Volcanic winter


A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the Sun and raising Earth's albedo after a large, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon injection of sulfur gases into the stratosphere where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling result in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation.

Historic examples

The effects of volcanic eruptions on recent winters are modest in scale, but historically have been significant.
;1991
;1883
;1815
;1783
;1600
;1452 or 1453
;1315-1317
;1257
;945 or 946
;535
;Toba supereruption

Effects on life

The causes of the population bottleneck – a sharp decrease in a species' population, immediately followed by a period of great genetic divergence among survivors – is attributed to volcanic winters by some researchers. Such events may diminish populations to "levels low enough for evolutionary changes, which occur much faster in small populations, to produce rapid population differentiation". With the Lake Toba bottleneck, many species showed massive effects of narrowing of the gene pool, and Toba may have reduced the human population to between 40,000 and 15,000 or even fewer.