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      Underestimated risks of recurrent long-range ash dispersal from northern Pacific Arc volcanoes

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          Abstract

          Widespread ash dispersal poses a significant natural hazard to society, particularly in relation to disruption to aviation. Assessing the extent of the threat of far-travelled ash clouds on flight paths is substantially hindered by an incomplete volcanic history and an underestimation of the potential reach of distant eruptive centres. The risk of extensive ash clouds to aviation is thus poorly quantified. New evidence is presented of explosive Late Pleistocene eruptions in the Pacific Arc, currently undocumented in the proximal geological record, which dispersed ash up to 8000 km from source. Twelve microscopic ash deposits or cryptotephra, invisible to the naked eye, discovered within Greenland ice-cores, and ranging in age between 11.1 and 83.7 ka b2k, are compositionally matched to northern Pacific Arc sources including Japan, Kamchatka, Cascades and Alaska. Only two cryptotephra deposits are correlated to known high-magnitude eruptions (Towada-H, Japan, ca 15 ka BP and Mount St Helens Set M, ca 28 ka BP). For the remaining 10 deposits, there is no evidence of age- and compositionally-equivalent eruptive events in regional volcanic stratigraphies. This highlights the inherent problem of under-reporting eruptions and the dangers of underestimating the long-term risk of widespread ash dispersal for trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic flight routes.

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          Most cited references21

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          Chemical and isotopic systematics of oceanic basalts: implications for mantle composition and processes

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            A first chronology for the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) ice core

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              Ash from the Toba supereruption in Lake Malawi shows no volcanic winter in East Africa at 75 ka

              The most explosive volcanic event of the Quaternary was the eruption of Mt. Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 y ago, which produced voluminous ash deposits found across much of the Indian Ocean, Indian Peninsula, and South China Sea. A major climatic downturn observed within the Greenland ice cores has been attributed to the cooling effects of the ash and aerosols ejected during the eruption of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT). These events coincided roughly with a hypothesized human genetic bottleneck, when the number of our species in Africa may have been reduced to near extinction. Some have speculated that the demise of early modern humans at that time was due in part to a dramatic climate shift triggered by the supereruption. Others have argued that environmental conditions would not have been so severe to have such an impact on our ancestors, and furthermore, that modern humans may have already expanded beyond Africa by this time. We report an observation of the YTT in Africa, recovered as a cryptotephra layer in Lake Malawi sediments, >7,000 km west of the source volcano. The YTT isochron provides an accurate and precise age estimate for the Lake Malawi paleoclimate record, which revises the chronology of past climatic events in East Africa. The YTT in Lake Malawi is not accompanied by a major change in sediment composition or evidence for substantial temperature change, implying that the eruption did not significantly impact the climate of East Africa and was not the cause of a human genetic bottleneck at that time.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                21 July 2016
                2016
                : 6
                : 29837
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Geography, College of Science, Swansea University , Swansea, UK
                [2 ]Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen , Denmark
                [3 ]Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University , Aberystwyth, UK
                [4 ]Inst. of Volcanology and Seismology, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky , Russia
                Author notes
                [*]

                Present address: School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.

                [†]

                Present address: Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

                Article
                srep29837
                10.1038/srep29837
                4956762
                27445233
                bbddb607-8cdf-4aa8-90d8-19548dc78e7d
                Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 21 April 2016
                : 24 June 2016
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