TEMPO.CO, London - Some scientists think they found the volcano responsible for a massive eruption that occurred in the 13th Century. The mystery event in 1257 was so huge that its chemical signature has been recorded in the ice of both the Arctic and Antarctic.
European medieval scriptures talk of a sudden cooling of the climate, and of failed harvests.
In the journal of the Proceeding of the National Academy Sciences of The United State of America (PNAS), an international team blames the Samalas Volcano on Lombok Island, Indonesia, for this catastrophic eruption.
Very few remains of the original mountain can be seen – just a huge crater lake.
The team has tied sulfur and dust traces in the polar ice to a pile of data gathered in the Lombok region itself, including radiocarbon dates, the type and spread of ejected rock and ash, tree-rings, and even local chronicles that recall the fall of the Lombok Kingdom sometime in the 13th Century.
"The evidence is very strong and compelling," Professor Clive Oppenheimer, from Cambridge University, the United Kingdom, told the BBC.
His co-worker, Professor Franck Lavigne from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in France, added that they "conducted something similar to a criminal investigation."
"We didn't know the culprit at first, but we had the time of the murder and the fingerprints in the form of the geochemistry in the ice cores, and that allowed us to track down the volcano responsible," said Lavigne.
The 1257 eruption has often been linked to a vareity of volcanoes in Mexico, Ecuador and New Zealand. Yet conjectures failed to prove true due to their dating or geochemistry, the researchers say. Only Samalas was able to "tick all the boxes".
The team's studies on Lombok indicate that as much 40 cubic kilometers of rock and ash could have been hurled from the volcano, and that the finest material in the eruption would likely have climbed 40 kilometers or more into the sky.
It would have had to be this big in order for material to be carried across the entire globe in the quantities seen in the Greenland and Antarctic ice layers. The impact on the climate would have been significant.
Archaeologists recently put a date of 1258 on the skeletons of thousands of people who were buried in mass graves in London.
"We cannot say for sure these two events are linked but the populations would definitely have been stressed," Prof Lavigne told BBC News.
In comparison with recent catastrophic blasts, researchers believe that the Samalas eruption was at least as big as Krakatoa (1883) and Tambora (1815).
BBC | ERWIN Z. PRIMA
