How cold was the "small glacier" that the Ming Dynasty encountered more than 300 years ago?

In the history of more than 4 billion years, there have been many periods of significant global cooling. Glaciers once pushed from the poles to the equator, and the world froze, forming an ice age.

During the billions of years on earth, there have been at least three major ice ages in the world, including the late Precambrian ice age, the Carboniferous-Permian ice age and the Quaternary ice age.

After the Quaternary Glaciation, the period since about 6.5438+0 million years ago is called the post-glacial period, including 2 1 century in which we live, which is actually in the post-glacial period.

In the post-glacial period, there are still many low-order fluctuations in the global climate, such as the obvious cold period from 4000 to 6000 years ago, which made the global glaciers expand for a time and was called the New Ice Age.

The last obvious small-scale glacier advance occurred from13rd century to the beginning of 20th century, and reached its peak from the middle of18th century to the middle of19th century, which is generally called the Little Ice Age.

Later scholars made a detailed study of the Little Ice Age in modern times, and found that from the early Yuan Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty, the land of China suffered from extremely cold "Little Ice Age".

However, the Ming dynasty was even more unlucky, right in the middle, which was the coldest stage of the whole "Little Ice Age".

According to the records in the Five Elements of Ming History, the normal situation in Nanjing is that there are few snowstorms in winter, but in the Ming Dynasty, it was "extremely cold in winter and the river was frozen for several days". I'm afraid it's colder than the northeast today.

In addition, "Reading the World" records the winter weather in Anhui, and the book has "heavy snow for days, and the flat land accumulates three feet." Three feet is equivalent to about one meter. The thickness of snow in Anhui is one meter. If it happened today, it would be a shocking scene.

Is it cold in the south of China?

According to Guangdong Tongzhi, 1506, there is a thousand miles of heavy snow in Qiongzhou, Guangzhou, and the snow in the territory is several feet thick. At the coldest time, the snow line even covered the northern part of Hainan Island, so it is no exaggeration to describe it as freezing in Wan Li.

In Guangdong alone, tens of thousands of people froze to death, because southerners lacked warm clothes, and the cold weather led to a sharp drop in cotton production.

From the above historical records, it is not difficult for us to see that the land of China more than 300 years ago really suffered a protracted cold snap nationwide, and after the cold snap disaster, it was always accompanied by drought.

It can be seen from the ancient book Reading the World that the rain and snow moved southward seriously at that time, which led to the continuous drought in important grain-producing areas such as Heluo, Qilu, wuyue, Jingchu and Sanfu, and almost no grain was harvested.

In addition, a large number of livestock were frozen to death and starved to death, which undoubtedly cut off the lives of ordinary people.

During the Little Ice Age, the Ming Dynasty was tortured by cold and drought in turn, and the most direct consequence was a sharp drop in population, economic retrogression, social unrest, and even a change of dynasty.

1644 In April, King Li Zicheng led an army to attack the capital, and Emperor Chongzhen personally rang the bell to summon officials, but no one responded. Seeing that the general trend had gone, Emperor Chongzhen, who was only 34 years old, hanged himself under Jingshan Park, and the Ming Dynasty was declared dead.

Emperor Chongzhen will never know until his death that the demise of the Ming Dynasty really had something to do with "Heaven", because the Ming Dynasty was really unlucky and happened to be born in the coldest stage of the "Little Ice Age" on earth.

If I guess correctly, it must be very cold that day when Chongzhen hanged himself.

Some data show that from about 2040, the earth will enter the next little ice age of 250 years. I don't know what will happen then