Understanding the history of our world requires researchers of all disciplines to work together to try and build as true an account of the past as we can. Humans are notorious for telling the stories they want to be true. We also can sometimes lose information in the passing of stories from generation to generation. We understand the Cascadia fault in part thanks to the histories of the First Nations and the efforts of researchers to record these stories before they are lost. This is a relatively straightforward process where geology, oral history, and archeology in the Cascades and Japan all tell the same story of an earthquake and a massive tsunami.

Other stories are harder to sort and feel easier to dismiss. For instance, in the sixth century C.E., there was a sudden pattern of water miracles recorded in Italian texts, such as Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers. While miracles aren’t where one would normally go looking for evidence of environmental change, in this case, these stories pointed to a sudden societal interest in water-related issues. Working together, historians and geologists were able to determine there was a temporary and dramatic change in rainfall that led to myriad water-related disasters of varying size.

To understand this, you have to look at things from a political perspective. If you are in a place where the people are afraid of flooding rivers and other water-related crises, you want them to believe their government can protect them. Today, this would lead to politicians discussing plans to build new levees and drainage systems. In the sixth century, it instead meant politicians discussing how powerful individuals had performed water-related miracles to save the lives of communities. Just as we can’t always trust politicians to follow through and build levees, we also can’t trust historical leaders to have always spoken of true miracles. There may have been real lives saved in some instances, but all we know for fact is that the uptick in reported miracles reflected a region in crisis as too much rain led to environmental damage.

So, scientists, it turns out we need to know history to understand our Earth, and historians, you need to know science to contextualize our history.

More Information

Holy Water: Miracle Accounts and Proxy Data Tell a Climate Story (Eos)

“Beyond one-way determinism: San Frediano’s miracle and climate change in Central and Northern Italy in late antiquity,” Giovanni Zanchetta et al., 2021 March 20, Climatic Change