The human impacts of the 1815 eruption

of Tambora volcano in eastern Indonesia

are well known. The sulfur injected into
the stratosphere by that eruption produced
a veil of sunlight-reflecting sulfate aerosols.
The following year, often called the year
without a summer, was marked by signifi-
cant global cooling, resulting in crop fail-
ures, famine, and social unrest as well as
by a broad array of climatic impacts
[Oppenheimer, 2003]. Over the past 10,000
years, there have been many other volcanic
eruptions of comparable (and greater)
magnitude than Tambora, and at least some
of these must have had similar effects. How-
ever, Tambora is the only major eruption
whose global climatic and human impacts
have been comprehensively documented.
One candidate for an eruption that had
impacts similar to those of Tambora is the 1600
eruption of Huaynaputina volcano in southern
Peru. The eruptive volume and sulfur dioxide
emissions from this eruption are roughly com-
parable to those of Tambora [de Silva and
Zielinksi, 1998]. Using temperature-sensitive
tree ring chronologies, Briffa et al. [1998] con-
cluded that 1601 was the coldest year in the
Northern Hemisphere in the past 600 years.
A study of tree ring records from the Canadian
Rockies [Luckman and Wilson, 2005] identified
1601 as one of the seven coldest years in west-
ern Canada over the past millennium. In this
article, we describe our attempts to document
the climatic, social, economic, and political
impacts of the Huaynaputina eruption at loca-
tions around the world.
Feasibility of Studying the 1600 Eruption
of Huaynaputina
The 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina is
a viable target for research. By 1600, the
Renaissance had transformed European
society, and many people in Europe were
making and recording observations of the
world around them, including indicators of
weather and climate. In Japan and China,
strongly bureaucratic imperial systems were
in place that produced copious written records,
including detailed observations of all man-
ner of natural phenomena. And for more
than 100 years prior to the eruption, Spain
and Portugal had been busy conquering
and colonizing the Americas, Africa, and
parts of Asia. With the conquistadors came
religious orders, including the Jesuits, who
were famous for keeping detailed records
about anything even vaguely related to the
business of the church. The fact that careful
observation and recording of natural and
human phenomena had become common-
place in all of these cultures made it highly
likely that we could find a geographically
diverse set of written records that could be
used to evaluate the impacts of the Huayna-
putina eruption. Finding such written records
would not be the case for what may have
been an even larger sulfur-producing event,
the eruption of Kuwae in Vanuatu in 1452 or
1453 [Witter and Self, 2007].
Another factor that enhanced the feasibility
of studying the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina
is the recent interest in global climate change
during the past century, which has led to an
intense search for phenological records.
These are written records of natural phe-
nomena that provide information about
climate, usually at annual resolution. Although
most of the available records are from
Europe and span only the past few hundred
years, several records go back before the
year 1600, and work is under way to expand
the geographic distribution of these records,
particularly for Asia, South America, and
Africa. The growth in the availability of
phenological records is complemented by
a growth in the availability of other records
that reflect annual variations in climate
over the past millennium, such as tree
rings, ice core layers, coral growth bands,
and varves.
VOLUME 89 NUMBER 15
8 APRIL 2008
PAGES 141148
Eos, Vol. 89, No. 15, 8 April 2008
EOS, TRANSACTIONS, AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
PAGES 141142
Global Impacts of the 1600 Eruption
of Perus Huaynaputina Volcano
Fig. 1. Dormant vines in the Napa Valley of California in mid-March. The date of the beginning
of the grape harvest in the fall is an integrated measure of temperature and precipitation during
the growing season.These dates have been written down for centuries in Europe and provide an
excellent record of year-to-year climatic variations. Photo by Kenneth Verosub. BY K. L.VEROSUB AND J. LIPPMAN
Eos, Vol. 89, No. 15, 8 April 2008
Initial Results
For the past 3 years, we have examined
various types of historical records and have
found considerable climatic, agricultural,
economic, and political evidence that 1601
differed significantly from the years that
preceded or followed it.
In Russia, the winter of 16011602 was
severe, and more than 500,000 people are
believed to have died between 1601 and
1603 in what is considered the worst famine
in Russian history. The resulting social
unrest and political discontent were major
factors leading to the overthrow of the
reigning monarch, Tsar Boris Godunov
[Dunning, 2001].
In France, the date of the beginning of
the wine harvest for the year 1601 is among
the seven latest for the period from 1500 to
1700 [Le Roy Ladurie, 1967, 1971; Chuine et al.,
2004].
In Germany, wine production for the year
1602 was less than 5% of the average value
of the previous and following 75 years
[Warde, 2006].
In Switzerland, 1600 and 1601 were among
the coldest years between 1525 and 1860,
according to reconstructed monthly temper-
atures [Pfister, 1988].
In Latvia, the winter of 16011602 is clas-
sified as one of the most severe in the Baltic
Sea in the past 480 years, based on the date
of the breakup of the ice in Riga harbor
[Jevrejeva, 2001].
In Estonia, 16011602 was the coldest win-
ter in a 500-year period, based on a recon-
struction of winter temperatures in Tallinn
[Tarand and Nordli, 2001; A. Tarand, written
communication, 2007].
In Sweden, record amounts of snow in
the winter of 1601 were followed in the
spring by the worst floods in memory. The
resulting harvest was very poor, which led
to hunger and disease [Utterstrm, 1955].
In China, there was a 17-day difference in
the blossoming dates of peach trees in
Hangzhou between 1601 and 1602 [Hameed
and Gong, 1994].
In Japan, the official date of the freezing
of Lake Suwa in central Japan, known as
Omiwatari, has been recorded for more
than 500 years, and the year 1601 repre-
sents one of the four earliest dates for this
phenomenon between 1520 and 1680
[Arakawa, 1954].
In the United States, there is an unusual
sedimentary layer in the Santa Barbara
Basin in California, dated at 1605 5 years.
This has been interpreted as evidence for
intense precipitation and regional flooding
associated with an interval of rapid, pro-
nounced cooling [Schimmelmann et al., 1998].
In Peru, wine production in 1600 and
1601 was severely affected well beyond the
fallout zone of volcanic ash from Huaynapu-
tina (P. Rice, written communication, 2007).
In the Philippines, records of the duration
of voyages of the Manila galleons traveling
from Acapulco to the Philippines between
1591 and 1750 indicate that the trip was
shorter than usual in the years immediately
after 1600, due perhaps to unusually strong
winds in the Pacific Ocean [Garcia et al., 2001].
Although this evidence does not prove
that the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina had
a significant climatic or human impact, it
does demonstrate that 1601 was a climati-
cally interesting year and that the potential
impacts of the eruption of Huaynaputina
are a topic that merits additional study. This
evidence also demonstrates that rather
detailed, geographically diverse, and clearly
relevant information is available for this
time period.
Lessons Learned
Our findings provide useful lessons for
future research on this topic. For example,
because many researchers have been look-
ing for trends, time series are often pub-
lished as multiyear running averages, which
obscures the effect of a single anomalous
year. The problem becomes especially
severe when the goal of the research is to
demonstrate long-term climate change (i.e.,
anthropogenic global warming) over cen-
tennial or longer timescales. However, the
publication of running averages usually
means that the annual records exist, and
the original data sets are often available.
Also, when historians find anomalous cli-
matic data for 1601, they often assume the data
are a manifestation of the Little Ice Age. Such
an assumption was initially made for the Rus-
sian famine. A more frustrating problem is that
sometimes the data for 1601 are simply miss-
ing. After tracing back through several sources
that referenced a 1200-year record of the
blooming of the cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan,
we finally located an English translation of the
original Japanese paper [Sekiguti, 1969], only
to find that 1601 was one of several years for
which there were no data.
It is also critically important to check for
causes. For example, in 1600 the British
invaded Ireland and burned many crops,
leading to a non-climate-caused famine the
following year.
We also note that the year 1601 often
shows up as one of the most extreme, but
not necessarily the most extreme, over a
particular time interval. Given the natural
variability of climate, this is not surprising.
It suggests, however, that to fully test our
hypothesis about the 1600 eruption of Huay-
naputina, we will need to demonstrate that
1601 is a consistently extreme year across
various indices and over long distances.
Future Work
We are continuing to gather data on possible
climatic and human impacts of the Huayna-
putina eruption. One important source of
information will be national libraries and
archives in Europe, including the Archivo
General de Indias, in Seville, Spain, which
houses the Jesuit records relating to the
Spanish Empire in the Americas and the
Philippines. Another important source of
information will be the county diaries of the
Ming Dynasty, which include detailed
reports of natural phenomena and agricul-
tural production.
Broader Implications
If the eruption of Huaynaputina had an
impact comparable to the eruption of Tamb-
ora, it raises the question of whether the
sulfur outputs of these two eruptions were
comparable. Most estimates of the sulfur
from Tambora fall in the range of 60100
teragrams [Oppenheimer, 2003], while esti-
mates for Huaynaputina range from 1632
teragrams (using ice core data) to 2655
teragrams (using petrologic analysis) [Costa
et al., 2005].
If a lower estimate for Huaynaputina is
correct, there might have been a second, as
yet unidentified, eruption in 1600. Alterna-
tively, 1601 simply could have been a very
cold year, unrelated to the eruption. How-
ever, a second eruption would be more con-
sistent with a higher estimate from the ice
core data than from the petrologic analysis,
not a lower estimate. Furthermore, most
very cold years in the tree ring record are
preceded by known volcanic eruptions
[Briffa et al., 1998; Luckman and Wilson,
2005]. Given that our knowledge of erup-
tions is still incomplete, it is not clear if any
very cold year has a nonvolcanic cause.
After all, the massive eruption of Kuwae, a
submarine volcano in the South Pacific, in
1452 or 1453 was not recognized until 1994
[Monzier et al., 1994], well after it was noted
in the tree ring records that 1452 to 1453
had been a very cold period. Another possi-
bility is that we do not understand the rela-
tionship between sulfur injection and cli-
matic cooling well enough to be able to
accurately determine the critical threshold
of sulfur input.
If the higher estimate for the sulfur input
from Huaynaputina is correct (or if the sul-
fur input from Tambora is less than previ-
ous studies have suggested, as Self et al.
[2004] have argued), these questions do not
arise. However, in the past, the Tambora
eruption has been regarded as the only
eruption in the past 10,000 years known to
have had a global climatic and social
impact. Because of this, Tambora-type erup-
tions were seen as low-probability events,
and few researchers took seriously the need
to study them in more detail. If the impacts
of the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina were
comparable to those of Tambora, then the
return period for such an event changes
from once in 10,000 years to perhaps once
in 200300 years, especially if we assume
that Kuwae had a similar impact.
All of this also provides new insights into
how volcanic activity can affect humans
and how humans respond to the impacts of
volcanic eruptions. Because of the desire to
draw analogies with current scenarios for
Eos, Vol. 89, No. 15, 8 April 2008
A new 46-meter-long coring system was
tested successfully during cruise 191 of
research vessel (R/V) Knorr in September
2007. During sea trials in water depths of 4.6
kilometers on the Bermuda Rise, coring
operations from the vesseloperated by
the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI)successively recovered piston
cores increasing in length from 26 to 38
meters, with sediment recovery at 8589%
of the core barrel length. An additional
25-meter core was recovered in 670 meters
of water on the upper continental slope off
New Jersey.
The Bermuda Rise location, which is a
well-sedimented drift deposit at the north-
eastern margin of the rise, has been cored
many times previously, including by R/V
Knorrs giant piston corer in 1973, by R/V
Marion Dufresnes Calypso corer in 1995,
and by the Ocean Drilling Programs
advanced piston corer (ODP/APC) in 1997.
In comparing the sediment recovery of the
systems, we determined that the WHOI long
core recovered the stratigraphic section
without any indication of stretching, effec-
tively duplicating the results of the ODP/
APC but without the unavoidable breaks
between APC cores every 9.5 meters. In
three deployments of the new corer, verti-
cal compression occurred in the lower
fourth of the core, while in two other
deployments sediment recovery was unde-
formed for the full 38 meters of recovered
sediment.
R/V Knorr (85 meters long, 2685 tons)
underwent significant modifications in 2005
to handle the new coring system, which is
more than half the length of the ship.
Although Charles Hollister (former dean of
the graduate program and vice president of
the corporation at WHOI) had developed a
long coring system for Knorr in the 1970s,
the line tensions necessary to remove the
corer from the seabed proved to be far too
great for the existing winch and trawl wire.
As a result, despite many successful deploy-
ments and core recoveries, every giant pis-
ton core system was eventually lost due to
wire failure during operations.
The limiting component of the giant pis-
ton corer was the trawl wire, which, at the
time (1970s), was a 5/8-inch-diameter steel
cable. Current standard trawl wires on
University-National Oceanographic Labora-
tory System (UNOLS) research vessels use
smaller-diameter 9/16-inch wire. Simply
using a larger steel wire is not a practical
solution: When deployed to great ocean
depths, the cumulative weight of the steel
wire quickly exceeds its strength and is in
danger of breaking even without any ten-
sion placed on it. The solution is to use a
composite rope made of synthetic materials
such as Kevlar, Plasma, or Vectran. These
ropes are neutrally buoyant, and they can
be manufactured in lengths suitable for
deep ocean work. This is the approach
used by the Calypso corer on R/V Marion
Dufresne.
Unfortunately, as with wire, these syn-
thetic ropes stretch under high tensions,
posing a significant problem for piston cor-
ing. The new WHOI long core system uses a
2-inch-diameter rope blended of Vectran
and Plasma braided with a torque-balanced,
nonrotating construction. The rope is 7500
meters long and has a breaking strength of
360,000 pounds. The breaking strength is
more than 10 times greater than the typical
tensions experienced by the coring system,
and its great strength limits stretching of the
rope during coring. Shore-based testing
prior to the sea trials documented that with
30,000 pounds of weight on the rope, a
5000-meter length of Plasma of this size
should experience only 2 meters of stretch.
Principles of Piston Coring
Piston coring of any type involves releas-
ing the corer at a predetermined height
above the seafloor to initiate a free fall and
penetrate the sediments. After release, the
rope is attached only to the piston inside
the core barrel and to the ship, but not to
the corer itself. When the free-falling corer
reaches the seafloor, the slackened rope
tightens and keeps the piston stationary at
the sediment-water interface while the corer
continues to full penetration. Ideally, the
internal piston should not change its posi-
global climate change, there is consider-
able interest in environmental and climatic
factors as drivers of change in older societ-
ies and cultures. If we can demonstrate a
second instance of a volcanic eruption that
had major human impacts at great dis-
tances, it may lead to a more careful search
for coincidences between major volcanic
eruptions and sudden disruptions of societ-
ies through time.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Chester Dunning, Pru-
dence Rice, Andres Tarand, Charles Walker,
and Paul Warde for sharing their expertise
and information. Jake Lippman acknowl-
edges a travel grant from the Presidents
Undergraduate Fellowship Program of the
University of California.
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KENNETH L.VEROSUB and JAKE LIPPMAN, Depart-
ment of Geology, University of California, Davis;
E-mail: verosub@geology.ucdavis.edu
A New Long Coring System for R/V Knorr
PAGES 142143