![]() It is unclear how many volcanoes are in water shallow enough to blow material into the atmosphere if they erupt. The number of big eruptions centuries ago ejecting water, like the Tongan volcano, is a mystery because it cannot be spotted in the ice.īefore it erupted, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai was about 150 meters below sea level. The size of ancient eruptions is judged from sulphur found trapped in ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Among them, Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to a “year without a summer” – with failed harvests from France to the United States.Įven worse, the eruption of Samalas in Indonesia around 1257 led to famines and may have kicked off the Little Ice Age, an unusually cool period that lasted until the 19th century. In the past 2,500 years, there have been about eight even bigger eruptions, according to the IPCC. Pinatubo cut average global temperatures by about 0.5✬ (0.9✯) for more than a year by dimming sunlight. Sun-dimming eruptions have happened roughly twice a century in the past 2,500 years, most recently Pinatubo, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “But I think the verdict is still out,” Voemel said. Holger Voemel, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said it was possible that the eruption would have some effect on global warming. Preliminary studies suggested that the “water plume may last up to around eight years in the stratosphere,” the layer of the atmosphere about 10-50 km (6-30 miles) above Earth, he said. “This is the first volcano in the observational record that may warm rather than cool the surface,” said Luis Millan, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. That mix of water and sulphur complicate the volcano’s impact.Ī study in the journal Nature in January said the eruption slightly increased the risk that global temperatures would temporarily breach 1.5✬ in at least one of the next five years. The eruption also blew about 500,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, which tends to cool the planet. “We can say with pretty good confidence that a volcanic eruption like this didn’t happen all the way back…to the 1880s, when Krakatoa erupted in 1883,” she said. The eruption in the Polynesian archipelago ejected 150 million-odd tons of water vapor into the stratosphere, about 10% of the 1.4 billion tons typically swirling there, said Margot Clyne, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the United States. Krakatoa, Tambora, Samalas among past huge eruptions The 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to limit the rise in average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7º Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times to avert the worst of climate change, from floods to wildfires. Many scientists say more research into volcanoes is vital to gauge how far eruptions can briefly affect the long-term trend of global warming, driven by burning fossil fuels. ![]() ![]() Humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelmingly to blame, scientists say, with less certain contributions from an El Nino weather event warming the Pacific, limits on light-reflecting pollution from shipping fuels, and the volcano. The June-August period this year was the warmest on record worldwide by a puzzlingly wide margin, with heatwaves occurring from Japan to the United States.
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