Scientists Discover Mysterious Volcano That Cooled the Earth in 1831 – Located in the Kurils

The nearly two-century-old mystery has finally become a reality.

In 1831, on Earth, a powerful volcanic eruption occurred, releasing a massive amount of ash and smoke into the atmosphere. This caused crop failures and widespread famine. Despite the scale of the destruction, the exact location of the volcano remained a mystery.

Researchers now have a multitude of tools that allow them to identify areas of geological activity. Nearly 200 years ago, such tools did not exist, so an eruption on a remote, uninhabited island could easily evade identification.

Through careful analysis of the ash preserved in the Greenland ice sheet, a team of scientists led by volcanologist William Hutchison from the University of St Andrews (United Kingdom) found its source. It turned out to be the Zavarytsky volcano, located on Simushir Island in the middle of the Kuril chain.

The researchers compared the chemical composition of microscopic ash fragments extracted from ice cores with samples from the Zavarytsky caldera, and the data matched perfectly.

Previously, it was suggested that the cause of global cooling from 1831 to 1833 was the eruption of the Babuyan Claro volcano in the Philippines. However, this theory was disproven in 2018.

According to another version, based on the analysis of sulfur released during the eruption, the volcano could have been on Graham Island—a volcanic massif in the Tuni Strait that disappears and reappears. However, Hutchison's research and that of his colleagues showed that the sulfur composition in the ice cores did not correspond to this location.

Instead, they found a match with Zavarytsky, which has a crater that likely formed in 1831. According to the researchers' estimates, the volume of volcanic material it expelled could have led to a cooling of 1 degree Celsius, comparable to the effects of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.