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ambience: Volcanic Eruption

The sounds of a volcanic eruption. Volcanoes can have an influence on global temperatures, in fact, one volcano’s effect was so profound, that it helped create a monster. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

”There are different kinds of eruptions. Some of them just have lava flowing out, such as the volcanoes in Hawaii. The ones that are important for climate are very explosive ones, that have a hot plume of gas and particles that shoots high up into the atmosphere.”

Alan Robock is an associate professor of meteorology at the University of Maryland. According to Professor Robock, when powerful volcanoes erupt, they can affect global temperature, by putting enough dust into the atmosphere to block out solar radiation. The clearest example of this effect came after the Tambora volcano erupted in Indonesia in 1815.

“The Tambora volcano caused what’s called the year without a summer,’ in 1816, when there were very cold temperatures in North America, because the cloud had spread around the world. There were frosts every month in New England, in 1816. In China, there were crop losses. In Europe, it was so difficult to do agriculture that the price of grain on the London Grain Exchange reached record levels, that haven’t been reached since then. The summer of 1816, Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bythe Shelley, the poet, spent the summer on the shores of Lake Geneva with their friend Byron. It was so cold and gloomy that summer, that they had a contest to see who could write the scariest story, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that summer, inspired by the cold and gloomy temperatures caused by a volcano.”

Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, makers of better things for better living.

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