Volcanic eruptions are a known factor that forces our climate on time scales ranging from years to decades and possibly to centuries for the exceptional mega-eruptions, such as the Toba eruption of about 75,000 years ago. Although satellite and the instrumental records have provided important information on the cooling aspect of certain volcanic eruptions, these data sets are limited in time and in the type of volcanic eruptions they have evaluated. Ice cores are the only known medium that preserve both the soluble (e.g., sulfur-rich acids) and insoluble (e.g., tephra or ash particles) components of an eruption thereby allowing the evaluation of many different types of volcanic eruptions over much longer time scales than is available through the study of just instrumental records. We use the volcanic record in ice cores to answer the following key questions:

 

• how many climatically-significant volcanic eruptions have occurred over the last 400,000 years that are presently unknown to the paleoclimatic community, and
• what is the magnitude and climatic impact of these events?
• How we can differentiate between the ice-core signals of large equatorial (tropical) volcanic eruptions, that have a global impact on climate, from volcanic events originating in the hemisphere from which the ice core was collected, thus a hemispheric climatic impact?

Faculty

Andrei Kurbatov, Karl Kreutz, and Paul Mayewski

Research

Projects:

Siple Dome, Antarctica
Law Dome, Antarctica
Mt, Logan, Canada Mt. Everest, Tibet
Mt. Moulton, Antarctic
Ross Ice Sheet Drainage System, Antarctica
International Trans-Antarctica Scientific
Expedition
Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP 2), Greenland

Contributions to Science

Sample publications: