Massive atmospheric sulfur loading of the AD 1600 Huaynaputina eruption and implications for petrologic sulfur estimates

We combine petrological, analytical, and thermodynamical data to constrain the sulfur yield of the AD 1600 Huaynaputina eruption which has been associated with the largest Earth's temperature shift in the last 600 years. The calculated amount of S (26-55 Tg), partly overlaps, but ranges to almo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical Research Letters
Main Authors: Costa, Fidel, Scaillet, Bruno, Gourgaud, Alain
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/95266
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/8239
https://doi.org/10.1029/2002GL016402
Description
Summary:We combine petrological, analytical, and thermodynamical data to constrain the sulfur yield of the AD 1600 Huaynaputina eruption which has been associated with the largest Earth's temperature shift in the last 600 years. The calculated amount of S (26-55 Tg), partly overlaps, but ranges to almost twice the amount estimated from ice-core data (16-32 Tg), the higher values of our estimate probably reflect that not all S released by the eruption reached the stratosphere. Our study also shows that it is possible to estimate the atmospheric sulfur loading from the volcanic products themselves, which opens the possibility to explore volcano-climate links beyond the time period covered by ice-core archives. Published version