In 1831, somewhere on the surface of the Earth, a portal to the underworld appeared.
A massive volcano opened its jaws wide and spewed so much ash and smoke that the sky darkened, cooling the northern hemisphere.
The crops failed. People were starving. Yet despite all the devastation, the volcano’s location remains a mystery.
Now, through careful analysis of ash from the eruption that had been trapped and preserved in the Greenland ice sheet, a team led by volcanologist William Hutchison of the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom has found the guilty.
This world-changing event has finally been linked to the Zavaritskii volcano on Simushir of the Kuril Islands, a strip of free land just 59 kilometers long located between Russia and Japan.
Hutchison and his colleagues compared the chemistry of microscopic ash shards extracted from Greenland ice cores with samples from the Zavaritsky Calderaand I found a perfect match.
“Finding the match took a long time and required extensive collaboration with colleagues from Japan and Russia, who sent us samples collected from these remote volcanoes decades ago.” Hutchison says.
“The moment in the lab when we analyzed the two ashes together, one from the volcano and the other from the ice core, was a real eureka. I couldn’t believe the numbers were the same. After that , I spent a lot of time delving into the age and size of the eruption in the Kuril archives to really convince myself that the match was real.
Today, in the 21st century, humanity has access to a suite of tools that allow us to identify sites of geological activity, from global seismic monitoring stationsto a swarm of Earth monitoring satellites in low orbit. In 1831, almost 200 years ago, these tools did not exist; thus, a volcanic eruption on an isolated and uninhabited island could easily escape identification.
An eruption considered responsible for the global cooling of 1831 to 1833 has been attributed to Babuyan Claro in the Philippines.
This, a 2018 article discoveredthis never actually happened.
Another theory, based on sulfur spewed during the eruption, suggested that the volcano could have been on Graham Islanda volcanic mass in danger of disappearing and reappearing in the Strait of Sicily. Hutchison and his colleagues found that the presence of sulfur in ice cores confirmed an 1831 eruption in the Northern Hemisphere, but did not match that location.
Instead, their work found evidence of what is known as a Plinian eruptionone who is similar to eruption of Vesuvius. A closer look at the microscopic shards of volcanic glass recovered from Greenland’s ice showed an exact match to the Simushir samples.
And we have a crater to prove it. Today, Zavaritskii is dominated by a caldera – the hollow basin that remains when a volcano explodes. This caldera probably formed during this 1831 eruption, according to researchers.
The team’s estimates of the volume of volcanic material released from the Earth’s interior would cause a cooling of around 1 degree Celsius – comparable to ambient temperature. Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 in the Philippines.
Volcanoes on Earth often continue to stay active for eons; and one that bursts catastrophically once I can do it again. The team’s findings suggest that remote volcanoes need to be studied and monitored more closely.
“There are so many volcanoes like this, which shows how difficult it will be to predict when and where the next large eruption might take place.” Hutchison says.
“As scientists and as a society, we need to think about how to coordinate an international response when the next big eruption, like the one in 1831, occurs.”
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.