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  • 1
    Publication Date: 2022-01-31
    Description: Highlights • Major eruption of Ilopango volcano, El Salvador occurred in the first half of the 6th century. • Ilopango eruption is consistent with ‘mystery’ eruption of 540 CE that caused global cooling. • Magnitude 7 event ranks as one of the 10 largest on Earth in past 7000 years. • Impacts on the Maya of Central America were severe, including estimated 100,000 + fatalities. Abstract Ilopango volcano (El Salvador) erupted violently during the Maya Classic Period (250–900 CE) in a densely-populated and intensively-cultivated region of the southern Maya realm, causing regional abandonment of an area covering more than 20,000 km2. However, neither the regional nor global impacts of the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption in Mesoamerica have been well appraised due to limitations in available volcanological, chronological, and archaeological observations. Here we present new evidence of the age, magnitude and sulfur release of the TBJ eruption, establishing it as one of the two hitherto unidentified volcanic triggers of a period of stratospheric aerosol loading that profoundly impacted Northern Hemisphere climate and society between circa 536 and 550 CE. Our chronology is derived from 100 new radiocarbon measurements performed on three subfossil tree trunks enveloped in proximal TBJ pyroclastic deposits. We also reassess the eruption magnitude using terrestrial (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) and near-shore marine TBJ tephra deposit thickness measurements. Together, our new constraints on the age, eruption size (43.6 km3 Dense Rock Equivalent of magma, magnitude = 7.0) and sulfur yield (∼9–90 Tg), along with Ilopango's latitude (13.7° N), squarely frame the TBJ as the major climate-forcing eruption of 539 or 540 CE identified in bipolar ice cores and sourced to the tropics. In addition to deepening appreciation of the TBJ eruption's impacts in Mesoamerica, linking it to the major Northern Hemisphere climatic downturn of the mid-6th century CE offers another piece in the puzzle of understanding Eurasian history of the period.
    Type: Article , PeerReviewed
    Format: other
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  • 2
    Publication Date: 2022-05-25
    Description: © The Author(s), 2013. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Quaternary Science Reviews 76 (2013): 16-28, doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.05.024.
    Description: A proxy system model may be defined as the complete set of forward and mechanistic processes by which the response of a sensor to environmental forcing is recorded and subsequently observed in a material archive. Proxy system modeling complements and sharpens signal interpretations based solely on statistical analyses and transformations; provides the basis for observing network optimization, hypothesis testing, and data-model comparisons for uncertainty estimation; and may be incorporated as weak but mechanistically-plausible constraints into paleoclimatic reconstruction algorithms. Following a review illustrating these applications, we recommend future research pathways, including development of intermediate proxy system models for important sensors, archives, and observations; linking proxy system models to climate system models; hypothesis development and evaluation; more realistic multi-archive, multi-observation network design; examination of proxy system behavior under extreme conditions; and generalized modeling of the total uncertainty in paleoclimate reconstructions derived from paleo-observations.
    Description: MNE and DMT were funded by NOAA/C2D2 grant NA10OAR4310115; SETW gratefully acknowledges support from an American Association of UniversityWomen Dissertation Fellowship. Work cited in this review was supported by NSF grants 0349356, 0724802 and 0902715, NOAA grants NA06OAR4310115 and NA08OAR4310682, and the University of Arizona’s Department of Geosciences and Institute of the Environment.
    Keywords: Forward modeling ; Observational network optimization ; Data-model comparison ; Hypothesis evaluation ; Reconstruction ; Uncertainty modeling
    Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server
    Type: Article
    Format: application/pdf
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