Massive volcanoes could cool Earth more in a warming world
Excerpt: ...Before humanity started in on its planet-altering course, volcanoes were one of the biggest climate players. Over the long term, they belched carbon dioxide from Earth’s interior, causing warming. But in the short term, their sulfur gases often react with water to form highly reflective particles called sulfates, triggering spells of global cooling. Dark smudges of ash littering ice cores—our best evidence of these early eruptions—are a dim reflection of the wild weather left in their wake. But the opposite is also true, it turns out: Climate can have a big impact on volcanoes. In the new study, Thomas Aubry, a geophysicist at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues combined computer simulations of idealized volcanic eruptions with a global climate model. They simulated the response to plumes released from midsize and large volcanoes both in historical conditions and by 2100, in a scenario when Earth is predicted to warm very rapidly. ...ultramassive eruptions would still be able to punch through to the stratosphere; what’s more, their gases would actually reach higher and travel faster than in the present climate, amplifying their cooling effect by 15%, the researchers report this month in Nature Communications. The reasons why come down to the bizarro world that is the stratosphere, Aubry says.…