VOLCANO MADNESS: RE: [Geology2] Storms, volcanoes could cool the Earth

Friday, July 6, 2012

RE: [Geology2] Storms, volcanoes could cool the Earth

Please no!

On the other side of the pond from you we are experiencing the wettest and coldest early summer since records began! Yesterday we had a month's rain in less than 24 hours.

Can we arrange some sort of exchange programme. We take some of your heat and you can have some of our rain?

Tricks

To: geology2@yahoogroups.com
From: allison.m.loukanis@att.net
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2012 03:53:59 -0700
Subject: Re: [Geology2] Storms, volcanoes could cool the Earth

Milwaukee is having unprecedented weather... no rain for two months and it was 107 degrees yesterday. My 28 year old a/c decided to go to the happy freon grounds the day before the Fourth. We have been HOT. I am all in favor of somehow sparking those volcanoes far from human habitation to somehow explode if they can make things cooler. Just tell me how. Allison

From: Lin Kerns <linkerns@gmail.com>
To: Geology2 <geology2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 5, 2012 11:23 PM
Subject: [Geology2] Storms, volcanoes could cool the Earth

Storms, volcanoes could cool the Earth

by The Canadian Press
Jul 5, 2012 /

An international team led by University of Saskatchewan researchers says small volcanic eruptions could cool the climate.

The team says aerosols, minute droplets of sulphuric acid, from relatively small volcanic bursts can be shot into the high atmosphere by weather systems such as monsoons.

"If an aerosol is in the lower atmosphere, it's affected by the weather and it precipitates back down right away," lead researcher Adam Bourassa, who is with the university's Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies, said in a news release Thursday.

"Once it reaches the stratosphere, it can persist for years, and with that kind of a sustained lifetime, it can really have a lasting effect."

The result, he said, is the scattering of incoming sunlight and the potential to cool the Earth's surface.

Bourassa said that until now it was thought that a massive eruption was needed to inject aerosols past the troposphere, the turbulent atmospheric layer closest to the Earth, into the stable layers of the stratosphere higher up.

Researchers noted that the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 temporarily dropped temperatures by half a degree Celsius worldwide.

The team, including scientists from Rutgers University in New Jersey, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the University of Wyoming, looked at the June 2011 eruption of the Nabro volcano in Eritrea in northeast Africa.

The researchers found that wind carried the volcanic gas and the droplets of sulphuric acid into the path of the annual Asian summer monsoon.

Dust from the Nabro volcano, being slightly heavier, settled out. But the monsoon lofted volcanic gas and the lighter liquid droplets into the stratosphere where they were detected by the Canadian Space Agency's OSIRIS instrument aboard the Swedish satellite Odin. The Nabro volcano caused the largest stratospheric aerosol load ever recorded by OSIRIS in its more than 10 years of flight.

Researchers say they hope the findings will allow more accurate models of climate behaviour and change.

The findings appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.