(OPINION) Mount Tambora changed the world. In 1815, the Indonesian volcano exploded in the most powerful eruption in recorded history, sending an enormous plume of tiny sun-reflecting particles high into the atmosphere, cooling the planet and ushering in disaster.
What followed was called the “year without a summer:” global temperatures plunged, crops failed, people starved, a cholera pandemic spread and tens of thousands died.
Some even credit the volcano with inspiring Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, while sheltering from unusually cold weather in Switzerland in 1816.
Many volcanoes have erupted since, but Tambora remains the planet’s most recent massive eruption. More than 200 years later, scientists warn the world may be due another.
The question is not if, but when, said Markus Stoffel, a climate professor at the University of Geneva. Geological evidence suggests a 1-in-6 chance of a massive eruption this century, he told CNN.
This time, however, it would happen in a much-changed world, one which is not only more populated but which has also been warmed by the climate crisis.
The next massive eruption will “cause climate chaos,” Stoffel said. “Humanity does not have any plan.”
Volcanoes have long shaped our world; they help create continents, have built the atmosphere and can change the climate.
As they erupt, they eject a cocktail of lava, ash, and gases, including planet-heating carbon dioxide, although in quantities dwarfed by those humans who produce burning fossil fuels.
When it comes to climate impact, scientists are more interested in another gas: sulfur dioxide.
A massive volcanic eruption can propel sulfur dioxide through the troposphere — the part of the atmosphere where weather happens — and into the stratosphere, the layer about 7 miles above the Earth’s surface where planes fly.
Here, it forms tiny aerosol particles which scatter sunlight, reflecting it back into space and cooling the planet below. These particles “will blow around the world and last for a couple years,” said Alan Robock, a climate professor at Rutgers University who has spent decades studying volcanoes.
For modern volcanoes, satellite data shows how much sulfur dioxide is released. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it propelled roughly 15 million tons into the stratosphere. This wasn’t a massive eruption like Tambora, but it still cooled the world by around 0.5 degrees Celsius for several years.
