Good info...I notice they didn't assign a new date to the Santorini eruption.
I wonder what caused the 1628 ice core spike?
I, too, wonder. Could be from an eruption anywhere in the world. Hawaii area comes to mind at once.
I wonder what caused the 1628 ice core spike?And all the others...
The truth of the matter is quite simple. There was once only one sulphur spike great enough to match Thera because budgetary restraints on the ice core work meant that such peaks had not been systematically looked for. Second millennium ice cores have now been searched more thoroughly, and there are peaks of sulphuric acid easily enough to match Thera (which vulcanologists say was not the kind of eruption to shoot out that much sulphur anyway), at NUMEROUS dates within the 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th, 14th centuries BC (see Zielinski et al in Science 264, 1994, pp. 948-952). The REAL FACTS show not only how pathetic is the case for the 17th-century proxy dating...[from "Re: When did Thera Erupt?", Peter James, reply to a discussion thread on an unknown e-list. Obtained via email from Ev Cochrane]
[T]here is now concrete evidence that the 17th-century ice core event COULD NOT have had anything to do with Thera. See Zielinski and Germani: "New Ice-Core Evidence Challenges the 1620s BC Age for the Santorini (Minoan) Eruption", Journal of Archaeological Science 25 (1998), pp. 279-289. In short, glassy volcanic material has now been analysed from the 1620s ice core layers. It was immediately compared with material from Thera and, in the words of the investigators, it "is very much different". Their conclusion:"Although we cannot completely rule out the possibility that two nearly coincident eruptions, including the Santorini eruption, are responsible for the 1623 BC signal in the GISP ice core, these results very much suggest that the Santorini eruption is not responsible for this signal. We believe that another eruption led not only to the 1623 BC ice core signal but also, by correlation, to the tree-ring signals at 1628/1627 BC."So there you have it. An opinion straight from the mouth of ice-core scientists which happens to agree, strangely enough with what vulcanologists have been saying and also cautious well-informed archaeologists like Professor Peter Warren of Bristol University who is AWARE of the problems inherent in "scientific" dating methods and has for years been lecturing and publishing caution about proxy dating.
"We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm."Similarly...
and now, from proxy dating I turn to proxy quoting (':Ancient Modern Life And Carbon DatingPrimordial carbon may come from limestone or natural gas welling up from the earth's interior. Modern life forms that metabolize primordial rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide, with its cosmic-ray produced carbon-14, will appear extremely old when carbon-dated. Mice eating such apparently ancient life forms at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, were carbon-dated as being 13,000 years old, and were expected to attain a ripe old age of 35,000 in a few months.
by William R. Corliss
"From Thera itself came carbonized tree trunk, still rooted in Minoan soil at the bottom of the Fira quarry." "The carbon-14 verdict from the Fira quarry trees was that life on the island had ended in the seventeenth century B.C. - about 1640>, give or take thirty years in either direction." [Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 233]this, regarding a big mutha of an eruption -- in prehistoric times.
It should be noted that the "eruption destroyed the Minoans" school has persistently exaggerated the amount of crud covering Akrotiri, claiming as much as 100 feet of ash. Not that they were lyin' er anything... Here's an example:Marine tephra from the Cape Riva eruption (22 ka) of Santorini in the Sea of Marmara[Abstract] A discrete tephra layer has been discovered in three marine sediment cores from the Sea of Marmara, eastern Mediterranean. The rhyodacitic glass chemistry and the stratigraphical position suggest a Santorini provenance and, in particular, a correlation with the marine Y-2 tephra that is known from the southern Aegean Sea and eastern Levantine Basin. This tephra represents the distal facies of the Cape Riva eruption of Santorini, which has been dated by 14C on land at 21950 cal. yr BP. Hitherto, the Y-2 tephra has been detected only in marine sediment cores recovered south to southeast of its volcanic source. The new occurrence in the Sea of Marmara approximately 530 km NNE of the Santorini eruptive centre suggests a more north-easterly dispersal of fallout products of the Cape Riva eruption than previously supposed.
S. Wulf, M. Kraml, T. Kuhn,
M. Schwarz, M. Inthorn, J. Keller,
I. Kuscu, and P. HalbachSantorini, GreeceSantorini is complex of overlapping shield volcanoes. Basalt and andesite lava flows that make the shield are exposed in the cliff below the town of Phira. Some of the cliff is thought to be a caldera wall associated with an eruption 21,000 year ago. Druitt and Francaviglia (1992) found evidence of at least 12 large explosive eruptions in the last 200,000 years at Santorin i...
Akroteri, a Minoan city on the south part of Thera, is being excavated. About 3-6 feet (1-2 m) of ash fell on the city which had a population of about 30,000. The residents appear to have been successfully evacuated prior to the eruption. No bodies have been found in the ash like those at Vesuvius. Archeologists also reported that movable objects had been taken from the city...
The Kameni Islands formed after the caldera. Eleven eruptions since 197 B.C. have made the two islands. The most recent eruption at Santorini was in 1950 on Nea Kameni, the northern island. The eruption was phreatic and lasted less than a month. It constructed a dome and produced lava flows.
The town was abandoned (little if anything was left behind) probably due to earthquakes, and buried under 16 feet or less of ash. That author's "five meters" is a bit of hyperbole I believe -- I've seen figures of three meters for the average depth of coverage. And Akrotiri was right on the crater.Akrotiri And The Santorini VolcanoThe final deposition of tephra (volcanic ash) attributable to this eruptional sequence is over five meters thick at Akrotiri but up to fifty meters thick elsewhere on Thera and includes large boulders of basalt in addition to the lighter and smaller bits of pumice which themselves now measure as much as fifteen centimeters across. There is no archaeological evidence for how long the full series of eruptions lasted, but vulcanologists have reached a consensus that the process was a fairly rapid, hence short-lived one. The absence of any clear signs of erosion at the preserved tops of the ruins of Akrotiri supports the notion that complete burial of these ruins followed close upon the heels of the events which produced the ruins in the first place, that is, the initial stages of the eruption.
1999 (from the Web Archive)
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Identification of Aniakchak (Alaska) tephraMinute shards of volcanic glass recovered from the 1645 ± 4 BC layer in the Greenland GRIP ice core have recently been claimed to originate from the Minoan eruption of Santorini [Hammer et al., 2003]. This is a significant claim because a precise age for the Minoan eruption provides an important time constraint on the evolution of civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. There are however significant differences between the concentrations of SiO2, TiO2, MgO, Ba, Sr, Nb and LREE between the ice core glass and the Minoan eruption, such that they cannot be correlatives. New chemical analyses of tephra from the Late Holocene eruption of the Aniakchak Volcano in Alaska, however, show a remarkable similarity to the ice core glass for all elements, and this eruption is proposed as the most likely source of the glass in the GRIP ice core. This provides a precise date of 1645 BC for the eruption of Aniakchak and is the first firm identification of Alaskan tephra in the Greenland ice cores. The age of the Minoan eruption of Santorini, however, remains unresolved.
in Greenland ice core
challenges the 1645 BC date
for Minoan eruption of Santorini
Nicholas J. G. Pearce
John A. Westgate and Shari J. Preece
Warren J. Eastwood
William T. Perkins