Meanwhile “Great Rift” volcano in Ethiopia erupts after seismic swarm, leading to evacuations.

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman 

Whenever I write about climate change, I often note that volcanoes can have significant impacts on the global climate.

A new example has been recently revealed, as a ‘mystery volcano’ that erupted in 1831 and significantly cooled Earth’s climate has finally been identified as Zavaritskii on Simushir Island, part of the Kuril Islands archipelago between Russia and Japan.

This eruption was one of the most powerful of the 19th century, releasing an enormous amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The Earth-caused emissions resulted in a decrease of approximately one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the annual average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere.

The challenge in locating the volcano was due to its remote location.

While the year of this historic eruption was known, the volcano’s location was not. Researchers recently solved that puzzle by sampling ice cores in Greenland, peering back in time through the cores’ layers to examine sulfur isotopes, grains of ash and tiny volcanic glass shards deposited between 1831 and 1834.

Using geochemistry, radioactive dating and computer modeling to map particles’ trajectories, the scientists linked the 1831 eruption to an island volcano in the northwest Pacific Ocean, they reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

..Before the scientists’ findings, Zavaritskii’s last known eruption was in 800 BC.

“For many of Earth’s volcanoes, particularly those in remote areas, we have a very poor understanding of their eruptive history,” said lead study author Dr. William Hutchison, a principal research fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.

“Zavaritskii is located on an extremely remote island between Japan and Russia. No one lives there and historical records are limited to a handful of diaries from ships that passed these islands every few years,” Hutchison told CNN in an email.

To find the volcano, researchers compared the chemistry of microscopic shards of ash extracted from ice cores drilled in Greenland with samples from the Zavaritskii caldera. They determined it was a perfect match.

“Finding the match took a long time and required extensive collaboration with colleagues from Japan and Russia, who sent us samples collected from these remote volcanoes decades ago,” Hutchison says.

“The moment in the lab when we analyzed the two ashes together, one from the volcano and one from the ice core, was a genuine eureka moment. I couldn’t believe the numbers were identical. After this, I spent a lot of time delving into the age and size of the eruption in Kuril records to truly convince myself that the match was real.”

Meanwhile, recent volcanic activity at Mount Dofan in Ethiopia has caused significant concern and prompted evacuations in the surrounding area.

Hundreds of people in a rural part of Ethiopia, 165km (100 miles) north-east of the capital, Addis Ababa, have been leaving their homes in panic as a nearby volcano has been showing signs of a possible eruption, a local chief told the BBC’s Afaan Oromoo service.

The smoke coming from Mount Dofan that began around 17:00 local time (14:00 GMT) on Thursday “has a fiery plume and it’s very high,” Sultan Kemil said.

In a video posted by the Ethiopian Geological Institute on its Facebook page steam and debris can be seen shooting out from the mountain.

In recent weeks, there have been more than a dozen seismic events around Awash Fentale – an earthquake-prone area of Ethiopia’s Afar region.

The seismic activity is part of the ongoing geological processes in the Great Rift Valley, where new oceanic crust is being generated.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how eco-activists connect the rifting to SUVs.

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