An enormous volcanic eruption around 1257 left a substantial sulphate-aerosol signal in both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores — about twice the Tambora 1815 signal — and produced an unusually cold European summer in 1258. The source volcano was identified in what year?
Identified in October 2013 by a team led by the French geographer Franck Lavigne, using converging evidence from tephra geochemistry (the glass-shard composition in polar ice matched Lombok pyroclastic deposits), radiocarbon dating, an 18th-century Old Javanese chronicle (the *Babad Lombok*) that records a catastrophic mountain eruption in the kingdom of Pamatan dated to roughly the right period, and climate-model consistency between the eruption magnitude and the recorded 1258 European cold summer. The mountain (Samalas) was approximately 4,200 metres tall before the eruption; about 1,700 metres of its vertical profile was removed in May 1257. The crater is now the Segara Anak caldera on Lombok.
Read the full story →In 1257 an Indonesian volcano called Samalas erupted with the largest eruption of the last seven thousand years. The sulphate signal appears in polar ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Medieval European chronicles record the cold summer of 1258. It took until 2013 to identify the source.
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