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Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
Thank you Kenny, that looks like an interesting article, but too long to read online. I'll try to download or print it for later.
I once saw a very frustrating documentary about Toba (lots of dramatic statements and very little actual information), so I looked at the wikipedia article and found a link to this site. |
Interesting that the link which lead to the section on
Climate had no mention of the Laki incident which devastated Iceland and Western Europe in 1783/4.
The meteorological impact of Laki resonated on, contributing significantly to several years of extreme weather in Europe. In France a sequence of extremes included a surplus harvest in 1785 that caused poverty for rural workers, accompanied by droughts and bad winters and summers, including a violent hailstorm in 1788 that destroyed crops. This in turn contributed significantly to the build up of poverty and famine that may have contributed to the French Revolution in 1789. Laki was only a factor in a decade of climatic disruption, as Grímsvötn was erupting from 1783–1785 and a recent study of El Niño patterns also suggests an unusually strong El-Niño effect from 1789-93.
In North America, the winter of 1784 was the longest and one of the coldest on record. It was the longest period of below-zero temperatures in New England, the largest accumulation of snow in New Jersey, and the longest freezing over of the Chesapeake Bay. There was ice skating in Charleston Harbor, a huge snowstorm hit the south, the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans, and there was ice in the Gulf of Mexico.
There is also evidence that the Laki eruption had effects beyond Europe, with weakened African and Indian monsoon circulations, leading to precipitation anomalies of -1 to -3 mm (-0.04 to -0.12 inch) per day over the Sahel of Africa, resulting in, among other effects, low flow in the River Nile. The famine that afflicted Egypt in 1784 cost it roughly one-sixth of its population. It may also have exacerbated the Tenmei famine in Japan.
There are worries that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption could trigger the much larger Katla Volcano.