MessageToEagle.com – The collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization left many unsolved mysteries and one of the biggest questions was how did the entire civilization disappear?
Researchers are now offering a possible explanation that could shed new light on the downfall on the Mayan civilization.
The Blue Hole off the coast of Belize, might solve one of the greatest historical mysteries.
The hole is an almost perfectly round hole in the sea and is nearly 1,000 feet across and more than 400 feet deep.
Minerals taken from Belize’s famous underwater cave, known as the Blue Hole, as well as lagoons nearby show that an extreme drought occurred between A.D. 800 and A.D. 900 at the time when the Mayan civilization disintegrated. After the rains returned, the Mayans moved north – but they disappeared again a few centuries later, and that disappearance occurred at the same time as another dry spell, the sediments reveal.
The ancient Mayan civilization collapsed due to a century-long drought, new research suggests.
Although the findings aren’t the first to tie a drought to the Mayan culture’s demise, the new results strengthen the case that dry periods were indeed the culprit. That’s because the data come from several spots in a region central to the Mayan heartland, said study co-author André Droxler, an Earth scientist at Rice University.
From A.D. 300 to A.D. 700, the Mayan civilization flourished in the Yucatan peninsula. These ancient Mesoamericans built stunning pyramids, mastered astronomy, and developed both a hieroglyphic writing system and a calendar system, which is famous for allegedly predicting that the world would end in 2012.
See also:
Ancient Ruins Of Xunantunich – Mayan City That Once Flourished
Ancient Time-Capsule: Mayan Village In El Salvador Preserved By Volcanic Ash 1,400 Years Ago
Beyond The Maya Temples: Ancient Bones Reveal The Everyday Lives Of Maya People
But in the centuries after A.D. 700, the civilization’s building activities slowed and the culture descended into warfare and anarchy. Historians have speculatively linked that decline with everything from the ancient society’s fear of malevolent spirits to deforestation completed to make way for cropland to the loss of favored foods, such as the Tikal deer.
“The evidence for a drought has been growing in recent years: Since at least 1995, scientists have been looking more closely at the effects of drought.
A 2012 study in the journal Science analyzed a 2,000-year-old stalagmite from a cave in southern Belize and found that sharp decreases in rainfall coincided with periods of decline in the culture. But that data came from just one cave, which meant it was difficult to make predictions for the area as a whole, Droxler said,” Discovery News reports.
The main driver of this drought is thought to have been a shift in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), a weather system that generally dumps water on tropical regions of the world while drying out the subtropics. During summers, the ITCZ pelts the Yucatan peninsula with rain, but the system travels farther south in the winter.
Many scientists have suggested that during the Mayan decline, this monsoon system may have missed the Yucatan peninsula altogether.
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