Unlocking the Secrets: The Astonishing Discovery Behind a 200-Year-Old Volcanic Mystery

Scientists have uncovered the origin of a massive volcanic eruption that has puzzled researchers for almost 200 years, according to a recent study.

The eruption, which occurred in 1831, ranks among the most significant volcanic events of the 19th century, leading to a notable cooling of approximately one degree Celsius in the Northern Hemisphere over the following years.

This cooling phenomenon is believed to have resulted in extensive crop failures and catastrophic famines in various areas. However, despite the eruption’s destructive consequences, the identity of the volcano that caused it remained a topic of heated discussion.

Currently, a group of scientists claims to have pinpointed the volcano in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team utilized data from accurately dated ice cores and additional geological records to identify the Zavaritskii caldera— a “remarkably isolated” volcano located on the unoccupied Simushir Island within the Kuril Islands chain—as the origin of the 1831 eruption.

The Kuril Islands form a volcanic arc that stretches over 800 miles across the northwest Pacific, lying between Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost major island, and the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East. While the Kuril chain is under Russian control, Japan asserts claims to several of the southernmost islands.

The recent research consisted of an examination of polar ice core records that revealed ash remnants from the 1831 eruption. These records are essentially long columns of ice extracted from thick ice layers found in polar environments. They operate as time capsules, preserving extensive data regarding Earth’s climate and ecosystem over hundreds of thousands of years.

“Only in recent times have we acquired the technology to extract tiny ash fragments from polar ice cores and conduct in-depth chemical analyses on them,” stated lead author William Hutchison from the School of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of St. Andrews in the UK.

He remarked: “These fragments are remarkably tiny, approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair.”

The analysis of the ash remnants displayed a “perfect fingerprint match” enabling Hutchison and his coworkers to connect the 1831 eruption with the Zavaritskii volcano.

“We scrutinized the chemistry of the ice at a very high temporal resolution. This enabled us to accurately determine the exact timing of the eruption as spring-summer 1831, confirm its high explosiveness, and isolate the minute ash fragments. The matching process was lengthy and required substantial collaboration with colleagues from Japan and Russia who had sent us samples collected from these isolated volcanoes several decades ago,” Hutchison stated.

“The moment in the laboratory when we analyzed the two ash samples together, one from the volcano and one from the ice core, was genuinely a eureka moment. I was astonished that the figures were identical. After this, I invested considerable time investigating the age and scale of the eruption within Kuril records to thoroughly assure myself that the match was legitimate.”

The researchers proceeded to reconstruct the eruption’s intensity and “radiative forcing”— the impacts of volcanic gases and particles on sunlight and heat—demonstrating that the incident could explain the climatic cooling observed from 1831 to 1833.

“These findings serve as a convincing candidate for this large-magnitude mystery eruption and underscore the climate-altering potential of these remote yet highly significant Kuril Island volcanoes,” the authors stated in the study.

The research emphasizes the necessity of analyzing the origins of “mystery” eruptions as they can offer new perspectives on where climate-impacting volcanic activities may transpire.

“There is a multitude of volcanoes like this one, which indicates how challenging it will be to foresee when or where the next large-scale eruption may take place,” Hutchison commented.

“As scientists and as a community, we need to consider how to coordinate an international response when the next significant eruption, similar to that of 1831, occurs.”

Do you know of a science story that Newsweek should cover? Do you have inquiries regarding geology? Reach out to us at [email protected].

Reference

Hutchison, W., Sugden, P., Burke, A., Abbott, P., Ponomareva, V. V., Dirksen, O., Portnyagin, M. V., MacInnes, B., Bourgeois, J., Fitzhugh, B., Verkerk, M., Aubry, T. J., Engwell, S. L., Svensson, A., Chellman, N. J., McConnell, J. R., Davies, S., Sigl, M., & Plunkett, G. (2024). The 1831 CE mystery eruption identified as Zavaritskii caldera, Simushir Island (Kurils). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(1).