Mike Baillie

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Michael GL Baillie (born 1944, Belfast ) is a British dendrochronologist and professor emeritus at Queen's University Belfast ( Northern Ireland ) at the Institute of Paleoecology . He is a leading international expert on dendrochronology and was instrumental in the creation of the Irish oak chronology in the 1970s and 1980s .

Dendrochronology and Dendroecology

Around the years 2354, 1628, 1159, 208 BC. BC and 540 AD, the growth or the annual rings of many trees over larger regions, sometimes even worldwide, were disrupted. For the years 535 to 544 AD in particular, sources in the Middle and Far East also reported on atmospheric disturbances and, according to Michael the Syrian , that the sun had only shone weakly for 18 months. The Justinian Plague also falls during this time . The dendrochronology could explain otherwise difficult to interpret traditions to the effect that a global atmospheric cloudiness took place at that time , which led to famine and epidemics ( weather anomaly of 535/536 ). Traces of this event were also found in Irish mythologies and chronologies, as Baillie specifically discusses in his books Exodus to Arthur and The Celtic Gods .

The cause of this climate catastrophe was initially considered to be a volcanic eruption with a VEI of 7 to 8. In 1990, however, a book appeared which, from an astronomical point of view, had come to the conclusion that especially in the 5th and 6th centuries the earth was bombed by Could have been exposed to comets. For this reason, Baillie favored this “comet hypothesis” for a long time. However, studies of ice cores in Greenland then showed that the event in year 540 ( Year 540 Event ) must be traced back quite clearly to a volcanic eruption. Analyzing ice cores and medieval Irish chronologies in particular, Baillie and his co-authors were able to show in 2013 that for the years 431 to 1649 AD, severe winters were associated with volcanic eruptions.

Book publications

  • Tree-Ring Dating and Archeology , London 1982 (Croom-Helm).
  • A Slice through Time: dendrochronology and precision dating , London 1995 (Routledge).
  • Exodus to Arthur: catastrophic encounters with comets , London 1999 (Batsford).
  • with P. McCafferty: The Celtic Gods: comets in Irish mythology , London 2005 (Tempus).
  • New Light on the Black Death: the cosmic connection , London 2006 (Tempus).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael GL Baillie: The Belfast Oak Chronology to AD 1001, Tree-Ring Bulletin, Vol. 37, 1977 ( PDF )
  2. ↑ Pilcher, JR, Baillie, MGL, Schmidt, B. and Becker, B .: A 7272-Year Tree-Ring Chronology for Western Europe, Nature 312 (1984), 150-52.
  3. ^ Bailey, ME, SVM Clube and WM Napier: The Origin of Comets, Oxford 1990 (Pergamon), ISBN 0-08-034859-9 , especially pages 72-78.
  4. ↑ Mike Baillie: Tree-ring chronologies present us with independent records of past natural events which, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, seem to link with some stories from myth, in: Krojer / Starke (Ed.): Kalendarische, chronologische und astronomical aspects of the past, Munich 2012, especially p. 127 ( PDF ).
  5. ^ Francis Ludlow, Alexander R Stine, Paul Leahy, Enda Murphy, Paul A Mayewski, David Taylor, James Killen, Michael GL Baillie, Mark Hennessy and Gerard Kiely: Medieval Irish chronicles reveal persistent volcanic forcing of severe winter cold events , 431–1649 CE, In: Environmental Research Letters Vol. 8, No. 2 (2013) ( PDF ).
personal data
SURNAME Baillie, Mike
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baillie, Michael GL
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British dendrochronologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH before 1970