Ice cores finger obscure Pacific volcano as cause of 19th century climate disaster
By Richard Stone, Science.
Excerpt: The 1831 eruption of Zavaritskii volcano in the Kuril Islands sparked cropped failures and famines. The first sign of an impending cataclysm in the summer of 1831 was an eerie dimming of the Sun, which for days appeared bluish green across the Northern Hemisphere. In the ensuing weeks, foul weather and a long cold snap triggered crop failures and famines in India and Japan. The instigator was long presumed to be a climate-altering plume from a major eruption, but the volcano’s identity had been one of the great unsolved mysteries of volcanology. “It’s like a whodunit,” says Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge. At long last, the culprit has been unmasked in a report out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team led by volcanologist William Hutchison of the University of St. Andrews describes sulfur isotopes and glassy shards of ash deposited in ice core layers dated to 1831 that trace back to an obscure volcano in the remote Kuril Islands north of Japan’s Hokkaido Island. …“We’ve had this idea that the biggest eruptions that change climate tend to happen at low latitudes—eruptions like Pinatubo and Tambura,” Hutchison says. “But this shows that high-latitude eruptions can have very big impacts as well.” …“Huge hailstones destroyed crops in Europe.” Decreased rainfall during the Indian monsoon led to crop failures and a devastating famine in the eastern Indian state of Madras in 1832 and 1833 that killed about 150,000 people. About twice as many died in a famine that gripped northeastern Japan from 1832 to 1837….