by A climactic mystery about a year that took a deadly turn for the summer may have been solved. Using new ice core techniques, scientists have concluded that the dark, cold year of 1831 was due to the massive eruption of a volcano north of Japan.
The year 1831 was a very nasty year in terms of weather. Around the world, temperatures fell by an average of 1 °C (1.8 °F). The British Isles were flooded with rain to the point where it was one of the wettest years on record since that century, when the countryside was flooded. Blizzards ravaged the northeastern United States, and India and Japan suffered severe famines as harvests failed.
Even the composer Felix Mendelssohn took time off from scribbling his ‘String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor’ to note that during a trip through the Alps he was treated to ‘desolate weather, it has rained again all night and all morning, it is as cold as in winter, there is already thick snow on the nearest hills…’
It wasn’t the worst year ever without summer, but it was pretty annoying as these things go. In the years since, scientific consensus has favored a volcanic eruption as the cause of the disaster. This explosion, as we now know, was the equivalent of as many as 25,000 atomic bombs dropped from Hiroshima, which hurled enormous amounts of sulfur dioxide, amounting to 13 million tons, into the upper atmosphere, where it formed sulfate aerosols. These acted as small mirrors that reflected sunlight back into space, cooling the planet significantly.
Oleg Dirksen/University of St Andrews
The tricky part was figuring out which volcano erupted and caused all that aggravation.
Now a team led by Dr. Will Hutchison from the School of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of St Andrews may have the answer. Looking at ice cores dating back to 1831, the scientists used new chemical analysis techniques to find the “fingerprints” that matched the microscopic ash particles that were one-tenth the diameter of a human hair spewed into the air.
What the researchers found was that the chemical composition of the ice core ash matched nicely with the Zavaritskii volcano on the remote, uninhabited island of Simushir, part of the Kuril Islands. That’s already a strange place, considering it’s been a disputed territory between Russia and Japan since the Soviet military occupied it at the end of World War II, and it was once the site of a secret nuclear submarine base during the Cold War.
“We analyzed the chemistry of the ice with very high temporal resolution,” Hutchison said. ‘This allowed us to determine the precise timing of the eruption in the spring-summer of 1831, confirm that it was highly explosive and then extract the small ash shards. Finding the match took a long time and required extensive collaboration with colleagues from Japan and Russia, which sent us samples collected from these remote volcanoes decades ago.
“The moment in the laboratory when we analyzed the two ashes together, one from the volcano and one from the ice core, was a real eureka moment. I couldn’t believe the numbers were identical. After this I spent a lot of time delved into the age and size of the eruption in the Kuril archives to really convince myself that the match was real.
Aside from its historical significance, the 1831 incident is important in modern times because such volcanic disturbances are not uncommon. The last weather-disrupting eruption occurred in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo blew up its chimney in the Philippines, lowering global temperatures by half a degree Celsius. .
At the very least, it might give those eager to try to artificially manipulate Earth’s climate some pause in the face of natural forces far greater than anything humans can produce and which would almost certainly make such plans based on, shall we say, unintended ways would disrupt.
Source: University of St Andrews
