Undocumented Volcano Contributed to Extremely Cold Decade from 1810-1819
ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2009) — South Dakota State University researchers and their colleagues elsewhere in America and in France have found compelling evidence of a previously undocumented large volcanic eruption that occurred exactly 200 years ago, in 1809. The discovery helps explain the record cold decade from 1810-1819.
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Cole-Dai said climate records show that not only were 1816 -- the so-called "year without a summer" -- and the following years very cold, the entire decade of 1810-1819 is probably the coldest for at least the past 500 years.
Scientists have long been aware that the massive and violent eruption in 1815 of an Indonesian volcano called Tambora, which killed more than 88,000 people in Indonesia, had caused the worldwide cold weather in 1816 and after. Volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect on the planet because they release sulfur gases into the atmosphere that form sulfuric acid aerosols that block sunlight. But the cold temperatures in the early part of the decade, before that eruption, suggest Tambora alone could not have caused the climatic changes of the decade.
"Our new evidence is that the volcanic sulfuric acid came down at the opposite poles at precisely the same time, and this means that the sulfate is from a single, large eruption of a volcano in 1809," Cole-Dai said. "The Tambora eruption and the undocumented 1809 eruption are together responsible for the unusually cold decade."
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See also:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121377379&sc=fb&cc=fp
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