 Welcome to the sixth and final press conference of this year's virtual EGU. So this is obviously a meeting of the European Geosciences Union and this year we have more than 14,000 abstracts and 16,000 people from across the globe participating in the meeting. So my name is Erin Martin-Jones. This is EGU Press Conference Assistant and I'll be hosting today's session, which will include a question and answer period, following on from presentations by all three of our speakers. So to allow members of the media to ask your own questions, we're obviously conducting this as a Zoom meeting. So once the last speaker has finished, please write the letter Q in the chat box to ask a question. I'll call on you to unmute and ask your question yourself or you're also equally welcome to type your question in the chat box and I can read them out as well. Hopefully this won't happen, but for some reason if Zoom should quit, we'll just start the press conference and give you all a couple of moments to rejoin the session. That's completely fine. And obviously there's lots of good stuff on the media press centre for EGU, so that's media.edu.eu, where you'll find the abstracts and documents relating to this and the other press conferences we've been doing. So please check there for more information. So I'll introduce our three speakers now just to make for faster transitions in between them. So obviously this press conference is all themed learning from the past, catastrophes, climate and cultural change, and our speakers are first up, Dr. Diagonma De Groot, who is associate professor at Georgetown University, the United States. Second up, we should have Dr. Stephen Powell in the audience. I'm here. You're here. Excellent. So Dr. Stephen Powell is senior research fellow at St. Petersburg State University. And last but not least, we have Dr. James Terry, who is professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. So I will now ask our panelists to come forward in that order to give a short presentation and then once we've heard from our three speakers, I'll open up the floor for questions. So I'll just stop sharing and Diagonma, you can share your, your slides. Well, thank you so much. Can you all see my PowerPoint. Yes. Okay. It's, it's a real pleasure to join all of you today. Thank you Terry for inviting me. I want to introduce you to an article that we recently published in the journal Nature entitled towards a better understanding of societal responses to climate change and in this article. We try and coin a transdisciplinary field of study that explores how past climate changes have influenced human history. We call that the history of climate and society or HCS. And this is a field of study that depends on what we call climate proxy sources. These sources are just something that can stand in for instrumental measurements before the instrumental period so that is before the late 19th century or so. There are proxy sources from the archives of nature like tree rings and ice cores that have embedded in their composition, the signature of past climate changes and there are our proxy sources as well from the archives of society, from documents or oral histories, or archaeological remains that testify to the influence of past climate change. So by combining these different proxy sources, we create reconstructions of past climate change and that just means graphs or maps that tell us how climate has changed in the past. This is a reconstruction of the last 2000 years or so this was created by meteorologist Ed Hawkins using pages 2k data. And of course the first thing it shows is recent extreme anthropogenic warming, but then it also shows a colder period that began around the 13th century and lasted through the 19th century CE called the Little Ice Age, a cooling of several tenths of a degree Celsius in the northern hemisphere. And it shows another maybe less cold and certainly less long lasting period in the sixth century CE that's recently been coined the late antique Little Ice Age. Okay, so there was quite a bit of climatic variability even before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, although it's not as extreme as what's happening now. And that realization which we can see in reconstructions or gain from reconstructions is the foundation for HCS scholarship. The scholarship is now pretty big. There's a smattering of recent publications that mostly focus on the Little Ice Age, mostly written by historians, but we have over 4000 publications now at the Climate History Network is a tarot database which you can access at climatehistory.net and that's not even a complete list. So there's a lot of publications and they use diverse methodologies, some of them qualitative. The statistical, the statistical workers tended to focus on Imperial China, but they also have a lot in common. They tend to focus on catastrophe episodes of societal collapse as it's called, or just crises that affected past societies because of climate change the argument goes. This is a graph from our Nature article that focuses on publications written by historians that focus on the Little Ice Age in Europe. So as you can see there's more and more of these publications. You can also see the overwhelming majority focus on catastrophe relative to resilience. And often these publications draw on a selection of case studies and might focus on the collapse of dynasties in ancient Egypt or Viking settlements in Greenland or the classical Maya or Angkor. A whole bunch of different case studies that supposedly show that societies collapsed when climate changed. So there's good reason for this societies could be disastrously affected by climate change as I think you'll hear in a few minutes. But we argue in this nature piece that HCS scholarship has suffered from recurring set of methodological challenges, they might use climate data inappropriately for example. They might focus on excessively large scales in time and space without considering local relationships. They might use historical primary sources, inappropriately at face value or ignore what can't be quantified, or pay it insufficient attention to uncertainty. There's a whole bunch of these recurring problems. And what we suggest is a research framework that's really just a selection of questions that researchers should ask themselves. To hopefully allow researchers to overcome these problems. And, and really what we're going for is inspiring researchers to work better with with each other. It's been a very multidisciplinary field, but an insufficiently transdisciplinary field, meaning that there are research groups that might involve a token historian or a token scientist but rarely do you have equal clusters of scholars from different backgrounds imagining projects from the ground up so that is really what we call for. We try and model that approach by examining and unearthing examples of populations that were resilient in the face of past climate changes. And by doing that we find that there are a number of what we call pathways by which populations could be resilient or adaptive in the face of climate change you can see the definitions we use for those terms here. So that past populations could exploit new opportunities created by local environmental responses to climate change. Or we find that they could make use of resilient energy systems so energy systems that did not change when temperature or precipitation change. And we find that resilient populations often drew on diverse resources through intricate trade connections, or that their institutions were particularly flexible, or that they migrated and in migrating transform themselves to better adapt to a changing climate and we find all these pathways by examining both the little ice age and the late antique little ice age. What we have of course is what lessons can we learn from these case studies that we can apply to the present. And one lesson would be that we should look beyond collapse when we're considering the past or even beyond crisis which would try and unearth more of these examples of resilience, because they might have something to teach us about what we should do to adapt to a warmer climate now. And also I think we should be more transdisciplinary when we conduct climate research so not just a drawing on one kind of scholarship but all kinds of different scholarships are necessary to play together in order to tackle these big research topics. Okay, thank you so much. Looking forward to your questions. Thank you Dr the group so and yeah once again if we if we save the questions up until the end. And if we move on now to Dr Steven power if you're available to unmute yourself. I'll share my screen now. Okay, can you all see this presentation. Yep, we can see that. Okay, so I'm just going to start. One of the societies that hasn't been looked at so much is the Mongol Empire and its fall, but it seems connected to the eruption of Samalas. Just in case you're not familiar with Samalas thought have happened, the eruption took place in late 1257 on Lombok, Indonesia, and the volcanoes effects are found in ice core samples all over the earth. But it was only identified positively, relatively recently by Frank Levine and all. It's the largest volcanic gas injection of the common era, releasing sufficient sulfur and halogen gases into the stratosphere to be responsible for the cooling of the later 1200s. So this is a look up we made last little frenzy and myself showing connections between political events and the breakup of the Mongol Empire and environmental and weather disruptions in the post eruption period of a few years. And you can see it's a truly global moment. Things were happening in Japan and Europe that have been emphasized in literature but in this middle area, which was in Brown that's the Mongol Empire. And you can look up into these different states where you can see the light brown barriers already by 1260. And we're wondering, how did that happen so soon after the volcano. There's two episodes that are very clearly connected. One is this number 13 here. And the next is the Civil War up in Mongolia 22 and 19 and 20 that seemed really closely connected to the volcano. So the epidemic of 1259 and the death of the last great Khan, Monka in 1258 59 he launched a campaign to conquer the Song Empire, the pink in China that unconquered part. And so there were three major army groups, the army group in Yunnan was struck by an epidemic in 1258. And then in 1259 the army group under Monka Khan was similarly struck by an epidemic and the Khan himself died in it, and that started the Civil War amongst his relatives it's a direct connection. But there were many documented epidemics at the same time in England, Iraq, Syria, Korea, we found in China, these seem to be ignored Japan. So these are always tied to the post volcanic effects. So here you can see the campaign, the black arrow on the left that's Monka cons, the great cons army and he reaches the how you can. And he dies there August 11. And then below that you see I in 1258 that's where the epidemic roughly struck the other army group, and it shut down there and almost killed their commander. He was infected. In the description of the death of Monka Khan in Rashida Dean's Chronicle, when Monka Khan was besieging this place the water and the air of the place gave rise to an epidemic to ward off the cholera as a father in Persian. And might, it might be a more general term the word world emperor began to drink wine and persisted in doing so suddenly he had intestinal pains and the disease came to a crisis, and he died. We found the idea that this could be cholera compelling in an earlier article because it's a waterborne disease carried by plankton. And it's endemic to the Bay of Bengal, all the global pandemics in the 1800s and early 1900s they started there. And after major volcanic eruptions in the early 1800s. There was always a major epidemic arising in there. Vaba and Persian sources in 1259 is describing a diarrheal epidemic it seems that was now the modern word for in Persian for cholera, and the fear of drinking water that's documented in the 1200 sources about this epidemic but also in 1800 sources in Persia, using alcohol as a as a way of avoiding the disease, or even treating it that's found in 1200 sources on this epidemic mystery epidemic, and it's found in 1800 sources. I would say, could, could Bengal if there if there was a hypothetical caller outbreak, could it reach Sichuan a couple years later after this volcano, a year or so. And there was in fact this major trade route network from Bengal to Sichuan that intersected Dali in them in the Middle Ages, the horse T wrote a Marco Polo this big road here this big red one. That drives the exact route from the cons capital, now Beijing to Bengal. And again I designed this with a co author, that's the, that's the frenzy. But the second point is the climate effects also influenced to one the civil war. So monkey cons brothers go to war after he dies, one's based in the step up in Mongolia, and cool icon was based in China, which seems to have been more resilient. I'm not mentioning this resilience and. But the steps on the other hand where they're really ruined by drought in the aftermath, and it absolutely destroyed Eric Booker's war effort. The volcano erupt volcanic eruptions do trigger this drought in North China and Mongolia and the capital was moved from Kara Korman Mongolia to con balik at the in 1260, which happens to be a very bad year of drought as events by the proxy data. And that's all in an important article, and that's documented in the sources all across northern China Mongolia drought famine during the civil war and it really hampered the step forces efforts. So here's just the conclusions the takeaway. Samalas has been ignored as an influencer on the Mongol Empire's dissolution despite records of environmental weather and epidemic havoc in the years after 1257, especially the immediate years with the volcano is one piece of a complex picture involving human choices social factors resilience again. It's not so cut and dried that this is a deterministic relationship. There are human choices monkey con chose to invade and besieged the value Chang even when he was warned by an advisor that there was southern epidemics, he just chose to ignore it and he died. But so it's not, it's not completely the volcano destroyed the Mongol Empire, but to leave this out of this discussion when we see this data, including the proxy data mixed with the source data which hasn't been heavily emphasized. And this is an important picture of how these important historical events that had real global consequences were influenced by the environment, and these things can serve as a reminder in our own time, perhaps a warning. So thank you very much for your. Thank you, Stephen. And so let's now move on to James, Dr James Terry, if you're about. Yes, I'm here. Thank you for the introduction and thank you Terry for the invitation. Please let me know once you can see the screen. Yeah, we've got your screen. Well, this work is essentially a case study that has been carried out in 2018 in a in a very remote part of the Pacific, in fact, in the in the northern Gilbert Islands of of Kiribati. Now in terms of paleo tsunami studies, the vast central and western Pacific region is somewhat of an intriguing anomaly, because although it's potentially exposed to tsunamis that could be generated around the entire Pacific Rim. In fact, the entire central and western Pacific lacks dated paleo tsunami records. And as far as we're aware there are none in fact that have been been dated compared to many that have been dated around the Pacific Rim. So Kiribati is one of the atoll nations there are five, what are called atoll nations nations that are entirely made up of atoll islands these low lying islands of often dispersed across vast regions. And you can see from the images here that these islands are essentially long narrow islands that encircle a shallow central lagoon, the particular islands that we're interested in are the are the atoll of butary tarry in the northern Gilbert's and and small making island which is which is north of butary tarry and you can see that it's just north of the equator, about three degrees north, and only covers really a few square kilometers but it does support a population of a few thousand people. So we became aware of, of named mega class and mega class is essentially a giant block of reef rock that has been transported, usually by waves up onto the reef platform, and we were told about several that have been mapped and had names. So I was invited by a former student who now works for the, for the Ministry of mineral resource development and fisheries his name is Robert Carraro, and he's there, and we visited making in in July 2018 for for a short visit to have a look at these, these mega class and here you can see them named ones there's rebuah and and talk here talk here is the one over here on the right in the booers is is on the left. And these really are huge I mean these are some of the biggest reef blocks the biggest mega class that I've seen on on the reef lap and in fact they're so big that they are the highest land on on the island, you know, this one here is six meters tall it's above above the tide or whatever stage of the tide you're at. And we measured this one and we measured the others. And we, we're pretty certain that we can identify these as paleo tsunami evidence, because for a start making is outside the tropical cyclone belt, you know elsewhere in the Pacific of course, you have both the north and south Pacific cyclone that periodically receive very large cyclones such as Fiji in the last few years there's been extremely intense cyclones but near the equator these events don't occur. And these, these mega class have have been rolled along. We know that because within them you have fossil corals, which are not in their growth orientation, they're both inverted coals in one of the blocks. They're sideways oriented coals in in another one of these named blocks. So this is, is pretty certainly evidence of wave transport by by possibly lifting and also by by rolling. There's even one which which is not on the platform it's just off shore and it was pointed out to us and it's distinctly separated from the from the reef by a sort of narrow chasm here so we had a look at this one, just off shore as well. And what you can do is of course because these are made of coral, you can take fragments and send them off for for dating we used uranium thorium dating which essentially naturally occurring uranium which is co precipitated in the coal while it's alive. Once it dies it then turns slowly into thorium and it works as a as a fairly precise atomic clock. The thing of course is the accuracy and the precision of the measurements are not quite the same thing. In terms of accuracy if you want to know when this rock was deposited we're assuming the coral within it died when it was thrown up by the waves. But of course you have to know which is the youngest end of this very large deposit. We use the corals to help us and we can identify which is the youngest end of the of the of the boulder. And from that, you know that our colleague Annie Lau in the University of Queensland. You know dated this in her lab, and the youngest date we have is AD 1576. So it can't be older than that it could potentially be younger, but we think that we've sampled the youngest part of the of the boulder. Now, and one of the most difficult things to measure believe it or not is is the volume of these things because of course they are in a regular shape. So Professor can add again co our co worker in the University of Alaska from a set of photographs that I took around the boulder did modeling and was able to determine the volume of the largest one. The rock really is a huge mega class and you know it's over 90 meters cubed, and probably in the region of 170 tons or possibly bigger, because people tell us that a smaller one next to it which is unnamed was at one time joined with it and since split off. From, from the size of these things you can use what are called hydro dynamic flow transport equations that you can then model the estimated minimum flow velocity of the water that would have been required to move these. And from that, depending on whether you're thinking of rolling mode or lifting mode, the speed of the water flow would have had to have been a minimum of between seven and 16 meters per second which is which is pretty fast compared to other similar work we've seen in the storm, the positive folders elsewhere in the in the Pacific. We're pretty certain that the wave must have come from the West. Why do we say that well because we were is the largest of the rocks and it's closer to this coast. Tokyo has been transported further away from the coast about 150 meters or so so it's certain the way well fairly certain away came from the West, rather than the other side of the reef. Now we were lucky when we were there to to be introduced this was entirely by chance. Serendipity came into play a chat here who has the official position of wind money other. And that means that he is the traditional story teller on making island. Well, not every island in Kiribati has a traditional story teller but that making has one it's a hereditary position that's passed down. And this chap has the responsibility of, of passing down to the generation beyond the traditional stories or history legends and myths of his island and it's essentially a way of archiving events from the past and things to do with genealogy and much like so he was a very friendly chap and he came with us out to the reef, and he was willing to tell us the story of three giant waves that occurred in the past. And this was wonderful because this was a chance to to to overlap and to marry evidence both from anthropology and also from Geoscience. And the story was was interpreted by again another colleague of ours Marta Retorek from my university, and the story goes that a chap called Baranto who may have been a chief was angered for some reason and he sent three giant waves in retribution. And he doesn't tell us when this occurred, but the oral history preserves what we think is credible evidence supporting a tsunami hypothesis because it doesn't contain any information about stormy conditions about dark, dark skies or, or other kinds of things to do with the weather which these stories normally do. The story doesn't contain any information about any rumbling or shaking of the ground again this information would normally be preserved in the source of legends and oral histories. So we think that this is what you might call an orphan tsunami because it didn't have an accompanying large earthquake and this is essentially the model of how we believe that the edge of the reef crest was broken and carried on to the shore or the reef platform to produce these these mega class. So, so what do we think caused this this tsunami then in the in the late 1500s in the 16th century. Well, of course, around the Pacific rim. There is subduction zone seismicity in other words very large earthquakes as we're we're all aware with the 2004 tsunami the boxing day tsunami and also with the 2011 to hockey tsunami in Japan is seismically driven earthquake driven tsunami. There have been records of events in the 1400s but this is about 100 years too early for our event if our dating is correct. Likewise, there was a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the mid 1400s in Vanuatu huge volcano blew itself to pieces. So both of these possibilities the dates are not quite right they occurred about 100 years too early and we're not sure if the waves would have been energetic enough to to have reached thousands of kilometers away in kid of us and thrown up these huge blocks. So what we think instead is likely is that this is an example of being landslide failure off the coast that generated a local large tsunami and we think that this probably happened in along this steep bathymetry offshore of making in this kind of direction. So what this means then is that this has implications for understanding the paleo tsunami history of the Central and Western Pacific which at the moment has a scarcity of information. This kind of work needs to needs to continue. And what it tells us of course is that there's exposure and there's risk in addition to the threats of sea level rise of course which these countries are facing at the moment. But what is important, it helps to highlight also the value of indigenous environmental knowledge to help add to the information we can gain from Geoscience. And together this this enables us to have a much better picture of disaster risk in some of these remote and potentially extremely vulnerable lowline island in the in the Central Pacific. Thank you for listening. I'll stop there. It seems and to all three of our speakers for that for their great presentations and so I'll open up the floor now for some questions so of course you're welcome to write your question in full in the chat or just type of let a queue and we can come around to you to ask your question yourself so any questions. I have one from Sarah Darwin and she says great talks. This is a question for all the speakers. It seems to be. It seems that most of the research tends to focus on catastrophes rather than resiliency. Do you think that this is a product of the geological record, preserving upheaval, or is this because of the human nature of human nature. Are we fascinated by chaos and destruction. I can start answering that one. This is actually a focus in our nature article as well when we explore that question. I think part of the reason there are several, but part of the reason is that when HCS scholars begin research projects are often trying to explain a particularly extreme event in the past. So let's say the disappearance of one of these Viking settlements in Greenland right. Why did that happen. This question has prompted a great deal of scholarship, because it seemed to coincide with the start of little ish. So they're trying to work backwards to explain disasters that have happened. And, and so that I think accounts for a lot of this focus on disaster. And I would add that the sources themselves the historical sources often describe, you know, in very, maybe even hyperbolic terms or at least in very flurry flow flurry kind of terms they describe these human disasters and catastrophes as a result of the epidemic for instance that destroyed the last great con of the unified empire and there's a sense of kind of horror, but you feel at any time that you read about this that how nature can overwhelm even the greatest armies of the time and can break apart the greatest states of the period, reduce kings and everything to, you know, victims of these on these catastrophes. So that that has a certain pole on on the reader. That's a good point actually when you're looking at resilience. So often you're looking at something that effectively isn't there. Right if you're looking at disaster in the past disasters can be very well documented. And, and, you know, with resilience it's often what didn't happen right so it's, it can be harder to kind of wrap your mind around that and find the sources for writing a project about that. And that reminds me I'm Martin bulk noticed around the time of 1258 there's a lot of accounts of bridge repairs in Germany. So you know something bad happened to the bridge, but you, but what you rather read about is the repair but that's not so interesting to reader. James any final comments on that one or I think both the both Steven and Agama have answered that question very well and the, you know, studying disaster risk and a disaster risk reduction of course which is the focus of the send I framework on disaster risk reduction very important UN framework. You know to understand how we can improve resilience. You must understand how the hazard works and the process is first, and then you need to understand the level of exposure as well. Certainly, in the person who asked the question Sarah is absolutely right there needs to be a focus on resilience building as well. Certainly in the Pacific, actually people are remarkably resilient they have all kinds of wonderful systems in place you know kinship. A tradition of helping each other in times of calamity. And so actually some of this indeed these indigenous methods are to be admired. But you know studying disasters and studying disaster risk reduction needs all of these things combined it needs an understanding of the geoscience of the hazards. And then it needs an understanding of levels of exposure. And then how can society, you know, both use traditional resiliency but also develop new solutions, often nature based solution to help us adapt into the future. One more thing. I think there has been, maybe assumption is too strong, but the kinds of models I would say that HCS scholars have used of causation have tended to assume that the most direct impacts of climate change on past populations have been through growing seasons and grain prices. And of course, if you use that assumption, then you will always tend to focus your research projects on periods of very high grain prices. And those periods are often closely associated with disaster so another kind of going back to the sources a little bit but also now thinking about the methods and the models that scholars use. I'm noticing all your research on these periods of high grain prices also tends to bias the analysis towards disaster. Terry, I noticed your question but if James and Steven want to add something else so shut up for a second. That's a good question Terry I think that, you know, we're all responsible for communicating what we can, you know, to help with with disaster risk reduction and journalism certainly you know and journalists need need to play their part as well. Unfortunately, I think what's often the case is that, you know, the resilience is not maybe so newsworthy as the impacts, you know, impacts make news and this as you say is sort of what people want to see. But certainly I think academics and I think journalists and anybody that has any kind of knowledge or understanding that can be shared should do what they can to increase awareness. And the example shown in Kiribati there in the Gilbert Islands I think is a wonderful one where where somebody actually has the responsibility to pass down indigenous knowledge of events that were not written down, you know from hundreds of years ago to make sure that future generations are aware that that they have been giant waves of course you know that they're not really or necessarily aware, you know what caused such events, you know what generated tsunamis and so stories are embellished and people make their own interpretations. But the important point is that the knowledge of the event itself and the kinds of damage that it caused, you know I didn't tell you everything about the stories in that particular context but you know that the giant waves were meant to have to have caused a favor of damage and geomorphic change in fact one island was separated from a larger islands and so there was a sort of reconfiguration of the coastline if you want to think of it like that. And that information has been passed on without any written record successfully over centuries and I think that's that's quite remarkable. And so you know I think we can learn a lot from these kinds of traditional methods of making sure that knowledge isn't isn't lost. So here's what I would say an answer to those questions and our article nature kind of partly addresses them, but first how researchers can work better with each other well the first thing is that researchers have to realize they should work with each other. Right so right now, a common problem in this field is that you might have historians or archaeologists who think they can use the paleoclimatic evidence for past climate change but might misuse that evidence. There are paleoclimatologists who want to use the historical or archaeological evidence but they might misuse it as well for example they might rely on accessible data sets without realizing that those data sets for historical change are not comprehensive. So, as you could probably tell from my presentation from the other presentations this is a highly, it has to be a transdisciplinary field, right we're talking about science, the science of reconstructing these past climate changes, but then also the humanities and social science that goes into figuring out the impacts of those past climate changes on human populations. So, you can't just assume that you know it all. I would say to colleagues, you have to try and work in research teams now what does that look like. Often research teams are flawed, because you might have 10 scientists who decide to invite one historian into the research team to figure out human impacts. Right, and if you do that you automatically marginalize the perspective of the historian. So that's not right either what you should really do is get together groups of people that are relatively equal in terms of the discipline that they represent. So let's say three paleo-climatologists, three historians, three archaeologists get together and start working on a research project from the ground up. I think that's a pretty good best practice. It's not the only way of doing this, but it is I think a good way of doing it. I'll put it that way. In terms of the role that journalists can play in communicating a message of resilience, well, so I've worked a lot with journalists and a lot with public outreach. And one thing I find is that the discourse is so polarized these days, right? On the one hand, you have terrifying stories of potential extremes in the future, which may well happen by the way, but there's been a real focus on that. And on scenarios called RCP 8.5 or SSP 8.5, the most extreme apocalyptic scenarios of our future. That's very common. And there's some reason for that of course. But on the other hand, you've got kind of the fringe climate deniers who still occupy way too much space here in the United States and I would say globally as well. What you don't have nearly enough of, I would argue, is more nuanced stories sort of in between. And those kinds of stories are, I think, most common when you look into the past. And I think one of the big lessons of the past is that this stuff is complicated. Unless climate change, of course, becomes too extreme, and generally impacts on populations are nuanced, and there's lots of examples of resilience and adaptation, sometimes in societies that are actually vulnerable to climate change. So it's really, really complicated to tease these things out. And what I wish for the media is that the media would focus more on these kind of complex stories. From my experience, there is a real public appetite for that kind of content. And I think I think it would be wonderful if the media assumed that the public would be interested in stories that go beyond these two extremes. Thanks, Sarah. You mentioned why do I, why do we think it's cholera? And the truth is with medieval diseases, how they understand them, the terminology they use, and often they're really vague descriptions mean that a lot of literature can be spent, just trying to figure out how to offer suggestions for what the disease was, but why cholera is so compelling? It doesn't have to be cholera to imagine this was affected by the volcano. But because there were a lot of epidemics, there was one in England that there's a huge mass grave in London that was found related to this 1258 environmental disaster. So epidemics can strike a vulnerable, worn down, stressed out, hungry population in cold or disruptive weather. This can just, it doesn't have to be cholera. But cholera is compelling because the response to it, the wine drinking, this exactly matches what an English observer in Persia saw in 1820 during the so-called first cholera pandemic. When it reached Persia immediately, the people had these set methods of whether they were allowed to or not, they were drinking all the alcohol they could find. And evidently, it's to avoid water. Rashida Dean writing about Monka Kahn's reason for drinking wine plainly says it's to avoid water. And in the 1800s, what you find too is that when cholera first reached Europe, in Austria, Hungary, the surgeon corps, basically they disinfected all the wells across Austria, Hungary. And there was a lot of suspicion in the Persian sources too from the 1800s that do not drink water from still bodies of water. If you have to drink water, drink it over water that flows over stones or drink alcohol. And this is even Islamic authors would say this and it went against their prohibition on alcohol. So the fact that this 1800s literature in Persia, and they call it Baba, just like that became the word cholera in Persian. I don't know if it was when Rashida Dean used it in the 121300s, but that did become the Persian word for cholera. So there's just and there's a description of diarrhea and fear of drinking water and terminology of intestinal cramps. So, yeah, there's a lot of reasons to think it's cholera. It doesn't have to be, but that's what I thought is a better suggestion than black death or malaria. Okay, services, thank you. And are there any more questions for our panelists. Could I just add one really last quick point after volcanic eruptions in the 1800s like Tambora erupted in 1815, 1817, a massive cholera epidemic started in the Bay of Bengal and it radiated across Asia and into, you know, that was the start of the first cholera pandemic. In the 1830s there were two major climate forcing volcanic eruptions as well and like clockwork, a year or two after major cholera epidemic in the Bay of Bengal. So, until they really started to get cholera under control in the mid 1800s that starts to skew things because now it's not happening in the same way they have quarantines and these massive measures to control cholera whether they understood it or not. So, when big volcanoes happened in the early 1800s, what we definitely know is cholera would always have a outburst in the Bay of Bengal and that has to do with probably with the heating of the Bay of Bengal the increase in plankton population and the stress on the population hunger drove weather disruptions. Sorry about that. But yeah, that's, that's the reason. That's fine. Thank you for adding that point. Anything else for our panellists? Any more questions? Okay. Well, I think we can leave it there but I'd like to say thank you to our panellists for this really interesting discussion and for taking the time out to present to us. And also for all of our journalists that have attended as well. So we'll finish there. And this obviously marks the final press conference of EGU. Hopefully next year we can welcome you to Vienna in person. But other than that you can find all of our press conferences for EGU so far and on our YouTube channel. So check out there and all of the materials, as I said, on our press center online.