A team of volcanologists has solved a decades-old mystery, tracing back to an obscure volcano in the remote Kuril Islands that caused a global cooling event in 1831. The discovery reveals that high-latitude eruptions can have significant impacts on climate.
Historical records show that the eruption led to crop failures and famines in India and Japan, as well as “abysmal weather” in Europe. Researchers had previously identified a major eruption occurred somewhere in 1831 but couldn’t pinpoint its location.
A sulfur spike in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica dated the blast to the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes. Further analysis of sulfur deposits pointed to an eruption that released about 13 teragrams of sulfur into the stratosphere, comparable to the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption.
The breakthrough came after a team led by volcanologist William Hutchison analyzed ash from the Zavaritskii volcano in the Kuril Islands. The sulfur isotopes and glassy shards matched those found in ice cores, confirming the volcano’s identity as the climate-altering culprit.
The discovery highlights the importance of patchy volcano surveillance worldwide. “It’s like a whodunit,” says Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge. The new findings demonstrate that even the most remote and unsolved eruptions can have significant impacts on global climate.
Zavaritskii’s eruption offers cautionary lessons for today. Hutchison notes that high-latitude eruptions can have big effects, contradicting previous assumptions that biggest climate-changing eruptions occur at low latitudes. As researchers continue to study volcanoes worldwide, the next major eruption could be a surprise, according to Oppenheimer.
The discovery sheds new light on the Little Ice Age, a 500-year-long global cooling period that includes the massive 1815 Mount Tambora eruption in Indonesia. Further research may uncover more secrets from this era of significant volcanic activity.
Source: https://www.science.org/content/article/ice-cores-finger-obscure-pacific-volcano-cause-19th-century-climate-disaster