Volcanoes Can Mitigate Climate Change?

Small volcanic eruptions over the years may actually helped slow climate change. That's at least according to a new study which details how minor eruptions between 2000 and 2013 may have directly cooled the average global temperature.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, describes how volcanoes blast helpful particles, called aerosols, into the air during an eruption. When these sulfer dioxide aerosols reach the stratosphere (the second layer of our atmosphere), they cool the Earth by blocking and reflecting some of the Sun's solar radiation back into space.

This effect prevents the global temperature from rising by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius. In a year's time, it prevents between 25% and 50% of the expected temperature rise - explaining for the so-called "hiatus" in global warming that has occurred over the last 15 years, according to the researchers.

"What they've found makes sense, and it's important to quantify," Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, recently told Science. He added that understanding these natural influences can help in the climate modeling process, where experts try to predict likely climate change scenarios and prepare for the future.

And while a ton of climate change modeling is supplemented with data from satellites, lead researcher David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, purposely avoided this data, knowing that satellites have a tough time accounting for these aerosols.

"About one-third of the aerosols have been missed," Ridley told Live Science, explain that ice particles (which are aerosols themselves) in clouds can confuse data.

Yet there is as much as a 5 km thick gap in the lower stratosphere where climate-cooling aerosols can persist, yet not show up in satellite data. Using data from ground-based laser readings and weather balloons instead, Ridley and his colleagues painstakingly gathered the numbers they needed.

"This doesn't necessarily mean that every eruption will be able to get sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and form aerosols, but they are just neglected entirely in [some] climate models," Ridley added. "The fine nuances make quite a big difference."

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