WELCOME

"It was a very bad year for the Khmer," Penny

Oct. 18, 2018 by James Ashley

"It was a very bad year for the Khmer," Penny says of the city. "You wouldn't have expected it to be worse, or worse. It's not that there wasn't a lot of activity that day.

"But the water, the air pollution, it was very, very bad for the people in the city. Even in the city centre, people kept saying: 'Oh, they could not stay, they were really poor and we could not provide for them.'"

That last sentence suggests a very good climate for Angkor. But to see how this climate may have played out in the early years of Angkor, Penny and his colleagues dug through sediment cores and examined its history and climate. They saw that the water flowing into the city was more than half of its original capacity.

It became less than half. From the 1500s to the late 1700s, an unusually strong wind swept the sediment of the city, bringing it to the surface—and its water into the city.

Penny argues that the wind pushed up the sediment and the city began to flood. But the researchers also observed that the flooding could have taken place on sites that were already under cultivation and that people had moved around so that they might have been able to survive.

"When people died, they were all sitting at a stone's throw from where they'd been sitting," he says.

The researchers concluded that "a large percentage of the destruction was probably caused by climate change."

"The whole point of the study was that the lack of activity in the city and the lack of water in the city were both causes," Penny says. "It turned out that these effects were not just of climate change."

There were five possible explanations for the flooding: some of the river flowing into the city was likely to have been triggered by rising rainfall, some were a result of natural disasters, a part of the city was simply too hard to protect, and some were caused by the natural effects of climate change.

The researchers believe that the most probable explanation is that the flood occurred because the city was so prone to flooding that the city was not able to accommodate the floodwaters.

But the researchers also suggested that the reason the floodwaters were so strong was because the city was not able to cope with the floodwaters.

"It might have been the reason that they were so close to the ground that the water came quickly out of the ground and it would flow down the river so quickly that the rainfall was so low