Cataclysmic 1831 Eruption Traced to Quadruple Volcano on Abandoned Soviet Island

Scientists have finally solved a 200-year-old climatological mystery—and the answer was hiding out on a forgotten island. Late last year, a team of researchers revealed that a massive 1831 eruption from Zavaritski volcano, part of the remote Simushir Island chain, triggered global cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. A newly released satellite image shows these peaks—Milna, Zavaritski, Prevo, and Uratman—lined up end-to-end in a near-perfect row, forming one of the most geologically dramatic landforms in the Kuril Islands, a disputed chain between Russia and Japan. Simushir is part of the volatile Ring of Fire, where Earth’s crust grinds and ruptures along tectonic plate boundaries. The 5-mile-long (8-kilometer) island features volcanic peaks visible from space. But one of them, it turns out, made an outsized and surprisingly recent impact on the world’s climate. The team published its research describing the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1831, t ... Read full article.