From ScienceNews: Indonesia implicated as location of biggest eruption in last seven millennia
SELFOSS, Iceland — One of the biggest mysteries in volcanology may finally have a solution. An eruption long thought to have gone off in the year 1258, spreading cooling sulfur particles around the globe, happened the year before in Indonesia, scientists report.
Until now, researchers have known a big volcano went off somewhere in the world around that time, but they didn’t know exactly where or when.
The new report still remains something of a mystery. Franck Lavigne, a geoscientist at Panthéon-Sorbonne University’s Laboratory of Physical Geography in Meudon, France, showed data and close-up photographs of the remains of the perpetrator volcano on June 14 at an American Geophysical Union conference on volcanism and the atmosphere. But he declined to name the specific volcano, saying he had agreed with his international colleagues not to identify it until the work is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“We have new and solid evidence for the biggest volcanic eruption in 7,000 years,” Lavigne said.
Consensus in the meeting hallways was that he showed pictures of Indonesia. Lavigne would say only that Indonesia has more than 130 active volcanoes.
Scientists know a big eruption must have happened in the mid-13th century because ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica dating to that time contain huge amounts of sulfur. Tree rings, historical records and other evidence also show that the planet cooled soon thereafter. Big volcanic eruptions can spew sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere, where they spread around the globe and reflect sunlight, temporarily chilling the planet.
Leading candidates for the 1258 eruption have included Mexico’s El Chichón, which also erupted in 1982, and Quilotoa in the Ecuadorean Andes. But the chemical composition of rocks from those volcanoes, among other factors, don’t really match the 1258 sulfur from ice cores.
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Are they eventually going to blame this one for the onset of “The Little Ice Age”?
Volcanoes erupt and cause cooling. Big volcanoes erupt and cause big cooling.
so the warming that began with the RWP, perhaps earlier, interrupted by volcanoes spewing forth sulphur, appears to be continuing.
I just watched a Piers Corbyn podcast in which he postulated that volcanoes and global cooling have a common cause. He said the effect of volcanoes, per se, was over rated. Is anyone aware of him being able to back that contention up with data or physics?
Very interesting.
This would be consistent with the suddeness of the Little Ice Age onset in Europe, but I thought I rememberd that date being closer to ~1300.
How much larger was this than Tambora?
don,t worry Australias PM gillard will stop globle warming with a carbon tax god bless her. the only problem she dose not belive in god or anything else
And Gaia never recovered … species killed off, bitter cold that wiped out the human race except for Tropical refuges, the sea is still acidic from the gases, ozone layer destroyed, alpine life eliminated, and the planet remains almost lifeless.
A lesson for all humans barely surviving today and whose Cancerous Carbon emissions will soon eliminate life that is still just barely hanging on.
Wait … I’m think I’m channeling someone or something … “Is this a Hockey Stick I see before me its Shaft toward my hand?
“Newly unearthed historical records and other evidence show that climate changes were already happening in the region by the winter of 1257-1258, Lavigne said. “We think the eruption may have been in the late spring or summer of 1257,” he said. That’s nearly a year earlier than previously thought.”
Or the that the ice core date of 1258/9 is correct and this is yet another confirmation of a cold winter before a major eruption.
Didn’t I read a post on here a month or so back claiming that volcanic eruptions do not correlate well with cool periods?
I hiked into the Rinjani caldera about ten years ago. Stiff climb up but the descent into the caldera was treacherous. And the smoking cone and eerily silent group of local animists I bumped into in the dark made for an unsettling night.
Nice chart here:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/the-mysterious-missing-eruption-of-1258-a-d/
John F. Hultquist says, June 15, 2012 at 6:31 am
Yep. Odd how temps were already on the decline before each of these major events.
commieBob says:
June 15, 2012 at 4:39 am
He said the effect of volcanoes, per se, was over rated. Is anyone aware of him being able to back that contention up with data or physics?
=========
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction
A paper written by researchers from Beijing Normal University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences found a significant relationship between tidal forces and earthquakes in China and Taiwan. The paper considered the relationship between 21 major earthquakes (Ms ≥ 7.0) in land and the offshore area of Taiwan island in the 20th century and the variance ratio of the lunar–solar tidal force. The result indicated that the time of these earthquakes is closely related to the variance ratio of the lunar–solar tidal force, and therefore that the tidal force possibly plays an important role in triggering earthquakes.[63] The conclusion is this method may be used to help forecast earthquakes by studying the lunar perigee.
http://www.onereed.com/articles/vvf/ec5.html
During 1990, anticipation grew among the general public that such events might again be replayed in the Midwest around Dec. 3, 1990 — despite the skepticism of most seismologists. The date for this prediction had been given by Dr. Iben Browning, whose previous track record for anticipating earthquakes had been phenomenal and well-publicized by the media. [See Winkless, Browning, 1975.] Browning’s rationale was that the 19-year lunar cycle, which brings the earth, sun, and moon into a recurrent alignment, would once again put the full moon at its closest approach to the earth (perigee), while the earth approached its own perihelion with the sun. He theorized that this combination of multiple cycles of tidal force would put seismically sensitive areas at risk. Browning’s predicted timetable for the 1990 earthquake was also 178-179 years after the 1811-12 events, a well-established period in which most of the planets are aligned on one side of the sun. It was this same 178-year planetary cycle that had been the subject of Gribbin and Plagemann’s controversial book, The Jupiter Effect [1974].
“The number of significant earthquakes in the world increased in 1990, and the number of deaths attributed to earthquakes in 1990 was almost as high as during the entire decade of the 1980s. … 68 significant earthquakes (6.5 or greater in magnitude) occurred throughout the world in 1990 [10% more than the annual average during the 1980s]. … The reported earthquake death toll for 1990 exceeded 52,000, a number comparable to the total earthquake deaths of 57,000 for the entire previous decade.”
I love the way the writer of the Wired piece gets snippy because the scientist released a lot of the technical information early – but won’t tell anyone the conclusion of the study (the actual name of the volcano) until the paper is published.
When you think about it, it’s a great way to confirm your theory without the same confirmation bias… and it’s a fun little mystery for the geologists, too.
ferd berple says:
June 15, 2012 at 6:57 am
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ferd
See the attached
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1850/to:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1900
Does Krakatoa really show up in this series?
If one did not know the date of the eruption, I suspect that very few people would be able to correctly identify the date from a review of this data.
How very convenient for the CO2AGW believers. If they had not lost all credibility a long time ago I would even look at this. But it’s probably another made to measure research result reviewed by the usual peers.
“Wait … I’m think I’m channeling someone or something … “Is this a Hockey Stick I see before me its Shaft toward my hand?”
“Or, art thou but a False Creation, proceeding from the heat oppressed brain……..”
Hmmmm – Seems like Shakespeare may have been Chanelling both Nostradamus and a certain Dr. Mann at the same time.
Perhaps all the recent warming gave him a touch of heat stroke back in ’98 😉
See: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/mystery-of-the-missing-1258-a-d-eruption-solved/#more-115844
Of course Indonesia should be implicated.
Very interesting relevant dialogue, only from the last post here, TonyB who has done a lot of work on validating human records as indexes of temperature in the past.
And then there’s the Toba event. Was the human population reduced to a low number by a near-extinction event? It seems more like another scare story used to raise the blood pressure (i.e. Yellowstone supervolcano) and make people believe they need more government.
http://anthropology.net/2007/07/06/mount-toba-eruption-ancient-humans-unscathed-study-claims/
Interesting location. The next island to the west is home to Tambora, which gave us a VEI7 in 1815. Cheers –
Assuming Yellowstone goes off anytime in the next few hundred years, there won’t by any “more government” around to do anything about it. Barring a miracle, in the wake of such an event, the United States as we know it is unlikely to continue as a viable political entity.
Lucy
Thanks for your reference to my extended post in the previous thread which is also directly releant to this one.
.
In all the contemporary medieval records I have read, the only ones close to the 1257 date are;
AD1230 ” the harvest having failed for two successive years owing to continual rain which caused great overflowing of the river (in Exeter) there was so great a scarcity of provisions that the people were obliged to eat horse flesh and substitute bark of trees for bread
AD1286 the summer proved very wet which caused great innundation
tonyb
” people were obliged to eat horse flesh”
OMG, you mean like the French do? It must have been aweful.
Hopefully with a bit more global warming France may finally recover from the 1257 eruption and no longer be “obliged to eat horse flesh”.
commieBob says:
June 15, 2012 at 4:39 am
He said the effect of volcanoes, per se, was over rated. Is anyone aware of him being able to back that contention up with data or physics?
Exaggerated volcano effects are part of the reason for increased CO2 forcing in climate models.
That’s why Hansen’s forcings are bigger than anyone else’s.