While searching for information on the Black Death, I came across a completely different and unexpected event, a massive volcanic eruption in 1258;

http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/londons-volcanic-winter.htm

This eruption is practically unknown, yet caused a death toll on a par with the Black Death and must have had a major impact on history.

Interesting article Trike, I'd not heard of this eruption either.

It must have been from one of the volcanoes in Africa, Asia or the Americas, surely if it was one of the European volcanoes such as in Italy, Greece or Iceland there would be records of the eruption?

Rinjani Volcano in Lombok, Indonesia is the latest suspect, ID

A very comprehensive list here of major volcanic eruptions from around 10,000BC until the present day, unfortunately missing the 1258 eruption.

http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm

The big one was Toba, around 70000 years ago and that nearly stopped us in our tracks. On the other hand, the period of extreme stress that followed may have fostered beneficial behaviours so possibly not all bad.
Will we be as lucky when Yellowstone goes up?

Lord, I thought Yellowstone had already done enough damage. Is it going to erupt again?

There is quite a good map here of the most notable eruptions and their immediate area of impact, Yellowstone was huge by comparison!
Click to enlarge - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Volcanic_eruption_map.svg

Edit. The largest volcanic eruption in the history of the earth was the Siberian Traps, thankfully these sort of eruptions are rare with only 8 occuring in the last 250 million years.
http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/palaeofiles/permian/siberiantraps.html

Yup, just a question of when, I'm afraid. There's a few of them, a cracker under New Zealand but don't tell Caro.

We've had some volcanic activity here recently. Mount Tongariro has erupted twice in the last three months, despite me reading somewhere in the last few days a statement that called it 'dormant', since it had been inactive for over 100 years.

However, my part of the country is not at the seat of volcanic activity - Gran will have more to worry about from the usual size of volcanoes. I'm not expecting to live a few more million years, so think I will worry about more imminent dangers.

Not a volcano but a tornado has just gone through Auckland where Gran lives. Two people seem to have been killed, though the news is rather uncertain at this stage. The man from the building site being interviewed sounds very shaken.

Hi Caro, Thankfully I live on the other side of town and only had a lot of rain and wind, we were off line for a couple of hours, my son lives on the other side and thankfully all the family are ok but he knew the 2 workers on the building site who died.

The 2nd baron's War 1264 - 5 happened only a few years after this event. I wonder if the crop failure and famine added to the undoubted discontent with the reign of Henry III and help lead to the war?

Tim

There was also a major eruption of Katla in Iceland in 1262, which would not have improved atmospheric conditions if the northern hemisphere were still suffering from the results of the 1258 eruption.

Western Europe in the mid thirteenth century does seem to have been particularly vulnerable to unexpected natural disasters be they volcanic eruptions, pestilence or whatever.

For a start by the middle of the century it was becoming uncomfortably over-crowded. The density of population in much of rural France and Italy was at a level not to be seen again until the beginning of the 20th century. And this was without access to modern crop rotation methods, imported or artificial fertilizers, food preservation (canning, refrigeration), agricultural technology (seed drills etc). Nearly all suitable land was already in full use, indeed much was probably being over-used and so becoming increasingly less fertile. New areas of suitable land: lowland forest, heath, fen etc were no longer just there waiting to be brought into use, having nearly all been already brought into cultivation. In short many, perhaps most people were living a marginal existence, producing just enough to live on but not enough to lay aside for a rainy day - literally so as they watched their harvests rot under under unexpected summer rains....

... Because the climate was starting to get worse too, perhaps exacerbated by volcanic activity. Alpine and polar glaciers were advancing, it was generally getting colder and with increased rainfall. Cultivation of cereals in Iceland, and the vine in England were brought to a close. Generally throughout Europe the increasing cold/wet conditions made less acreage of land suitable for wheat. There was also of course the turmoil of warfare, eg. in Italy, England and France, which did much to disrupt the life of the countryside at a time when the supply of food was already strained to the limit.

I don't know how much one can blame on volcanic activity as opposed to general climate change etc, but there were certainly a series of famines in England in 1272, 1277, 1283, and 1292.

Islanddawn wrote:

A very comprehensive list here of major volcanic eruptions from around 10,000BC until the present day, unfortunately missing the 1258 eruption.

http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm

The Tambora eruption is believed to be the cause of the "year without a summer" in 1816.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

another 7 rated eruption at Santorini has been proposed for the collapse of the Minoan civilisation and the beginnings of the Atlantis legend.

Meles meles wrote:

Western Europe in the mid thirteenth century does seem to have been particularly vulnerable to unexpected natural disasters be they volcanic eruptions, pestilence or whatever.

The start of the Little Ice Age, in which vulcanism may played a part;

http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html

Latest research debunks the theory that the Thera (Santorini) eruption caused the collapse of the Minoan civilisation.

Whilst the resultant tsunamis from the eruption certainly devestated the Minoan coastal settlements, archaeologists have found evidence above the Thera eruption layers of the continuance of Minoan life further inland. There is also archaeological evidence to suggest there was warfare some 50 or so years later.

The new theory is that Thera merely served to weaken the Minoans that enabled the later Mycenaean conquest, which was the true end of the Minoan civilisation as we know it.

Thera today, with the lava domes Nea Kameni and Palea Kameni (New and Old Kameni) in the centre of the caldera. The domes continue to grow.... http://ismosav.santorini.net/1088.0.html



Thera, before the Minoan eruption

My tootsies get a regular buffing with a large lump of pumice that I picked up on the north coast of Crete. Is it a remnant of the Thira explosion? I like to think so.

Probably is Ferval, if not the Minoan eruption then one of the many other ones anyway. I had to buy a new pumice stone this year, disappointingly it didn't say on the tag where it is from.

I've got a pumice from Teide on Tenerife, not a pretty white though. It is black like a big lump of charcoal and as light to hold.

Pliny the Younger's account of the Vesuvius eruption in 79AD;

http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/pompeii/plinyletters.htm

Fabulous detail in Pliny's letters Trike, gripping from beginning to end and I could almost smell the sulphur. Added to that it is one of those rare (?) occasions when the written word exactly coincides with archaeological findings.

has anyone read Barbara Tuchman's 'distant Mirror'?? It's all about the atrocious weather and climatic conditions, plus pestilence and infections of the 13th/14th century. (probably brought about by volcanic activity).

Yep, read that one. I'd be inclined to accept the theories that attribute the crop failures, in part, to vulcanism as a good working hypothesis.

Severe volcanic events do seem to be well established as agents for rapid climatic and subsequent cultural change. Besides the events of mentioned above there are also:

An eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru seems to have caused 1601 to be the coldest year in the northern hemisphere for six centuries which resulted in widespread crop failure and famine (possibly as many as a third of the Russian population died 1601–03).

The eruption of Laki in Iceland, 1783–84, caused crop failures in Europe and possibly drought as far away as India, and has been estimated to have killed over six million people globally.

The eruptions of:
1812, La Soufrière in the Caribbean,
1812, Mount Awu in the Sangihe Islands, Indonesia,
1813, Suwanosejima, in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan,
1814, Mayon in the Philippines,

.... together were probably responsible for the summer of 1815 being unusually wet in Europe, and so might be implicated in Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon was unable to deploy his artillery until the ground had dried and the crucial few hours delay allowed the Prussians to arrive in the nick of time and join the battle.

And starting in April 1815 there was the massive eruption of Tambora which, adding to the disruption caused by the eruptions since 1812, is well established as causing considerable climatic change. 1816, the so-called “year without a summer”, saw record low temperatures, heavy rainfall and reduced sunlight, leading to widespread crop failures and famine across the northern hemisphere.

But on a lighter note they could also be implicated in having other effects:

In 1816 the incessant rain during that "wet, ungenial summer" forced Mary Shelley and her friends to stay indoors for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Shelley to write 'Frankenstein'.

The dust and aerosols in the upper atmosphere produced spectacular sunsets and inspired Turner to produce a whole series of paintings characterised by yellow/orange skies.

The lack of oats to feed horses may have spurred the German inventor Karl Drais to research new ways of horseless transportation, which led to his 1817 invention of the velocipede, the first bicycle and a major step toward mechanized personal transport.

Going back a bit further, well a lot further, the Toba eruption around 70000 BCE damn near did for us as a species. Some suggest it left only about 10000 alive, in fairly scattered groups, and the consequent glaciation made things a tad difficult for the survivors.

In Bronze age Europe those pesky Icelandic volcanoes did their worst too. There's thought to have been a biggy around 2000 BCE and then Hecla went up around 1200 BCE. The ensuing climatic deterioration caused the loss of marginal agricultural land, people moved down from the higher slopes and the peat cover really got going.

The major eruption of Thera in 1650BC tends to overshaddow all subsequent eruptions of the volcano, but, in fact, Thera has erupted many times since. 197BC, 46AD, 1050AD, 1650 with resultant tsunami, 1707 and 1928 again with a tsunami. Although not as large as previous tsunamis.

Vesuvius is another whose ancient eruption tends to overshaddow more modern activity. From Wiki,
Vesuvius entered a new phase in December 1631, when a major eruption
buried many villages under lava flows, killing around 3,000 people.
Torrents of boiling water were also ejected, adding to the devastation.
Activity thereafter became almost continuous, with relatively severe
eruptions occurring in 1660, 1682, 1694, 1698, 1707, 1737, 1760, 1767,
1779, 1794, 1822, 1834, 1839, 1850, 1855, 1861, 1868, 1872, 1906, 1926,
1929, and 1944.

The activities of either volcano would not have helped climatic conditions in Europe either.

Footage from the 1944 eruption of Vesuvius

Not all volcanoes impact on climate - as recently as 1991 it was discovered that the key factor is the amount of sulphuric gasses emitted, not pyroclastic debris or suspended ash. The largest sulphuric oxide cloud produced this century came from a Philippines eruption - Pinatubo - that year. It was observed that this eruption alone accounted for a global drop of one degree in mean temperature over two years (seen as a welcome counterbalance to global warming by some). The combined effect of Krakatoa and Tambora, which produced almost 40% of all the volcanic ash injected into the atmosphere in the last 500 years, brought about a double dip (they were several decades apart) of 0.1 degrees which lasted two years each, up to 1991 the largest dips recorded which could be linked to a volcanic source.

Volcanic ash, while creating an observable haze effect that can last several years, is inefficient in blocking sunlight. It can create a trigger event for the greenhouse effect though not, at least as yet provable, a sustained one. If poorly dispersed it will also have a dramatic effect on the local environment, especially as it settles, but not a climatic one.

Volcanic eruptions are a bit like breaking wind - it's the sly silent ones that often do the most damage.

Thera (Santorini) appears to have been a bit of both, though such is a rarity - even for Thera. Its eruptions in recorded history have often been dramatic and devastating for the locality, but nowhere near as far-reaching in effect as the big one three and a half thousand years ago. This is reckoned to have been the second biggest eruption ever - using criteria that not only takes into account the violence of the initial explosion but also the sustained release of detritus and gasses afterwards - which is measurable from the geological record. Krakatoa, the second largest in recorded history whose effects could be measured in real-time, was about half that of Thera in terms of magnitude using the same criteria.

Meles meles wrote:

The dust and aerosols in the upper atmosphere produced spectacular sunsets and inspired Turner to produce a whole series of paintings characterised by yellow/orange skies.

The Victorian artist William Ascroft made a decent living for a few short years out of just that - painting the "Krakatoa effect" in English seascapes and landscapes.

this has been so very very interesting - thank you to all the extremely knowledgeable contributors. Yellowstone was mentioned earlier - is that due for an eruption, or was it only of historic significance and a spent force now?
(the reason I cannot make longer posts is that the screen seems to be set at dark maroon, so I am unable to actually see what I type. Frustrating, as you will agree).

Hi Binky - is your text not white when you type it? Try changing the entry mode by clicking on the a/A buton over the reply box next time before you start typing and see if it helps. That uses a different colour scheme.

Also, you can ensure that you use default text colour (white) in Internet Explorer by opening tools, Internet Options, Appearance and then the "Colours" tab. If you use "windows default" then your browser will use whatever settings a site itself has applied.

it's not the text, it's the background colour (so I'm typing black text on dark brown/maroon background.

aaaagh, just tried your tip about the a/A button and it's giving now me white text which makes it BRILLIANT to see on a dark background. Many thanks.

Glad to hear it - though the text should be white in both modes so I still reckon you've a browser setting in use which is overriding the site's defaults, Binky.

Somewhere I have a brochure from around ten years ago when I was last at Yellowstone and which assured visitors that they weren't likely to become sauteed during their stay, at least for another 1,000 years and possibly 10,000. Yellowstone is an impressively huge caldera - however it does not display signs of the intense pressure build-up preceding a massive or sudden explosion. An eruption would most likely be in the form of lava flow emanating from many thousand fissures. Not a nice place to be when it happens but a danger from which escape is possible at walking pace. Toxic gasses are another issue however - emission of these is closely monitored and as yet their presence can only be confirmed, but no method of predicting how much or how sudden they could be thrown out in a violent release has been devised.

Binky, you may be interested in this link. It gives you a constantly updated readout from all the seismic guages placed round the Yellowstone district on an interactive map of the area.

Yellowstone Monitoring (US Gov)

Scientists say they have proven that mega volcanic eruptions have caused mass extinction of species, and shedding some doubt on the asteroid impact theory that became a popular as an explanation for mass extinctions.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130321-triassic-mass-extinction-volcano-paleontology-science/

Sort of including volcanic eruptions, but more, an interesting article on climate change over the past 1,000 to 2,000 and some causes.

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/04/2013/past-climate-change-varied-remarkably-between-regions

it seems that the Toba eruption may not have been so catastrophic as originally postulated, according to this paper which suggests that it did not precipitate a dramatic climatic deterioration nor cause a population bottleneck. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/24/1301474110.abstract

There was a major climate change around 535-536 AD, some researchers going for vulcanism others for meteor impact;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535-536

Something not seen before, we have a volcano that attracts gold, or makes it or something.

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/09/02/volcano-near-santorini-attracts-gold/

Technology is a wonderful thing, a nice video here on the volcanic activity that formed Santorini as we know it today. In Greek with English subs, but the video is self explanatory anyway

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2014/12/05/the-formation-of-santorini-video/

Thank you very much for this interesting film, Islanddawn.

Saw once a documentary about the Thera eruption destroying by a tsunami the ancient Minoan civilization.
All what I remembered was that it was on the French-German channel Arte...
But by a painstaking research I found at the end the film again...With endurance everything is possible on the internet...
"La civilisation engloutie Minoenne"



It's in French and searching for an English version I found by the name "Harvey Lilley":
http://www.programme-tv.net/biographie/27750-lilley-harvey/cv/

And:
https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/harvey-lilley/47/789/462

Also work for the BBC? Time travellers?

Kind regards and with esteem, Paul.