A coincidence is leading me down the research rabbit hole today.

Last night I was reading The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium by Robert Lacey, an enjoyable portrait of the daily lives of English serfs just before the Norman Invasion. In 1014, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of the few surviving written sources, “This year, on the eve of St. Michael’s day (September 28), came the great sea-flood, which spread wide over this land, and ran so far up as it never did before, overwhelming many towns, and an innumerable multitude of people.”

I’ve never heard reference to a tidal wave in Britain before, because they are very rare; a little digging and I found that there have only been a handful going back to 6100 BCE, caused either by earthquakes offshore or unusual meteorological conditions. Yet forensic geologist Dallas Abbott, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, has found evidence that a large meteor or comet struck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean around 1014, part of the largest Taurid meteor shower display in recorded history.

The Taurids are debris left over from comet Encke and are known for slow-moving fireballs with long smoke trails; research by I. S. Astapovich and A. K. Terent’eva found that 42 fireballs were part of the 11th century Taurids. One can only imagine what people were thinking about on the night of September 28, 1014.

Except that, in the modern Gregorian calendar, this date translates to October 4, 1014. Today, one thousand years ago.