Laser scans of an alpine glacier reveal a climate catastrophe in the shadow of England’s Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder.
A team of researchers using lasers to read the levels of lead pollution in an ice sheet on the Colle Gnifetti alpine glacier in the Swiss/Italian Alps compared their scans with historical English tax records detailing UK lead production. Their results show a drop in AD 1169 followed by a spike in AD 1170, which aligns with the events surrounding Thomas Becket’s murder. When the murderer, King Henry II was desperately trying to regain favor with the pope, and built a swathe of new monasteries, each one requiring several tons of lead.
Ice Scanning Pollution Levels in Medieval England
Professor Christopher Loveluck and colleagues from Nottingham University published their full findings in the journal Antiquity. This presented their analysis of the ice core sample from Colle Gnifetti showing a drop and then spike in lead smelting from AD 1169–1170, following the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his cathedral in AD 1170.
