VICS - Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society

Volcanic eruptions are an awe-inspiring example of a natural driver of environmental change.

At the local scale, erupted lava, ash and gases can impact ecosystems, human health and economies.

Global scale impacts can be produced by large-magnitude explosive eruptions, like those of Mt. Pinatubo (1991) or Tambora (1815), which inject sulfur into the stratosphere, resulting in the formation of sulfate aerosols that act to backscatter incoming solar radiation.

Volcanic stratospheric sulfate aerosol is the dominant natural driver of past climate variability, generating large-scale surface cooling and altering atmospheric circulation patterns, with complex consequences at the regional scale.

The comparison of paleoclimate records and model simulations of periods with strong volcanic activity provides important insights for understanding the global and regional climate responses to external forcing agents. This in turn informs predictions of future climate change, such as that due to projected increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Finally, the rapid large-scale effects of volcanic eruptions and the increasing precision of information from natural archives such as ice cores concerning the timing and magnitude of past eruptions make for powerful case studies of climate impacts, vulnerability and resilience in past societies, with potential lessons for the future.

Phase 2

Phase 1 (2015-2018) focused primarily on the Common Era. In Phase 2 (2019-2022), VICS will extend its scope to the full Holocene (11.7 ka BP), and beyond. Volcanic forcing will be reconstructed and made available for the full Holocene, and for significant events even deeper in time for which proxy records are available, e.g. Taupo (25.3 ka BP) and Toba (75 ka BP). Investigation of climate and societal impacts will shift to eruptions with greater magnitudes than found in the Common Era, such as the Mt. Mazama (approx. 5620 BCE) and Santorini (approx. 1600 BCE) eruptions. The second phase will culminate with a review paper summarizing the scientific basis for a connection between volcanic eruptions and societies. This final goal will serve as a motivation over the full lifetime of the working group, to identify and eliminate gaps in the multi-step arguments linking eruptions to societal change.

VICS is largely motivated by the needs of the climate modeling community. Within Phase 1, VICS helped foster the development of a new volcanic forcing reconstruction which will be used in activities associated with the 6th phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), including both the Model Intercomparison Project on the climatic response to Volcanic forcing (VolMIP) and the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP). In Phase 2, VICS aims to provide information on volcanic forcing for other modeling experiments, including simulations of the Holocene.

Volcanic eruptions - and the role of eruptions in shaping past climate and societal changes - is a topic of deeply interdisciplinary research, and has also resonated greatly in popular culture. Therefore, VICS fosters research that engages multiple disciplines (e.g. climate science, history, archaeology, volcanology) and which reach a large and diverse audience through high-ranking journals, the popular press and web-based journalism.

Background

Volcanism is a primary driver of climate variability on global and regional scales, and has been linked to many climate processes such as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, ENSO, the NAO, and the tropical monsoons.

Volcanic signals in proxies are an invaluable tool in producing chronologies - most notably for dating and matching between different ice cores - but also for synchronizing ice core and tree-ring chronologies. The response of different climate proxies to volcanic forcing is useful for calibrating and validating those proxies. Finally, volcanic eruptions provide an important test for climate models, helping to assure that their response to external forcing is realistic, thereby providing confidence in future climate predictions.

VICS will also have a strong component focused on the societal impacts of historical and hypothetical future eruptions. The interdisciplinary aspect of VICS makes it a natural fit with the Extreme Events and Risk Assessment Integrative Activity.

VICS will use data provided by the PAGES 2k Network in order to better understand the regional-scale climate responses to volcanic forcing, e.g. the impact on the Monsoon and the North Atlantic region. Volcanic forcing reconstructions will be deposited to an archive of the ICSU-World Data System (WDS).

Learn more and participate

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Follow VICS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VICS_PAGES

This group is open to anyone who is interested, and early-career researchers are encouraged to be involved. To participate, please contact a member of the Steering Group.