Our near record snow fall may have started in Iceland, Russia, and Alaska

Russ Steele

The snow on Mt. Baker Washington is still five stories tall in the pass, the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park had the lastest opening ever, and record snow fall on Mt. Shasta have the glaciers moving again.

Northern hemisphere volcanos have been very active in Iceland, Russia, and Alaska over the last two years.  These volcanos may have had more of an impact on our climate than we originally thought.

New studies show that volcanic eruptions can eject up to 100 million times more ash than previously thought. One million times! The ash seeds cloud formation, leading to more rain and snow.

A team of researchers in France monitored Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which, beginning on March 20, 2010, ejected an enormous plume of ash into the atmosphere that soon spread across Europe.

The researchers then analyzed how many secondary particles this ash generated as it reacted chemically with other components of the atmosphere.

Their new data showed that when sulphuric acid particles become large enough, they can behave as seeds for cloud formation, thereby increasing the amount of precipitation.

In addition, such seeding particles can form at lower altitudes and farther away from volcanoes than past studies had suggested, causing changes in local and regional weather.

The findings, published online on July 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, here, point to the potentially broader climate influence that volcanoes could have.

It was a combination of low solar activity in 1800 and long series of eruptions by Mount Tambora in 1815, that created a year without a summer in 1916 in the Northern hemisphere.  Now the question, is could a series of seperate volcanos across the hemisphere produce enough ash and secondary particles to produce a future year without a summer?  We live in interesting times.