“Desolate weather, it rained again all night and all morning, it is as cold as winter, there is already deep snow on the nearest hills.” These were the words of German composer Felix Mendelssohn as he traveled through the Alps in 1831. However, there was only one problem: it was summer.
In the spring-summer of 1831, a volcano somewhere on Earth erupted, sending huge columns of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, causing global cooling and forcing our planet to experience strange weather conditions that year.
A global cooling of one degree Celsius caused crop failure and famine around the world, but perhaps most strange were the various reports of the appearance of a green, purple and even blue Sun in August. At the time, scientists knew that a volcano was the likely culprit, but they didn’t know which one should take the blame. Now, a new study by scientists at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom claims to have solved the mystery: the Zavaritskii volcano, located in the Kuril Islands, northwest of Japan, was to blame.
Satellite image of the Zavaritskii volcano.
The lead author of the study, Dr. William Hutchison of the University of St. Andrew, says that the breakup of this (untimely) cold case occurred thanks to technological advances that made it possible to analyze more volcanic evidence. The results of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Only in recent years have we developed the ability to extract microscopic fragments of ash from polar ice cores and perform detailed chemical analysis,” Hutchison explained in a press release. “These fragments are incredibly tiny, about one-tenth the diameter of a human hair.”
After scientists from Russia and Japan sent samples collected decades ago from this remote volcano on the uninhabited island of Simushir, Hutchison and his colleagues compared the samples to fragments of polar ash and found that Zavaritskii was an exact match.
“The moment we analyzed the two ashes together in the laboratory, one from the volcano and one from the ice core, was a true eureka moment,” Hutchison stated in a press release. “I couldn’t believe the numbers were identical. After this, I spent a lot of time delving into the age and size of the eruption in the Kuril records to really convince myself that the coincidence was real.”
The climate-altering eruption of the Zavaritskii volcano is far from a historical exception. The famous eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the subsequent Year Without a Summer in the US in 1816, with lakes and rivers frozen as far north as northwestern Pennsylvania in July. In a more contemporary example, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in Indonesia cooled the atmosphere by one degree Celsius after pumping 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.
As this volcanic mystery is solved, Hutchison warns that learning everything we can about these explosive phenomena can help prepare the world for when the next massive eruption inevitably arrives.
“There are so many volcanoes like this one, which highlights how difficult it will be to predict when or where the next large eruption might occur,” Hutchison says in a press release. “As scientists and as a society, we have to consider how to coordinate an international response when the next major eruption occurs, like that of 1831.”
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes and edits about science fiction and how our world works. You can find his older material on Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
