A volcano that has long kept scientists up at night, baffled and bewildered, has finally had its largest looming question answered. Nearly 200 years after it erupted, scientists have finally determined its location.
A tedious process found that the volcano called Zavaritskii was situated on Simushir Island. This is an area that’s a part of the Kuril Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
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The volcano has become a legend of sorts as it has long been known to be one of the most destructive 19th-century explosions. Scientists had never been able to find the structure, however. Since its heyday at the end of the Little Ice Age—in which the ramifications of its explosion dropped the Earth’s temperature by one degree—scientists have known it shot off in the 1830s.
A Volcano That Erupted in The 1830s Has Finally Been Discovered
The latest discovery is a major milestone in the space. Researchers took extensive measures to identify the volcano, sampling ice cores in Greenland and studying sulfur isotopes along with grains of ash glass shards from the event.
The breakthrough moment that allowed this discovery to fall into place was when they determined that sulfur fallout was more than six times denser in Greenland than Antarctica, which is where the explosion originally was thought to have occurred.
“I am still surprised that an eruption of this size went unreported,” Dr. William Hutchison told CNN. “Perhaps there are reports of ash fall or atmospheric phenomena occurring in 1831 that reside in a dusty corner of a library in Russia or Japan. The follow-up work to delve into these records really excites me.”
If you’re wondering why it took so long to figure all of this out, it’s simply because there’s not a large community monitoring explosions in the past. When these explosions did happen way back when they just weren’t documented like they should have been. Many volcanic activity also takes place in remote places, so many more, like this one, go unreported.
