They went looking for one thing and found something entirely different - from Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal at the American Geophysical Union:
The Remarkable Things You See in Ice Cores-Like the Black Death
A new paper is out in the AGU journal GeoHealth and it shows something that is truly remarkable.
Researchers looked at lead concentrations in an ice core from a glacier on the Swiss-Italy border. They wanted to know if there was a natural background of lead pollution and they pretty much got there answer.
There is not.
What’s remarkable though is how they found out: The Black Death.
When the mass dying began in 1348, iron smelting stopped. No one needed new iron, because there was plenty of iron around since many of those who owned it were now dead. The atmospheric lead levels dropped to almost undetectable levels during the great dying, and the graph below shows it:
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