Ta Prohm’s Haunting Ruins Are Also A 1,000-Year-Old Climate Change Warning

Ta Prohm isn't the most impressive ruin in the world. It's not even the most impressive ruin in the neighborhood. Angkor Wat sits only a couple miles away and it's the largest religious monument ever built. But Ta Prohm is more human scale and it's merged with nature once the humans left. Its original name was Raja Vihara, the Royal Monastery, and it was dedicated to the Buddhist personification of wisdom. But it's a new place now. Silk cotton trees and strangler figs have merged with the carved rocks to create new structures. The temple was built a thousand years ago, around 1186, just after Angkor Wat during the golden age of the Khmer Empire in what's now Cambodia. The Khmer controlled most of Southeast Asia and the capital city Angkor was the biggest urban center in the world before the Industrial Revolution. And they had incredible technology to support such a large congregation of humans. Southeast Asia gets heavy rainfall in one season and a lot less in another. So the Khmer built water management systems like huge reservoirs, canals, channels, and dikes that allowed them three harvests a year. It might have been the best technology of the time. And they built these temples at their peak. Khmer Empire ruler Jayavarman VII, who also built Angkor Thom nearby, is the man credited. But a man's name doesn't really capture the true size of this project. And then about two or three hundred years later, the society collapsed. It wasn't all at once, or for one reason. But one reason archaeologists and ecologists hypothesized was that environmental factors, otherwise known as climate change, overwhelmed those amazing water management systems. Drought and then flood would have destroyed them. Then a young Ph.D. student named Mary Beth Day spent about six years digging and found evidence for this theory in the form of sediment records in the reservoir. The ruling class abandoned this place. They moved south and then for four or five hundred years, the forest merged with Ta Prohm until it was, quote, rediscovered. It's a beautiful place, but it's haunting. What hundreds of thousands of people would be living here if the city had survived? It should give us pause. Our civilization is a collaboration with nature. A giant structure must sway with the wind and roll with the earthquakes, or else it will surely quietly fall. Hollywood films often depict the destruction of urban centers. The crisis comes at once, either in the form of a monster we can band together and fight, or as nature, unstoppable. But in reality, our biggest cities have died before. This one did. It just happens over a longer period of time. The rain falls, the roots grow, and nature eats what we build. The best technology of that time wasn't enough.