Past volcanism and climate
This webinar is part of a special series celebrating 20 years of Climate of the Past.
Wed, 18 Mar 2026, 16:00 CEST
Conveners: Hugues Goosse & Linden Ashchroft
Studying the response to past volcanic activity help to quantify the impact of short term forcing on global climate and to test the ability of climate models to reproduce this impact.
Guest speakers:
- Michael Sigl (University of Oslo, Sweden)
- Lauren Marshall (University of St. Andrews, UK)
A Song of Ice and Fire – Volcanism, Climate and Humans since the Last Ice Age
Michael Sigl
Volcanism has shaped the Earth ever since its formation and contributed to the formation of the Earth's crust, oceans and atmosphere. However, volcanic eruptions can also cause great destruction and loss of life. Volcanic eruptions also affect the global climate — in the past, at present and in the future. The presentation highlights the meticulous detective work involved in searching for traces of past volcanic eruptions embedded in the polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Did the Laacher See eruption in the Eiffel trigger the Younger Dryas cold snap? When exactly did the Minoan eruption of Thera take place? Are there links between volcanism and famines, pandemics and the rise and decline of empires and dynasties? Harnessed with new forensic clues extracted from the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica we reveal new insights on the timing, climate impacts and global hazard risks of Earth's largest volcanic eruptions. These insights have implications for paleoclimatology, geochronology, volcanology, archeology, history and our preparedness for future extreme events. By reconstructing a comprehensive and continuous timeline of global volcanic activity and atmospheric aerosol emissions going back tens of thousands of years we aim to provide constraints to guide future catastrophe risk management.
Climate modelling of volcanic eruptions using SO2 emissions
Lauren Marshall
Climate variability over the last millennium is dominated by the cooling effects of large-magnitude volcanic eruptions that inject large quantities of SO2 into the stratosphere. However, a long-standing mismatch exists between model-simulated and tree-ring-derived surface cooling. In this webinar, I will discuss recent work simulating the volcanic forcing and climate response over the last millennium using interactive aerosol modelling, and explore this discrepancy in further detail.