Scientists have "lost" a huge volcano

10 Oct 1465 people fervently waiting for the wedding of king Alfonso II of Naples. He was destined to marry a refined Hippolyte Mary Sforza, an aristocrat from Milan, in a lush ceremony. When she entered the city, the crowd quieted. Before her was a look so strange and wonderful, what she had never seen.

Alas, the people did not look at the bride — they looked at the sky. Although it was noon, the sun became blue and has thrown the city into an eerie darkness. The solar Eclipse? The vagaries of weather? In the end, the autumn turned out to be wonderfully wet and some were talking about thick, dense mist that rose into the sky.

It was only the beginning. In the following months the weather in Europe has gone awry. In Germany the rain was so strong that the cemeteries were exposed the corpses. In Poland, the inhabitants of the cities travelled through the streets in boats. The castle cellars of the Teutonic knights was flooded, and whole villages have been washed away by streams.

After four years in Europe, started a small ice age. Frozen fish in ponds. The trees refused to blossom, and the grass had sprouted. In Bologna, Italy, heavy snow forced the local residents to come along with their horses and goods along the frozen canals.

Wedding Alfonso was more unusual than you might think. For many thousands of kilometers away in the tropics, the giant volcano did geological history. The eruption was so large that it produced an ash cloud that enveloped the Earth and brought to the very cold decade for many centuries.

The explosion could be heard 2,000 miles, and with it came a tsunami that destroyed everything for hundreds of kilometers. From the point of view of scale, it has surpassed even the eruption of Tambora in 1815, which released the energy equivalent of 2.2 million atomic bombs, and killed at least 70,000 people. Traces of this eruption is found from Antarctica to Greenland.

The Problem is that scientists can't find this volcano. How so?

What is the "unknown eruption" occurred, is undeniable. Like most megaseriesi, it vaporized a bunch of sulfur-rich rocks that fell into the atmosphere and settled on the poles in the form of sulfuric acid. There they are stuck in the ice, formed a natural record of geologic activity that spanned the Millennium. There is nothing that could do that, even the fall of an asteroid.

But to reveal his existence — that was the easy part. What scientists don't know is... everything else. This is a real geological mystery over which geologists scratching their heads for decades.

It All began with hearing and decorated with a coral fringed Islands in the South Pacific. In 1950-ies, archaeologists visited Tonga, Vanuatu and heard stories about the ancient land that many generations ago linked him to the neighboring island of EPI. He was known as Kuve, and in its center was a giant volcano.

Aside from the obvious exaggeration like that all this brought the supernatural anger local resident, who is tricked into an incestuous relationship with his mother, the legend is as follows. One day, after some strong earthquakes, catastrophic eruption tore the island into two parts.

Many people escaped, sailed to the neighbouring Islands. Most of the remaining were killed, but among the survivors was a young Ti in Tonga Lisanti who re-settled in Tonga and paved the way for generations to come.

All that remains of this volcano today, it is a crater a mile deep beneath the ocean in the Caldera Kuve — and a thick layer of ash on EPI and Tonga created by the flow of superheated gas and rock that grew on the island at a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour.

Scientists did not know about the eruption of the 15th century until the 1980s years until I found a splash of acidity of these times in the cores from the polar ice. Suddenly, studying the Kuve, they something pointed.

The First valuation date of the eruption was based on the number of tribal chiefs who ruled ever since, as it happened, and put it between 1540 and 1654 years. In fact archaeologists have dated the skeleton Lisanti, which was of 14-15 century. So far, so good.

Soon it began to appear testimony and from other sources. The languages of the Islands surrounding the crater, showed common linguistic roots that pointed to the exit of some of the dialects many hundreds of years ago.

And then, in 1993, the volcano has interested scientist from the jet propulsion Laboratory of NASA. While in the atmosphere, releasing sulfates to reflect sunlight back into space. The dimming effect during the eruption can be so powerful that man-made "volcanoes" was proposed as a way of combating climate change. Therefore, pang decided to find out exactly when the eruption Kuve, studying global cooling at that time.

He was looking for clues everywhere, combing ancient texts and even looking at the ring on the portraits in the British oak frames in search of slow growth. Pang concluded that the eruption occurred in 1453 — it's too early to disrupt the wedding of Alfonso, but once in a while to match up with others especially deadly year.

In Sweden, lost crops and granaries emptied. Across Europe, the trees stopped growing. In China, tens of thousands of people froze to death. Under the Yangtze river for 40 days non-stop snowing, and the Yellow sea frozen at 20 kilometers from shore. On the other side of the world the Aztecs faced the largest famine in history.

Pang was so sure in their study that even suggested the exact date of the eruption — may 22, when it was interrupted by a big fight that broke out at Constantinople. A huge "fire", which was organized by the Turkish invaders were only a reflection of the ash in the twilight.

The Final argument came when a team of French geologists visited the island to study it closer. Based on the size of the crater, they calculated that the eruption Kuve released enough magma to fill the Empire state building is 37 million times, and threw the wreckage into 48 kilometers into the sky. Sulfate was three times more than during the eruption in Tambora is more than enough to make an impact on the climate.

What is important, based on radiocarbon Dating of trees killed during the eruption, scientists have placed its date between 1420 and 1430 years. Although it is not very consistent with the spikes in ice cores, it was still close.

Scientists have begun to call the eruption of the 15th century "event in kuve" theory has gained momentum. Unfortunately, clarity was not there. Ten years after the visit by the French geologists to the site of the eruption, the crater of profit other scientists.

Under the leadership of Karoly Nemeth, an ecologist from Massey University in New Zealand, scientists have searched for signs of the explosive eruptions capable of changing global climate. They found nothing.

A huge eruption rise of at least 25 kilometers up — allowing them to inject sulfur directly into the upper layers of the atmosphere and scatter debris over a large area. To find out how impressive was the eruption in kuve, scholars should examine the fallen ashes. "There is no doubt that the volcanic deposits are, but their length is not quite what you would expect to find after a massive eruption".

In fact, the data indicate that the volcano was relatively small, no more than 1000 meters high, that less than a quarter of the height of Tambora before the eruption. Nemeth concluded that instead of a single burst with a massive explosion, the volcano has erupted several times, but smaller. It was a powerful explosion, as it might seem, but the scientific community simply does not see.

And then in 2012 in the heart of the ice of Antarctica found a big surprise. The sample was from a place called Law Dome, which is famous for its high snowfalls. This is a popular place for climate researchers, because the thick ice makes it easier to discernment a separate annual layers. A group of scientists have made the most precise record of all major volcanic eruptions over the last 2000 years.

They found that a splash of acidity in the 15th century the records were not caused by just one eruption, but two. In addition, the first of them took place in 1458 — much later eruption in kuve. The authors strongly recommend to others with caution to the link. The mystery of the lost volcano has not been resolved. A year later, another study confirmed their results.

As scientists might understand it all so wrong?

The thing is how dated the ice Deposit. They can't provide accurate data, just a string of annual events, one after the other. To understand when an event occurred — like the "unknown eruption" — frozen records are being Packed with historical information, like the message on climate chaos 1453.

"It's kind of incredible closed-loop argument," says Nemeth. The eruption believed occurred in 1453, because it was then cooled down the planet and because then erupted in kuve... and so on and so forth.

In the end, the only evidence linking all three together, remains indirect. "It all depends on misinterpretation of historical information," said Martin, Bauch, a historian at the University of Leipzig in Germany, who researched the proof of global cooling in 1465.

When the evidence of the "unknown eruption" found in the ice, people were planning to find this place, so when I confirmed the eruption in Kuve, all points are aggregated. "It was an accident," says Nemeth.

But if the eruptions at Kuve was not what happened?

To influence the whole world, these eruptions were to occur in the tropics. Because of the tropics rising air can lift the volcanic cloud higher in the atmosphere where it will disintegrate for many years. Debris and dust will also spread on a wide area because strong winds will...