Century-long drought appeared to be blamed for collapsing the ancient Mayan civilization, an age-old culture with remarkable ethnological aestheticism and a perplexing austerity. Though, the Mayans relished the occasional human sacrifice and they incorrectly predicted the end of the world two years ago, their civilization matched its contemporaries springing up in drafty European palaces.
A new study suggested evidences that drought caused the Mayan's civilization collapse. According to NBC News, minerals taken from a famed underwater cave, known as the Blue Hole along with nearby lagoons in Belize show that an extreme drought happened between the 800 and 900 A.D. was the time that the Mayan culture crumbled.
Based on the latest findings, LiveScience said the results strengthen the clues that dry periods were indeed to be blamed for the Mayan culture's demise. But study coauthor Andre Droxler, who is a Rice University's Earth scientist, stressed that the new study is not the first to link drought to the Mayan civilization's collapse.
Droxler conducted an investigation to measure the drought's effects on the Mayans. The Washington Post reported the Earth scientist gathered mineral deposits in the Great Blue Hole, which is a thousand-foot crater about 40 miles off the coast of Belize. Droxler's team took core samples from the sediment and looked at the ratio of titanium to aluminum.
When heavy rains came, The Daily Star said titanium from volcanic rocks ends up in the Great Blue Hole in Belize and the Atlantic Ocean. During dry periods, less titanium can be found. Doing the calculation, Droxler found less titanium from sediment samples dated to the Mayan's downfall.
"It's like a big bucket," Droxler said, describing the Great Blue Hole. "It's a sediment trap."
The team also discovered that during the period of drought and when the Mayan civilization collapsed, there were just one or two tropical cyclones every 20 years, as opposed to the usual five or six, as reported by The Daily Mail. Cyclones can be so strong that it can unleash destruction but they are also necessary to bring much-needed water, which prevents a pre-developed civilization from starving.
In recent years, evidence of drought that suggested the Mayan civilization's collapse had been increasing. Since 1995, Discovery News reported that scientists have been observing more closely the effects of dry periods. And a 2012 Science journal study explored a 2,000-year-old stalagmite from a southern Belize cave found the severe reductions in rainfall matched the periods of decline in the ancient culture.
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