The water system that helped Angkor rise may have also brought its fall
Monsoon floods and decades of drought were too much for the infrastructure to bear
By Bruce Bower
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.