Scientists have identified the “mystery volcano” that cooled Earth’s climate, nearly 200 years after its eruption in 1831.
The report which was published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’, on Monday, mentioned an extremely remote volcano Zavaritskii located in the Kuril Islands (between Japan and Kamchatka), an area disputed between Russia and Japan as the source of this eruption.
Despite knowing the year of the powerful volcanic eruption that cooled the Earth, its location had remained a mystery for almost 200 years. The eruption caused temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere to drop by 1°C (1.8°F), resulting in cooler and drier conditions.
Researchers solved this puzzle by studying ice cores from Greenland, which preserved layers of ash, volcanic glass, and sulfur isotopes dating back to 1831. The sulfur fallout in Greenland was found to be 6.5 times higher than in Antarctica, indicating a Northern Hemisphere eruption.
Using advanced techniques like geochemical analysis, radioactive dating, and computer modelling, scientists traced the volcanic material to the northwest Pacific. Samples provided by others who had studied Kuril volcanoes revealed a geochemical match with Zavaritskii caldera.
Zavaritskii’s eruption is now recognised as one of the most powerful of the 19th century, alongside Mount Tambora in Indonesia (1815) and Cosegüina in Nicaragua (1835). These events marked the tail end of the Little Ice Age, a centuries-long period of cooler temperatures.
