The Middle East region is reeling under drought conditions since 1995, and it is the worst in 90 decades, reveals NASA.
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Studying tree rings to better understand the region’s climate, scientists were able to get a complete history of drought in the Eastern Mediterranean dating back as far as 900 years. The more water there was in the corresponding year, the thicker a tree ring is.
The scientists identified the driest years and found patterns in the geographic distribution of droughts.
This recent dry period is “significantly drier than any comparable drought period”, says Cook, “which strongly suggests some kind of human component”.
“The magnitude and significance of human climate change requires us to really understand the full range of natural climate variability”, said lead author Ben Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement.
Between the years 1100 and 2012, the team found droughts in the tree-ring record that corresponded to those described in historical documents written at the time. The research is part of NASA’s ongoing work to improve the computer models that simulate climate now and in the future.
Share your views in the comment section below. The atlas is a compilation of records of tree rings from trees both living and dead from all over the region, including northern Africa, Greece, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
The study concluded that the drought in the Levant during the 1998 to 2012 period had an 89 percent likelihood that it was the driest 15-year period of the last 900 years, and a 98 percent likelihood that it was the driest 15-year period of the last 500 years.
Previous studies have shown that before the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011, when nationwide protests erupted against President Bashar Assad, Syria experienced one of the most severe droughts in recorded history. In other words, when the eastern Mediterranean is in drought, is there also drought in the west? Malta just reported its worst winter drought in 50 years, according to News 24, and farmers are anxious the lack of moisture will spell catastrophic consequences on their crops later in the year.
The area spanned from Southern Europe and Northern Africa to the Levant region in Middle East. The Mediterranean Levant region includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus, Palestine, Turkey and Syria. As it turns out, if one country of the basin is suffering from low humidity, it is very likely that drought is also present in others. The ring’s examination is part of the effort to understand the region’s climate and the reasons behind the water frequent shifting from one area to another.
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As for the war in Syria, Richard Seager, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Observatory, co-authored a 2015 study about both the drought and the war called “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought”. “This paper shows that the behavior during this recent drought period is different than what we see in the rest of the record”, he said, which means that the Levant region may already be feeling the effects of human-induced warming of the planet.
