User:Richard Rowe/1809 volcanic eruption

South Dakota State University researchers and their colleagues elsewhere in America and in France large amounts of sulfuric acid in layers of snow in Greenland and Antarctica dating to 1809 and 1810. Suggesting that the cold spell during the decade of 1809 to 1819 may have been triggered by this previously unknown volcanic eruption. This eruption predates the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 wish is consider the trigger for the "year without a summer" in 1816. Volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect on the planet because they release sulfur gases into the atmosphere that form sulfuric acid aerosols that block sunlight. "Our new evidence is that the volcanic sulfuric acid came down at the opposite poles at precisely the same time, and this means that the sulfate is from a single, large eruption of a volcano in 1809," said Professor Jihong Cole-Dai of SDSU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the lead author in an article published Oct. 25, in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The Tambora eruption and the undocumented 1809 eruption are together responsible for the unusually cold decade."

Cole-Dai said the Tambora eruption was immense, sending about 100 million tons of sulfur gas into the atmosphere, but the ice core samples suggest the 1809 eruption was also very large -- perhaps half the size of Tambora -- and would also have cooled the earth for a few years. The researchers reason that, because the sulfuric acid is found in the ice from both polar regions, the eruption probably occurred in the tropics, as Tambora did, where wind patterns could carry volcanic material to the entire world, including both poles.