Good news if you lived through the drought of 1934: First of all, congratulations, you’re pretty old and still truckin’ along! Secondly, a new study by NASA confirms what anyone who experienced it already knew: 1934 was the driest year on record in North America in the last 1,000 years.

The novel study used tree ring-based drought records from 1,000 AD to 2005, along with modern records. They found that 1934 was 30 percent worse than the nearest competitor (1580) and covered over 70 percent of North America. By comparison, 2012’s drought covered just under 60 percent of the continent.

“It was the worst by a large margin, falling pretty far outside the normal range of variability that we see in the record,” said climate scientist Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Present-day Americans are actually familiar with the conditions that caused the landmark drought: A high pressure system sat over the west coast for much of the winter, which turned away wet weather. A very similar phenomenon happened last winter, resulting in brutally dry, cold air. The high pressure system combined with dust storms created by poor farmland management practices to further suppress rainfall.

“In combination then, these two different phenomena managed to bring almost the entire nation into a drought at that time,” said co-author Richard Seager, professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York. “The fact that it was the worst of the millennium was probably in part because of the human role.”

Global climate change, officials say, is likely to only make droughts worse. While wet areas may get wetter, already dry areas in parts of the western U.S. stand to get even drier.

“The risk of severe mid-continental droughts is expected to go up over time, not down,” said Seager.