Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
At the medieval city of Angkor, flooding after decades of scant rainfall triggered a devastating breakdown of the largest water system in the preindustrial world, new evidence suggests.
Intense monsoon rains bracketed by decades of drought in the 1400s set off a chain reaction of failures in Angkor’s interconnected water network, computer simulations indicate. The climate-induced crumbling of the system — used for irrigation, drinking water and flood control — hastened Angkor’s demise, scientists conclude online October 17 in Science Advances.
“Angkor’s critical [water] infrastructure acted to accelerate the impact of climatic disruption,” says study coauthor and geoscientist Dan Penny of the University of Sydney.
Complex infrastructure systems, from Angkor’s water network to modern electrical grids, consist of many interacting parts. Troubles in one part of a system can lead to the failure of other components.
Penny…
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