An attempt to stimulate discussion about the causes of an unexpected event which occurred after the huge eruption of Tambora Volcano in 1815
Guest Essay by Caleb Shaw
Volcanoes cause cooling, right? No.
Having got your attention, I would like to bring up three historical incidents, hoping I may generate some interesting explanations for something I myself have no definite answer to.
On April 10, 1815 the Tambora Volcano exploded. It is estimated it blew 39 cubic miles of ash skywards. (A three-mile by three-mile by three-mile cube is only 27 cubic miles.) (I have no idea how many Manhattans that is.)
The noise was so loud it was heard 1200 miles away. Ships over the horizon assumed it was the cannon of a ship in distress and sailed around looking for another ship, and on one island troops were marched off to reinforce other troops because it was assumed an outpost was under attack. Then the great cloud of ash began to spread across the sky.
It is estimated 10,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, as many as 70,000 more by starvation or diarrhea brought on by the heavy ash fall, and another 4600 by tsunamis ranging from six to thirteen feet. The blast, as large as four Krakataus, penetrated the tropopause, roughly 11 miles up near the equator, and reached 16 miles further into the Stratosphere, to a total height of 27 miles. There, high above the circulations of Haley and Ferrel Cells, it began to spread out around the Globe.
By June 28, 1815 the inhabitants of London were noting amazing, brilliant and long-lasting sunsets.
The following summer, 1816, was remarkably cold over many northern lands, marked by frosts and ruined crops. It is remembered as “The Year Without A Summer” and, in my neck of the woods, as, “The Year Of Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.” Here in New Hampshire, where hay was an export that fueled the horse-drawn transport big cities, not even enough grass could be grown to feel local livestock. While the wealthy could import hay from Pennsylvania, the poor knew hunger, and many simply had to slaughter their livestock. In the following years populations of many towns in New England shrank, as people never wanted to see such a summer again, and the rock-free lands of Ohio sounded warmer, and actually were further south.
The link between Tambora and that cold summer seems plain, but here comes the third and, to me, intreauging item from 1817. It involves a quote from John Daly’s site which many know well, that begins,
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated….”
This statement by the President of the Royal Society in London is dated November 20, 1817, and is not what I would have expected. I would have expected Tambora to increase the ice at the pole by making the entire earth colder. The fact the ice apparently decreased is a polar puzzle.
The question then becomes, “Do volcanoes reduce the amount of ice at the poles?”
In the comments at WUWT the commenter Philip Bradley suggested that Tambora’s ash may have fallen on the polar ice, reducing the albedo and increasing the melting. I’m not sure enough ash would fall, that far north, and remain uncovered by snow long enough, to have such a dramatic effect.
I’d be interested to hear the ideas of others. My personal guess is that, even though the climate was colder back then, the AMO still went through warm and cold phases, and just happened to be moving into a warm phase, involving a slosh of warmth moving north, and Tambora accentuated this slosh.
As I have explained elsewhere, “I call this my Slosh Theory, and it is based upon a highly scientific experiment I did at age three in the bath tub. Timing was everything. If you got the timing down, you could generate such a tremendous wave that half the water left the bathtub and wound up on the floor.
My mother did not appreciate my research and stunted my scientific growth, which explains why I became a writer.”
The eruption of Mayon in 1814 might have helped to magnify the effect of Tambora:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayon_Volcano
Globally increased clouds through volcanic ash cloud?
Will cool tropical regions, but provide more insulation at the poles. As the gulfstream will have trundled on as before, given the momentum of the many cubic kilometers of water involved, the heat flow from the equator to the north is more or less the same, but losses through cloud cover are reduced. Hence more melting sea ice.
I am no scientist or historian. The idea I have is very simple. It is possible that the volcanic ash acts like road salt. Road salt does lower the melting point of the snow to help keep the snow and ice from refreezing near the original freezing point. Pumice is one of those that we use on some city streets either with or substituting road salt. My question is is volcanic ash a form of pumice? Because if volcanic ash is actually a form of pumice, its characteristics with lowering the melting point of snow and ice could have something to do with the decrease in the sea ice in 1817.
Kaboom says: Albedo only comes into play while the sun is up in the northern polar regions
This is the alarmists myopic view of what albedo means. Albedo is reflectivity and is spectrally dependant. It applies at all times of the year and affects emission as well as absorption.
Open water is nearly “black” in the IR spectrum. Far from producing the “tipping point” positive feedback that many predicted by only considering the reflection of incoming solar, there is also a negative feedback through more IR emission and this works 12 months of the year.
An increase of ice after such a major eruption would just be a manifestation of this same negative feedback working in the other sense.
@rgbatduke >> At the poles, however, they can easily be net warming, as they are a “greenhouse” cover that reflects heat back towards the earth. <<
And during the polar winter, the same high-altitude reflective effects that make for spectacular sunsets could reflect more sunlight towards the poles, providing additional warming energy.
An article on the 1809 mystery eruption: Signal in Arctic & Antarctic ice cores; a suggestion that it may have been half the size of Tambora.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-09Volcano.asp
Sorry I can’t provide a link, but I remember reading that after the end of the Napoleonic wars the Portuguese cod fishermen, and European whalers, found that there was much less ice in the north than there had been when they were there regularly before the N wars started some 20 years earlier. I think the article I remember was a British Admiralty collection of reports from various shipmasters.
Another example of the Royal Society’s getting it badly wrong is described by Bill Bryson in his book ‘A short history of nearly everything’. In the mid-19th the Society awarded its highest honour, the Royal Medal, to palaeontologist Richard Owen, who had falsely claimed to be the discoverer of fossil organisms which had in fact been discovered and reported by other, less influential, scientists.
I says: “An increase of ice after such a major eruption would just be a manifestation of this same negative feedback working in the other sense.”
oops, meant decrease. This neg. f/b would oppose the presumed reaction tending to produce more ice (that is the sense of a negative feedback). Whether there is a net increase or decrease will depend upon many other factors, But this will tend to limit extreme excursions and avoid “tipping points”.
The Cole-Dai et al 2009 paper: “Cold decade (AD 1810–1819) caused by Tambora (1815) and another (1809) stratospheric volcanic eruption”:
http://www.sdstate.edu/chem/faculty/jihong-cole-dai/upload/Cole-DaiGRL2009.pdf
The ash cooled the planet just as clouds block incoming solar radiation. But, do not forget that clouds act as a blanket to slow down atmospheric and surface cooling, just like a blanket on a person’s body. Clouds DO NOT warm the surface or atmosphere, they just slow down its radiative cooling. Think about how rapidly air cools on a hot, partly cloudy summer day, quickly forming surface breezes as the air under a moving cloud rapidly, in seconds, radiates away its energy.
Particularly during the long night and extended twilight, there would not be many clouds in the Arctic, but the ash would have acted as clouds and prevented the Arctic from the radiative cooling that it would have done unopposed during the long Arctic night. That means the Arctic night would be warmer than normal.
Large stratospheric eruptions leave a thinner Ozone layer in their wake. Going by the last 3 large eruptions, it can take more than 25 years for the Ozone to rebuild and there can be a cumulative impact from successive events.
While the thinner Ozone is in place (and after the ash/sulfate cloud dissapates over the following 3 years), more ultraviolet solar radiation is getting through the atmosphere and reaching the surface.
Climate science seems to be unwilling to address this issue. Ozone has both a shortwave (solar interception) component and a longwave (greehouse gas) component and they haven’t really crunched the numbers on the net impact. But going by the temperatures in the stratospheric Ozone layer which are reduced by -0.5C to -1.0C in the long-run after an eruption, it appears that volcanoes could have a long-term warming impact until the Ozone rebuilds over several decades.
RE: lsvalgaard says:
July 8, 2013 at 5:03 am
Thanks for pointing that out, Leif. I’d forgotten the Mayan Volcano in 1814.
So now we have the “mystery volcano,” Mayan Volcano, and Tambora, all messing up the tidy calculations of regular cycles, all within ten years.
Is it any wonder weather is such a challenge to forecast? You go through all the work of carefully plotting the weather for the next year, and then some dumb volcano pops, and you might as well throw your forecast into the trash. I can just imagine a meteorologist throwing a pile of papers, read-outs and maps into the air in disgust, and scrabbling his hair with a deranged look.
Of course, if we could forecast volcanoes…..
The super-volcano Krakatoa eruption of 1883 occurred in Sunda Strait, geophysically adjacent to Tambora in the Lesser Sunda Islands. So the comparative question is, what influence (if any) did Krakatoa have on far-removed North Polar regions? Though any Arctic icecap thinning would be noticeable only on a major scale, we wonder if records exist to corroborate Tambora’s apparent warming-pulse some 67 years before.
Perhaps, with a ship like this, ( http://www.treasure-island-shipping.com ) a little more knowledge might become available
“Haley” cells? Shouldn’t that be ‘Hadley” cells?
CO2
When a volcano punctures the atmosphere to 27 miles, it provides a strong conductive path from the lower regions of the ionosphere to the Earth. There must have been a huge electrical surge at the location of the volcano that drained a significant portion of the Earth’s outer (ionospheric) electrical charge. This change in charge would alter the polar electric atmospheric boundaries, particularly over Greenland and Northern Europe, thus allowing the cold air of the Arctic to flow south. The warmer air from the Eastern Pacific and Asia would migrate north to replace the Arctic air and thaw the polar ice.
I think this is what we are seeing on a smaller scale even now as the Eastern portion of the US experiences cooler weather and the Western portion bakes in a stalled high pressure system. What we are seeing right now is the beginning of a long term Maunder minimum type event that will cool the Eastern US and Europe while warming the Arctic. The cause of the present electrical breakdown of our atmospheric systems is the weak electrical output of the Sun.
Incidentally, it also appears that the Earth is going through a separate long term cycle of internal heating on a scale of ten to twelve thousand years. We appear to be experiencing an increase in volcanic and background seismic activity. This will inevitably lead to large volcanic explosions, which could potentially puncture the atmosphere and further degrade the Earth’s electric charge. We could be heading for a catastrophe of biblical proportion.
steveta_uk says:
July 8, 2013 at 3:59 am
When paleo-climatologists take ice cores in Greenland, do they by any chance record the amount of ash/dirt/soot found in each “ring” while they are looking for the CO2 in the air bubbles?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Some do.
NY state Univ @ur momisugly Buffalo Study of Dust in Ice Cores Shows Volcanic Eruptions Interfere with the Effect of Sunspots on Global Climate
Caleb says: July 8, 2013 at 6:33 am
Not forgetting La Soufrière (1812), Mt Awu (1812) and Suwanosejima (1813), all with the same VEI of about 4 as Mayon (1814).
Maybe underwater vulcanism could warm the arctic?
emergent systems?
OK, now figure out what caused the freeze of June 4, 1859 in the upper midwest
Apologies if this is posted twice
It appears that there may be a lot of undersea active volcanoes around the arctic though these are very difficult to detect.
http://www.livescience.com/4992-volcanoes-erupt-beneath-arctic-ice.html
Iceland is pouring heat into the ocean from its active volcanoes so is there a possibility the ocean heat from these eruptions is helping melt the ice?
A good overview is here
http://www.mantleplumes.org/Energetics.html
From space we see that the ups and downs of sea ice numbers is all about the wind. Kaboom got it right about the wind blowing sea ice into the north Atlantic, it also blows it here and there. Pileing it up to 5 meters thick or thinning it down to less than 0.5 meters thick. Sea ice area, extent,or volume are not a proxy for global warming, they are however a proxy for the wind.
Icebergs are generaly made from glaciers not piled up sea ice.