Abstract
Indications of the climate of the Black Sea Region (the region up to about 500 km from the sea) are examined for a period of a few hundred years before and after 0 C.E. Much of the information is obtained from the work of Soviet scientists, some recent discovery regarding ice conditions on a high mountain of Turkey and from archeology of the region.
Levels of the Black Sea, the Caspian and that of the large Lake Van were on the rise at the time. The most plausible cause for the level rise of the latter two exitless water bodies is increased precipitation and inflow from the drainage areas; in the Black Sea's case a contributory factor must have been the level rise of the world's oceans. Pollen investigations in the southern European Soviet Union, as well as the large quantities of wine and figs grown on the northern littoral of the Black Sea at the time, suggest that the climate was a little warmer than at present. The pollen investigations intimate a temperature level about 0.5 °C higher than the ‘cold’ phase around the middle of the first millenium B.C. Support to the aforementioned inference is offered by the recently discovered ice conditions on Mt. Erciyas, Turkey, as they were 2000 years ago. It is also inferred that the precipitation level of the region was, generally, somewhat higher than nowadays.
Finally, a brief review is made of glacier, tree-ring density and peatbog data for Europe and North America. They all show that the period around 0 C.E. was relatively warm.
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In 1986–90 visiting with the Department of Meteorology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Neumann, J. Climate of the Black Sea region around 0 C.E.. Climatic Change 18, 453–465 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00142972
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00142972