Climate Change Latest News 2015: Spanish Conquistadors Started Climate Change in Americas 100s Years Before Industrial Revolution – Study

Climate change likely started hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution as suggested in a recent study conducted by researchers from Ohio State University.

A study on the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday shows that the mining activities of Spanish conquistadors, with their "lust for precious metals," pumped trace elements and contributed to the change in the climate of the Americas, Fox News Latino reported

In exploring the history of mining and metallurgy in the region between 793 and 1989, Paolo Gabrielli of Ohio State University and other researchers measured the various trace elements, such as lead, bismuth, and arsenic, that were released into the atmosphere during extraction and refining of metals and then deposited in the core of the Quelccaya glacier.

They found that a spike in trace element levels occurred around 1480, the time when the Incas started expanding their empire and used bismuth deposits to make a new type of bronze alloy. However, the period following the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in 1533 recorded a huge increase in chromium, molybdenum, antimony, and lead levels that was not surpassed until the industrial revolution.

"The metallurgic activities of the Inca had most likely only a local impact on the environment surrounding their mining operations," said Gabrielli, a study author and research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State. "In contrast, the mining and metallurgic activities performed by the Spanish had an impact on the atmosphere of the entire South America continent," Gabrielli said.

The levels started going up until 1700 and stayed steady until around 1830, coinciding with the wars of independence in Spanish America, Fox News Latino said.

During that time, "rebel and royalist armies destroyed machinery, killed draft animals, and damaged mines and refineries," the study said, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.

"In addition, the scarcity of both [mercury] and labor for amalgamation, lack of transportation infrastructure, dearth of capital, and debilitating fiscal policies all contributed to stagnation in the mining industry during this time," the study said.

The new research also suggested that the Anthropocene – the proposed epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems – started earlier than the Industrial Revolution. With lead being found in Greenland ice cores, some researchers said the period begun as far back as the Greek, Roman and Medieval periods.

"This new epoch emerged discontinuously through space and time during human history," Gabrielli said. "In other words, our data challenge the concept of the onset of the Anthropocene as a synchronous global discontinuity in the global geological record."