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Eos, Vol. 89, No. 15, 8 April 2008

Initial Results

For the past 3 years, we have examinedvarious types of historical records and havefound considerable climatic, agricultural,economic, and political ev idence that 1601differed significantly from the years thatpreceded or followed it.

In Russia, the winter of 16011602 wassevere, and more than 500,000 people are

believed to have died between 1601 and1603 in what is considered the worst faminein Russian history. The resulting socialunrest and political di scontent were majorfactors leading to the overthrow of thereigning monarch, Tsar Boris Godunov[Dunning, 2001].

In France, the date of the beginning ofthe wine harvest for the year 1601 is amongthe seven latest for the period from 1500 to1700 [Le Roy Ladurie, 1967, 1971; Chuine et al.,2004].

In Germany, wine production for the year1602 was less than 5% of the average valueof the previous and following 75 years[Warde, 2006].

In Switzerland, 1600 and 1601 were amongthe coldest years between 1525 and 1860,according to reconstructed monthly temper-atures [Pfister, 1988].

In Latvia, the winter of 16011602 is clas-sified as one of the most severe in the BalticSea in the past 480 years, based on the dateof the breakup of the ice in Riga harbor[Jevrejeva, 2001].

In Estonia, 16011602 was the coldest win-ter in a 500-year period, based on a recon-struction of winter temperatures in Tallinn[Tarand and Nordli, 2001; A. Tarand, writtencommunication, 2007].

In Sweden, record amounts of snow in

the winter of 1601 were followed in thespring by the worst floods in memory. Theresulting harvest was very poor, which ledto hunger and disease [Utterstrm, 1955].

In China, there was a 17-day difference inthe blossoming dates of peach trees inHangzhou between 1601 and 1602 [Hameedand Gong, 1994].

In Japan, the official date of the freezingof Lake Suwa in central Japan, known asOmiwatari, has been recorded for morethan 500 years, and the year 1601 repre-sents one of the four earliest dates for thisphenomenon between 1520 and 1680[Arakawa, 1954].

In the United States, there is an unusualsedimentary layer in the Santa BarbaraBasin in California, dated at 1605 5 years.This has been interpreted as evidence forintense precipitation and regional floodingassociated with an interval of rapid, pro-nounced cooling [Schimmelmann et al., 1998].

In Peru, wine production in 1600 and1601 was severely affected well beyond thefallout zone of volcanic ash from Huaynapu-tina (P. Rice, written communication, 2007).

In the Philippines, records of the durationof voyages of the Manila galleons travelingfrom Acapulco to the Philippines between

1591 and 1750 indicate that the trip wasshorter than usual in the years immediatelyafter 1600, due perhaps to unusually strongwinds in the Pacific Ocean [Garcia et al., 2001].

Although this evidence does not provethat the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina hada significant climatic or human impact, itdoes demonstrate that 1601 was a climati-cally interesting year and that the potentialimpacts of the eruption of Huaynaputina

are a topic that merits additional study. Thisevidence also demonstrates that ratherdetailed, geographically diverse, and clearlyrelevant information is available for thi stime period.

Lessons Learned

Our findings provide useful les sons forfuture research on this topic. For example,because many researchers have been look-ing for trends, time series are often pub-lished as multiyear running averages, whichobscures the effect of a single anomalous

year. The problem becomes especially

severe when the goal of the research is todemonstrate long-term climate change (i.e.,anthropogenic global warming) over cen-tennial or longer timescales. However, thepublication of running averages usuallymeans that the annual records exist, andthe original data sets are often available.

Also, when historians find anomalous cli-matic data for 1601, they often assume the dataare a manifestation of the Little Ice Age. Suchan assumption was initially made for the Rus-sian famine. A more frustrating problem is thatsometimes the data for 1601 are simply miss-ing. After tracing back through several sourcesthat referenced a 1200-year record of theblooming of the cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan,

we finally located an English translation of theoriginal Japanese paper [Sekiguti, 1969], onlyto find that 1601 was one of several years forwhich there were no data.

It is also critically important to check forcauses. For example, in 1600 the Britishinvaded Ireland and burned many crops,leading to a non-climate-caused famine thefollowing year.

We also note that the year 1601 oftenshows up as one of the most extreme, butnot necessarily the most extreme, over aparticular time interval. Given the naturalvariability of climate, this is not surprising.It suggests, however, that to fully test our

hypothesis about the 1600 eruption of Huay-naputina, we will need to demonstrate that1601 is a consistently extreme year acrossvarious indices and over long distances.

Future Work

We are continuing to gather data on possibleclimatic and human impacts of the Huayna-putina eruption. One important source ofinformation will be national libraries andarchives in Europe, including the ArchivoGeneral de Indias, in Seville, Spain, whichhouses the Jesuit records relating to the

Spanish Empire in the Americas and thePhilippines. Another important source ofinformation will be the county diaries of theMing Dynast y, which include detailedreports of natural phenomena and agricul-tural production.

Broader Implications

If the eruption of Huaynaputina had an

impact comparable to the eruption of Tamb-ora, it raises the question of whether thesulfur outputs of these two eruptions werecomparable. Most estimates of the sulfurfrom Tambora fall in the range of 60100teragrams [Oppenheimer, 2003], while esti-mates for Huaynaputina range from 1632teragrams (using ice core data) to 2655teragrams (using petrologic analysis) [Costaet al., 2005].

If a lower estimate for Huaynaputina iscorrect, there might have been a second, as

yet unidentified, eruption in 1600. Alterna-tively, 1601 simply could have been a verycold year, unrelated to the eruption. How-ever, a second eruption would be more con-

sistent with a higher estimate from the icecore data than from the petrologic analysis,not a lower estimate. Furthermore, mostvery cold years in the tree ring record arepreceded by known volcanic eruptions[Brif fa et al., 1998;Luckman and Wilson,2005]. Given that our knowledge of erup-tions is still incomplete, it is not clear if anyvery cold year has a nonvolcanic cause.After all, the massive eruption of Kuwae, asubmarine volcano in the South Pacific, in1452 or 1453 was not recognized until 1994[Monzier et al., 1994], well after it was notedin the tree ring records that 1452 to 1453had been a very cold period. Another possi-

bility is that we do not understand the rela-tionship between sulfur injection and cli-matic cooling well enough to be able toaccurately determine the critical thresholdof sulfur input.

If the higher estimate for the sulfur inputfrom Huaynaputina is correct (or if the sul-fur input from Tambora is less than previ-ous studies have suggested, asSelf et al.[2004] have argued), these questions do notarise. However, in the past, the Tamboraeruption has been regarded as the onlyeruption in the past 10,000 years known tohave had a global climatic and socialimpact. Because of this, Tambora-type erup-

tions were seen as low-probability events,and few researchers took seriously the needto study them in more detail. If the impactsof the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina werecomparable to those of Tambora, then thereturn period for such an event changesfrom once in 10,000 years to perhaps oncein 200300 years, especially if we assumethat Kuwae had a similar impact.

All of this also provides new insights intohow volcanic activity can af fect humansand how humans respond to the impacts ofvolcanic eruptions. Because of the desire todraw analogies with current scenarios for

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