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Across western North America (WNA), 20th-21st century anthropogenic warming has increased the prevalence and severity of concurrent drought and heat events, also termed hot droughts. However, the lack of independent spatial reconstructions of both soil moisture and temperature limits the potential to identify these events in the past and to place them in a long-term context. We develop the Western North American Temperature Atlas (WNATA), a data-independent 0.5° gridded reconstruction of summer maximum temperatures back to the 16th century. Our evaluation of the WNATA with existing hydroclimate reconstructions reveals an increasing association between maximum temperature and drought severity in recent decades, relative to the past five centuries. The synthesis of these paleo-reconstructions indicates that the amplification of the modern WNA megadrought by increased temperatures and the frequency and spatial extent of compound hot and dry conditions in the 21st century are likely unprecedented since at least the 16th century.
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Smoke and Silkworms: Itineraries of Material Complexes across Eurasia
An anonymous author in late 16th-century France recorded 370 pages of art and technical recipes, among which are two especially puzzling entries: one for a medicine from the "east" that involved smoking rosemary in a pipe (a new medicinal device in the 16th century that had come to Europe from North America), and another for closing silkworms in a vessel in order to produce a gold powder. This essay traces these processes across Eurasia, and explores how such movement of medicinal and alchemical knowledge could occur across such long spans of distance and time.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734596
- PAR ID:
- 10106367
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- EDITED VOLUME: Entangled Itineraries of Materials, Practices, and Knowledges Across Eurasia
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 165-181
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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