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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...

[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.

[from "Re: When did Thera Erupt?", Peter James, reply to a discussion thread on an unknown e-list. Obtained via email from Ev Cochrane]

On a Yahoo group ("New Chronology") devoted to David Rohl, one member (Robert Porter) pointed out that the ice core tephra from Greenland matches a volcano in Alaska, Aniakchak [G3: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems: An Electronic Journal of the Earth Sciences; "Identification of Aniakchak (Alaska) tephra in Greenland ice core challenges the 1645 BC date for Minoan eruption of Santorini", Pearce et al. abstract].

Here's a sidebar, regarding radiocarbon dating, from the other pole:

A researcher in Antarctica uncovered a dead seal and wanted to get it carbon dated. It appeared fresh and he wondered how old it was. It dated to 1200 AD (plus or minus whatever). As he had subsequent dead seal finds carbon dated, all of them came out to 1200 AD. At first he thought he had some kind of sudden, unexplained seal die-off from approximately that year. Then he had another seal that he'd killed himself carbon dated in an effort to calibrate the dating... I saw this info in a 1985 interview with Barry Fell, in Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by David Griffard. Alas, DG went down in a private plane after the seventh issue.:

"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...

Ancient Modern Life And Carbon Dating
by William R. Corliss
Primordial 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.

and now, from proxy dating I turn to proxy quoting (':

"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.

Marine tephra from the Cape Riva eruption (22 ka) of Santorini in the Sea of Marmara
S. Wulf, M. Kraml, T. Kuhn,
M. Schwarz, M. Inthorn, J. Keller,
I. Kuscu, and P. Halbach
[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.
Santorini, Greece
Santorini 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.

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:

Akrotiri And The Santorini Volcano
1999 (from the Web Archive)
The 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.

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.

There are deeper ash layers elsewhere on the island, but not necessarily associated with the same eruption that buried the town.

Hope this helps.

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Akrotiri on Thera, the Santorini Volcano and the Middle and Late Cycladic Periods in the Central Aegean Islands
Trustees of Dartmouth College
Bronze Age Aegean chap 17
Revised: Friday, March 18, 2000
most of the pumice from the eruption is found to the southeast of Santorini. The Greek Mainland and western Crete would have been altogether unaffected by the ash fall, but eastern Crete would have been covered by a maximum of ten, and more probably by between one and five, centimeters of fine pumice. Archaeologists eager to establish a correlation between the Theran eruption and the collapse of Neopalatial Crete feel that such a quantity of ash would have had a disastrous effect on agriculture in eastern Crete. However, others point out that such a relatively thin layer of pumice would have been eroded away by wind and rain within a year or two and would in fact enhance rather than detract from the fertility of the soil. A layer of Theran ash was identified in the late 1980's in some lake sediments in western Anatolia, indicating that the windborne dispersal of this ash had a much more northern and eastern distribution than previously suspected... Doumas in fact claimed that the collapse of the magma chamber and hence the appearance of the tidal wave was an event which postdated the volcanic eruption itself by a decade or more... More recently, the vulcanologists have claimed that the Santorini caldera formed quite gradually and that a tidal wave, if indeed there was one at all, would not have been on anything like the scale envisaged by Marinatos and other proponents of the link between the Theran volcano and the sudden decline of Neopalatial Crete... the simple facts are that the great earthquake which badly damaged Akrotiri is to be dated quite early in LM IA (either ca. 1650 or ca. 1560 B.C.?), that the entire town was buried in meters of volcanic ash still within the LM IA period (ca. 1625 or ca. 1550/1540 B.C.?), and that the wave of destructions (most of them including fires) which defines the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete and to which the palaces at Mallia, Phaistos, and Zakro all fell victim cannot be dated earlier than LM IB (ca. 1480/1470 B.C.?). Hood [TAW I (1978) 681-690] claims that clear evidence of the earthquake which so severely damaged Akrotiri before the town was buried is to be found at several sites on Crete where it is clearly dated to LM IA. More importantly, tephra from the later eruption of the Theran volcano has been found within the past decade in LM IA contexts on Rhodes (at Trianda) and Melos (at Phylakopi) as well as on Crete itself, ample confirmation that the eruption preceded the LM IB destruction horizon on Crete by a significant amount of time. Thus no direct correlation can be established between the Santorini volcano and the collapse of Neopalatial Minoan civilization.

One point I'm trying to make here is that the academics who promote the historicity of the huge volcanic eruption seize on anything and everything that seems to help, then when shown to be incorrect, retreat to another fallback position and pick up whatever else is around. It's not a scholarly approach, and reminds me mostly of the global warming demagogues, who keep retreating from one unsupported position to another, as the data continues to build showing that climate change is natural, that the oceans are not warming at depth, that sealevel isn't rising, etc.

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