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Abstract State or societal collapses are often described as featuring rapid reductions in socioeconomic complexity, population loss or displacement, and/or political discontinuity, with climate thought to contribute mainly by disrupting a society’s agroecological base. Here we use a state-of-the-art multi-ice-core reconstruction of explosive volcanism, representing the dominant global external driver of severe short-term climatic change, to reveal a systematic association between eruptions and dynastic collapse across two millennia of Chinese history. We next employ a 1,062-year reconstruction of Chinese warfare as a proxy for political and socioeconomic stress to reveal the dynamic role of volcanic climatic shocks in collapse. We find that smaller shocks may act as the ultimate cause of collapse at times of high pre-existing stress, whereas larger shocks may act with greater independence as proximate causes without substantial observed pre-existing stress. We further show that post-collapse warfare tends to diminish rapidly, such that collapse itself may act as an evolved adaptation tied to the influential “mandate of heaven” concept in which successive dynasties could claim legitimacy as divinely sanctioned mandate holders, facilitating a more rapid restoration of social order. 

Abstract. The mid-17th century is characterized by a clusterof explosive volcanic eruptions in the 1630s and 1640s, climatic conditionsculminating in the Maunder Minimum, and political instability andfamine in regions of western and northern Europe as well as China and Japan. This contribution investigates the sources of the eruptions of the 1630s and 1640s and their possible impact on contemporary climate using ice core, tree-ring, and historical evidence but will also look into thesocio-political context in which they occurred and the human responses theymay have triggered. Three distinct sulfur peaks are found in the Greenlandice core record in 1637, 1641–1642, and 1646. In Antarctica, only oneunambiguous sulfate spike is recorded, peaking in 1642. The resultingbipolar sulfur peak in 1641–1642 can likely be ascribed to the eruption ofMount Parker (6∘ N, Philippines) on 26 December 1640, but sulfateemitted from Komaga-take (42∘ N, Japan) volcano on 31 July 1641has potentially also contributed to the sulfate concentrations observed inGreenland at this time. The smaller peaks in 1637 and 1646 can bepotentially attributed to the eruptions of Hekla (63∘ N, Iceland)and Shiveluch (56∘ N, Russia), respectively. To date, however,none of the candidate volcanoes for the mid-17th century sulfate peakshave been confirmed with tephra preserved in ice cores. Tree-ring andwritten sources point to cold conditions in the late 1630s and early 1640sin various parts of Europe and to poor harvests. Yet the early 17thcentury was also characterized by widespread warfare across Europe – and in particular the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) – rendering any attribution of socio-economic crisis to volcanism challenging. In China and Japan, historical sources point to extreme droughts and famines starting in 1638 (China) and 1640 (Japan), thereby preceding the eruptions of Komaga-take (31 July 1640) and Mount Parker (4 January 1641). The case of the eruptioncluster between 1637 and 1646 and the climatic and societal conditionsrecorded in its aftermath thus offer a textbook example of difficulties in(i) unambiguously distinguishing volcanically induced cooling, wetting, ordrying from natural climate variability and (ii) attributing politicalinstability, harvest failure, and famines solely to volcanic climaticimpacts. This example shows that while the impacts of past volcanism mustalways be studied within the contemporary socio-economic contexts, it isalso time to move past reductive framings and sometimes reactionaryoppositional stances in which climate (and environment more broadly) eitheris or is not deemed an important contributor to major historical events.