Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary: Past Volcanism and Climate
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To mark its 20th anniversary, Climate of the Past, an interactive journal of the European Geosciences Union, is launching a special webinar series celebrating two decades of leading paleoclimate science.
Each webinar will emphasize the journal’s scientific diversity and impact, featuring two invited talks of 30 minutes from leading researchers across different areas of paleoclimate science. Talks will be followed by a live 30 minutes Q&A session, allowing for discussion and engagement with the broader community.
Volcanic eruptions induce among the strongest natural climate forcings at the annual timescale by injecting aerosols in the upper atmosphere that reflect a fraction of the solar incoming radiations. This leads to a short-term cooling at the Earth’s surface, which has been well documented in many archives. Volcanic eruptions can also potentially have effects on longer timescales, in particular if several eruptions are clustered.
For instance, the strong volcanic activity likely played a role in the relatively cold conditions observed from the 13th to the 18th century in many regions. Additionally, volcanic forcing modifies atmospheric circulations and precipitation patterns. The response to volcanic eruptions provides thus an important test for our understanding of the response to short term forcing and of the ability of climate models to simulate this response.
Talks:
Michael Sigl (University of Oslo) - A Song of Ice and Fire – Volcanism, Climate and Humans since the Last Ice Age
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.
Lauren Marshall (University of St. Andrews) – Climate modelling of volcanic eruptions using SO2 emissions.
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.
Conveners:
Hugues Goosse & Linden Ashchroft
Speakers:
Michael Sigl (University of Oslo, Norway) - Michael Sigl's research focuses on using environmental proxies to identify and quantify the impact of perturbations on the climate system, providing essential constraints to predictions of future climate evolution. To that end, Michael has developed analytical and empirical approaches that have been setting new benchmarks in terms of precision, accuracy, replication and scope within the field of ice-core sciences. Furthermore, his recent scientific achievements have exceptionally large transformative implications for various neighboring research fields ranging from solar and space sciences to geochronology, human history, archaeology, and natural hazard assessment.
Lauren Marshall (University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK) – Lauren is currently a research fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on understanding how large-magnitude volcanic eruptions impact the Earth’s climate. She is particularly interested in how different properties of an eruption such as the amount of sulfur dioxide emitted, the eruption latitude and the emission altitude impact the climatic response, and how sulfate measured in ice cores can be used to estimate the climatic response of historic eruptions. She is an aerosol-climate modeller and currently uses the UK Earth System Model to simulate eruptions over the last millennium to better understand their impact on climate variability. Lauren completed her PhD in Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds, followed by a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and lectureship at Durham University.
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If you have any questions about the webinar "Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary: Past Volcanism and Climate", please contact us via webinars@egu.eu.
- Webinar
- Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary: Past Volcanism and Climate
- Start time
- Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:00 CET
- Duration
- ca. 1h 30m
- Contact
- webinars@egu.eu