The Pavlof Volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands could potentially cause a drop in global temperatures after it began “erupting abruptly” Sunday afternoon.
The eruption sent volcanic ash 20,000 feet into the air and caused minor earthquakes. Approximately 100 people live 37 miles southwest of the volcano in the town of Cold Bay.
The United States Geological Survey says the volcano has had 40 known eruptions since 1762 “is one of the most consistently active volcanoes in the Aleutian arc.”
The enormous quantities of ash and gases ejected from the volcanoes could cause substantially slow global warming by literally blocking out the sun. Volcanoes have cooled Earth by 0.05° to 0.12° Celsius since 2000, according to studies. That’s drastically more than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Clean Power Plan, which will theoretically only advert 0.019° Celsius of warming by the year 2100.
“Large, explosive volcano eruptions, especially those in the tropics, can inject large amounts of particulate matter into the stratosphere, where it remains for several years giving it time to spread out through the global stratosphere,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist at the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller Caller News Foundation. “These particulates reflect away incoming sunlight and thus contribute a cooling pressure of the earth’s climate that may result in a temperature drop of a couple of tenths of degree Celsius for a couple of years.”
Repeated small eruptions can have a large cumulative impact however. The Pavlof volcano is very active and last erupted in November 2014. A study by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that small volcanic eruptions in the early 21st century were responsible for up to a third of the “pause” in global warming.
Until last year, scientists thought that only particularly large eruptions could have any noticeable affect on the climate.
“The fact that these volcanic signatures are apparent in multiple independently measured climate variables really supports the idea that they are influencing climate in spite of their moderate size,” said Mark Zelinka, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the MIT study’s authors, told The Daily Mail last year.
However, the cooling effect of any individual eruption is comparatively short-lived and the Pavlof volcano isn’t well geographically positioned to impact the global climate.
“The volcano that erupted over the weekend was located in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands—a high latitude location, and a region where volcanic eruptions are not particularly uncommon. Preliminarily, the eruption does not seem to be large enough or well positioned such as to induce a large-scale climate impact, but data is still being collected as to the magnitude and duration of the eruption,” Knappenberger concluded.
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