COSEE Ocean Systems: News
North Korea's 'millennium eruption' flooded the skies with sulfur, but left little climate trace
Description: Straddling the border between China and North Korea, the massive Mount Paektu volcano has long been an enigma. In 946 C.E., Paektu erupted with a force matched by few volcanoes over the past 2000 years. Yet curiously, Paektu's "millennium eruption" is not thought to have had the same devastating climatic effects as Indonesia's Mount Tambora, whose 1815 explosion poured 28 megatons of sulfur into the atmosphere, cooling the planet by 1°C and causing the famed "year without a summer." Now, a new analysis of rocks from Mount Paektu suggests its eruption actually put out 45 megatons of sulfur-far more than Tambora and more than 20 times past estimates based on ice cores in Greenland. [Source: Science / AAAS]
URL: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/north-korea-s-millennium-eruption-flooded-skies-sulfur-left-little-climate-trace
Availability: Full Text
Source: Science / AAAS
Publish Date: 11/30/2016
Reading Level: Basic
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