All right, let’s be fair to ourselves and Earth. We are not always responsible for climate change. We know that. There are other factors at work, such as solar cycles and volcanoes. In fact, volcanoes have had a massive impact on climate over the millennia, and we’re still learning about past volcanic events.

Take for example new research published in the journal Climate of the Past, in which scientists identified almost 2,000 volcanic eruptions as seen in ice cores taken from Greenland and the Antarctic. Those eruptions occurred all within the last 60,000 years, and they deposited massive amounts of sulfuric acid in the regions and probably elsewhere due to circulation.

Even more interesting, 25 of the eruptions were larger than any other eruption in the past 2,500 years, and almost seventy of them were larger than the 1815 Tambora eruption, which caused the Year Without a Summer and is the largest eruption on record in the past 500 years. That eruption caused temperatures to drop for years, bringing on drought and famine and causing over 80,000 deaths.

The new cores have given us the most precise look at the volcanic history of Earth ever and follow on previous work where the same team aligned the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to get a synchronized view of volcanic eruptions. Co-author Anders Svensson explains: To reconstruct ancient volcanic eruptions, ice cores offer a few advantages over other methods. Whenever a really large eruption occurs, sulfuric acid is ejected into the upper atmosphere, which is then distributed globally – including onto Greenland and Antarctica. We can estimate the size of an eruption by looking at the amount of sulfuric acid that has fallen.

These ice cores could also show us just how the climate changed after the eruptions, but that is research still in the works. And we need to understand those changes to predict how the climate could change and improve current models.

So do we know when the next massive volcanic eruption will occur? No. That 60,000-year timeline is too long for precise predictions. We’re pretty sure another eruption of the Tambora magnitude or greater is going to occur, but whether that’s in a hundred or a thousand years or even longer, we don’t know.

More Information

University of Copenhagen press release

“Magnitude, frequency and climate forcing of global volcanism during the last glacial period as seen in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores (60–9 ka),” Jiamei Lin et al., 2022 March 15, Climate of the Past