Directly or indirectly killing more than 55 million indigenous people during the European colonization of the Americas caused the Earth’s temperature to decrease, triggering a global climate change, British scientists suggest.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -From 1492, when Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas, to 1600, European colonists killed an estimated 56 million native inhabitants of the Americas either through direct warfare against them and societal collapse or by the imported diseases, such as smallpox and measles, which the indigenous people were highly susceptible to them, said a study conducted by a team of scientists from the University College London (UCL).
“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” said the study, whose title is “Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492.”
The study, whose findings were published in the Quaternary Science Reviews, added that wiping out up to 90 percent of the native population of the newly-found continent meant that around 56 million hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, of the land used by the victims fell into disuse and consequently became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation.
The amount of CO2 being sucked out by the plants was so enormous that it reduced the average global temperature by 0.15 centigrade in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the team said.
“There is a marked cooling around that time (1500s-1600s) which is called the Little Ice Age, and what’s interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a little bit of cooling,” said co-author Professor Mark Maslin.
“But actually to get the full cooling – double the natural processes – you have to have this genocide-generated drop in CO2,” he added.
During the Little Ice Age, the rivers across Europe, including the River Thames in London, would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal and disrupted agriculture triggered famines in a number of European countries, the study further said.
Air bubbles trapped in the layers of ice accumulated in the polar region helped researchers to detect a drop in concentration of atmospheric CO2 around the studied period.
Source: Press TV
Your Comment