Massive Volcano had Massive Effects

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

May 6, 2008

Some four hundred years ago, in the upland region of southern Peru, a volcano named Huaynaputina exploded; catastrophically. It was February 19, 1600, and is recorded as the largest volcanic explosion in South America in historic times.

And now scientists believe that its eruption may have had societal and agricultural impacts worldwide.

The local damage that was caused by Huaynaputina’s eruption was naturally disastrous, with volcanic mudflows destroying villages for miles around. The expulsion of masses of smoke and ash in to the atmosphere appears to have had widespread effects across the planet.

Volcanic eruptions more often than not will inject a large amount of sulfur in to the atmosphere; no doubt the spark which suggested to scientists the possibility that artificially injecting sulfur in to the air would counteract the effects of global warming. The sulfur then reacts with water in the air, forming sulfuric acid droplets which serve to reflect a measure of sunlight back the way it came.

This, naturally, saw a drop in the planet’s surface temperature for a year or so, until the droplets fell.

A more recent case of this happening took place as a result of the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, in 1991. Global temperatures took a drop of about 1 degree Fahrenheit (.5 degrees Celsius) as a result for the following year.

The evidence for a 1600 cooling appears to have been sitting there all along though, it just seems no one was looking for it.

A new study of historic records though has made an early linkage between the 1600 eruption and worldwide consequences. Studies of tree rings have shown that the year 1601 was a cold year. A trees life is counted by its rings, and during a cold year, a tree will grow less, and thus, the rings will be closer together.

But on top of that, geologists have found a lot more evidence to support a temperature drop after the Huaynaputina eruption. Russia suffered its worst famine between 1601 and 1603; Switzerland, Latvia and Estonian records all mention exceptionally cold winters from 1600 to 1602; France 1601 saw a late wine harvest, collapsing its wine production in Germany and colonial Peru; in China, peach trees bloomed late; in Japan, Lake Suwa froze at one of its earliest points in 500 years.

“We knew it was a big eruption, we knew it was a cold year, and that’s all we knew,” said study leader Ken Verosub of the University of California, Davis.. He added though that “In one sense, we can’t prove that the volcano was responsible for all this, but we hope to show that 1601 was a consistently bad year, connected by this event.”

Image Courtesy of Oscar González-Ferrán (University of Chile)

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