Researchers of the University of Cambridge and the UK Meteorological Bureau revealed that climate change caused by the human activity will significantly affect the effects of volcanic eruptions. Thus, the cooling effect of small and medium-sized eruptions can be reduced by 75 percent. This is reported in the article published in the journal Nature Communications.
Climate change accelerates the transfer of volcanic material in the form of sulphate aerosols from the tropics into higher latitudes. In the case of large eruptions, the cumulative effect of these phenomena will lead to the fact that the haze created by volcanic aerosols will block the ingress of more sunlight on the surface of the Earth, ultimately amplifying temporary cooling caused by volcanic eruptions.
Researchers applied global climatic models in combination with volcanic loop models to simulate how climate change can affect aerosols emitted by volcanic eruptions. It turned out that as a result of large eruptions, such as Pinatubo, which usually occur once or twice in a century, climate change will lead to new unexpected consequences – the loops will rise above, and the aerosols will spread faster on the globe, which in turn will entail Cooling effect by 15 percent.
However, for less severe eruptions, as Naid in Eritrea in 2011, which usually occur annually, the effect will be unexpectedly reduced by about 75 percent in the scenario of strong global warming. This is due to the fact that the height of the tropopause – the boundaries between the troposphere and the stratosphere – will increase, which makes it difficult to achieve the stratosphere volcanic loops. Such aerosols are washed out of the troposphere for several weeks.