Tamsyn Mather

So in the local facility, in places like Hawaii, where you have gas coming out of these volcanoes all the time, you can get quite substantial drops in air quality and acid rain problems, damage to vegetation.

Well, this is a really fascinating question.

So volcanoes actually alter our climate and environment in a huge number of different ways.

But just to give you an example, if we have a really big eruption which punches up material up into the upper atmosphere, so the layer of the atmosphere known as the stratosphere, which you might know about because it's where the ozone layer is, which is obviously very important to our existence.

If it punches up into that layer, basically the sulfur dioxide can oxidize to form a haze, a kind of veil of aerosol that can make the atmosphere really hazy high up.

And that can reflect some of the sunlight back off into space and actually cool the planet lower down.

So a really good example of this was in 1815.

There was an enormous eruption of Mount Tembora in Indonesia.

And this altered global climate patterns really profoundly.

So the year 1816 was known in Europe and North America as the year without a summer period.

We had things like snow in New England in June.

We had crop failures.

We had famine in various parts of the world.

People were forced to eat their cats rather tragically in Switzerland.

There were riots in France.

There was a great push of migration from New England to the western states in the US.

And that was all caused by the volcano changing the global weather patterns.

Yes.

One of the really interesting things was at the time, people didn't connect these phenomenon up.

Yeah, I imagine not.