Why did professional skateboarding arise in southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence, or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors? It's fairly well-known that a drought in southern California in the mid-1970s led to a ban on filling backyard swimming pools, and these empty pools became playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the greater Los Angeles area. But a new cross-disciplinary study shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s.

“We often look into the past to make associations between climate and society, but as we go further back in time, the evidence for those associations gets thinner,” said lead author Professor Ulf Büntgen from Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “We wanted to find a more modern example that can show how climate affects human behaviour, where we had lots of data to look at, which is how we ended up studying skateboarding.”