Volcanic Winter

Human activity is mimicking the powerful natural atmospheric changes brought on by the largest flood basalt eruptions. Look up the Siberian Traps which ushered in the Permian Mass Extinction and came very close to sterilizing the planet. This occurred due to absolutely monstrous CO2 gas release sustained over many thousands of years, as these eruptions are beyond any human comprehension. They dwarf VEI 8 explosive eruptions like Yellowstone (last was 1,000-1,500 cubic kilometers of volume). Flood basalt eruptions are 100,000+ cubic kilometers, sustaining at an enormously high yearly rate of effusion. They’re major players of global climate change and are often responsible for some of the warmest excursions our planet has seen. The earth has “tools” to recover from these excursions, but they too take many, many millennia in order to scrub CO2 and bring global temps back down. I can only say continuing mass deforestation is catastrophically short sighted on our part, and couldn’t be more antithetical to what we should be doing right now. I understand all the ways modern society depends on lumber, but we need to figure it out - fast. The earth hasn’t seen a flood basalt event since the Columbia River Basalts about 16mya, and as you can probably tell they’re extremely rare from a human perspective. They’re believed to often be the birth of a new hotspot as an enormous mantle plume pushes toward the surface and forces out spectacular amounts of freshly melted magma as the plume pushes into the crust. And with all that melted rock comes all that exsolved gas, CO2 chief among them. And yes, the hotspot that caused the CRB in the PNW is very likely the hotspot powering Yellowstone presently, albeit in a reduced capacity. Human activity is mimicking a flood basalt event, except at an even more rapid rate. They take thousands of years generally to have the kind of impact we’ve seen in a hundred. Short of catastrophic instantaneous events like asteroid impacts, we have to be the fastest instance of major climate change in the geologic record.

I just got heat stroke imagining your comment. Too funny how people differ, I don’t run but only hike below 60 degrees. Anything warmer I get on the treadmill. Nov to April is my hiking season, lol. To be fair I’m way different from most and probably a bit mad, but yeah!

This one was frustrating, I had nothing but virga. Did nicely a few days later with the rest of you though.

Those temps are obscene. Also, I don’t begrudge people for their preferences and absolutely respect them. But I don’t want 60 degree weather here in winter, ever. It’s just wrong, unseasonable, and actually truly makes me depressed. So yes, it’s dreary and chilly and wet which sucks, but I’ll still take it over whatever the hell DC is getting right now. I always look at it, too, like this; we have warmth, heat, and humidity to contend with almost all year these days. We don’t need warmth in the winter, because even having said that we still often get it anyway, and unfortunately often at the worst times (bad air masses ruining snow chances, etc). We often say “it just needs to be cold enough to snow,” and yeah, isn’t that the crux of it? Unfortunately the last few years, it simply hasn’t been for many events that rained throughout almost the whole Metro. Give me the cold, always. I’ve mentioned this before but didn’t @bluewavepost last year that for NYC, seasonal snow totals correlated to DJF average temperatures, to a point? And that the higher the average got above 35 or 36, the lower the seasonal snow totals? So I never cheer on warmth here in the winter, personally.

Crazy!! I’m at 48 currently.

“Did you know you were going 36 in a 35 and that I punched six holes through my bathroom wall this morning to commemorate NYC’s epic snow drought???!” “Go ahead and tell me what you were doing on the night of NYC’s last 6 inch+ snow event?”

Stockpile of rapid antigen tests. Both my wife and I work with the public and are constantly around lots of people, so over the course of the pandemic we frequently tested one another. They work pretty well, I’ve seen some likely false negatives but they usually correct with further testing. Just good to know what you have, when possible.

Thank you, and thank you @donsutherland1. I really hope you recover swiftly as well, I know how miserable it can be! The last time I had it, I had a 101-103 fever for about 8-9 days. Awful. Yeah, I’ve actually been up all night this evening due to the extreme discomfort of the congestion I have right now. My nose is like a blockade that won’t let a single molecule of air through, and that always triggers a sort of anxiety in me that makes sleep difficult to impossible. On the bright side my cough has been improving and along with it, the chest pain. Just gotta ride it out. COVID is extremely unpleasant, as is the flu or any other similar hard hitting virus.

Ugh. I think I have COVID again, luckily haven’t had it in like 18 months. But I’m fairly sure I have it right now, deep chesty cough with a lot of pain. Feel like el crapola. Time for some movies and video games .

Beautiful morning

Yes! I’ve seen eruptions computed into joules and compared to earthquakes, but that kind of mathematics is far beyond me. It’s possible though, and I’ve seen multiple eruptions compared to earthquake energy releases (and nuclear events like Tsar Bomba).

Toba Catastrophy Theory. The Toba eruption 75kya was 3-5x larger than the most recent Yellowstone supereruption. It was as big as 5000 cubic kilometers of erupted material which is mind boggling. For reference, Mt St Helens was about 1.2 cubic kilometers of erupted material and a low end VEI 5. If you want to know why I have such a burning interest in volcanology, the scale we’re talking about here is precisely the reason. It’s beyond comprehension and not even really all that long ago, 75kya is geologically last week. Events of similar magnitude will occur again, though of course not likely tomorrow. With that said, the genetic bottleneck component is disputed. There’s absolutely no doubt an eruption that monstrously large would’ve had a huge climate impact, however it’s not always that simple. There is evidence that Toba erupted huge (I mean HUGE) lava fountains around the circular caldera ring fault and then the primary ash column would’ve been something called a co-ignimbrite plume. This is sort of a secondary eruption column that follows a less explosive episode and creates strong thermal updrafts that lofts material high, but not quite as high as a primary explosive (plinian) sequence. Semeru had an eruption a couple years ago that demonstrated co-ignimbrite plumes well. Long story short, it may not have had as enormous an impact as the volume alone would suggest as climate disrupting gases may not have completely and consistently reached the stratosphere. We don’t really know for sure, but this is plausible. It definitely caused a volcanic winter don’t mistake me, I’m just speaking about the absolute magnitude of the event. The evidence against comes from a lakebed in Africa which shows little climate disruption from this time period. However, playing devil’s advocate we know even very large volcanic eruptions tend to regionally have varying impacts. Averaged globally there are pronounced effects, but certain regions may be more or less impacted than others. So it’s interesting but also not conclusive IMHO. There is probably more evidence and discussion about this nowadays, I haven’t read into Toba in quite a while. Regardless, an eruption that large - hominids at the time weren’t having very much fun. Indonesia would’ve been absolutely destroyed.

And yep, that’s the one I was thinking of! Conflated the dates with Tambora, which of course is pure lol as that stuff is always on my mind. Thanks!

Very fascinating stuff, thanks for that!! And yep I’m familiar with the Chesapeake impactor which fell during the Eocene something like ~33mya. Was a 1-2km bolide IIRC, certainly wouldn’t be a great time for us would that repeat today! Have you heard about the Australasian Strewnfield from less than 1mya?? It may have impacted an active volcano on the Bolaven Plateau in SE Asia, and subsequent lava flows buried the crater. It’s an insane possibility and one of the most fascinating subjects in recent geologic history. It was a relatively large impact event. Here’s a paper on it I read recently: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1904368116 And of course the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis had me hook line and sinker for a while, just because the possibility of a large airburst event significantly bigger than Tunguska only thousands of years ago is extremely intellectually appealing. But it’s heavily, heavily contentious and it’s not necessary to explain the Younger Dryas cooling excursion. The final pulse of melting from the Laurentide shutting down the AMOC is sufficient to explain that. Of course it could’ve still happened and simply not been the primary driver of the cooling episode, but again the supposed platinum anomalies found at Clovis culture sites from the time period are heavily disputed in literature. I always find that in and of itself kind of crazy, that material is either “there” or it isn’t. But I suspect that’s a major oversimplification. That sort of material analysis isn’t really my forte.

I had heard this in passing, do we have any estimations on intensity? Speculation? I had also read a very strong hurricane hit our area in I believe 1815 (or thereabouts, just going from memory). Seems like for a hurricane to maintain serious intensity up to our latitude it must have tremendous forward speed to dampen any weakening before landfall, which I believe checks out with estimations at least for the 19th century storm I read about. Weren’t the great LIE hurricane and Great Atlantic hurricane of ‘38 and ‘44 also very quick movers? Again, that sort of appears to be a pre-requisite for high intensity hurricanes up to this latitude, which does make sense.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Little Ice Age and have wondered for a long time what winters here would’ve been like , especially the earlier period 4-500 years ago, prior to colonization. I mean, if you take ~1C off the 1850-1900 baseline, you’re talking the possibility that the entire EC was extremely snowy. The only real contention here that makes sense is that it may have been colder and significantly drier, so perhaps averages weren’t too crazily different. But I have to believe during the coldest and stormiest decades of that period, this area had to be regularly pulling down 40-60 inches and probably had multiple seasons above our snowiest of the past hundred years or so. Again, perhaps the cold was offset by drier air overall and the region saw more frequent less amplified systems that perhaps didn’t drop snow as heavily as amplified storms do today with the oceans the way they are now. I had always heard the North Atlantic was an icebox during much of the LIA. If you go back to before the start of the Holocene (which wasn’t that long ago, crazily enough), the Laurentide ice sheet extended to NYC’s present location. Glaciers are compacted snowfall that doesn’t melt the rest of the year and compiles over centuries and millenia. Go back far enough and the area might just be the winter wonderland I dream of . But seriously, I have to imagine there were periods of the LIA that were extremely prolific for snowfall throughout the Mid Atlantic and New England. This is an excellent article from my favorite science blog on the internet (covers much more than just volcanology) that discusses this subject and touches on the LIA with some interesting speculation. It’s a very good read. https://www.volcanocafe.org/ice-age/

13.8, think that’s my low on the season so far. Welp, was nice while it lasted. Fun week.

Fair points, but I just want to mention that averages include all seasons including La Niña “shutouts.” I guess we can debate if this Niño was too strong ultimately, but central based (the forcing has been CP, right?) Niño’s with periods of polar favorability should yield more snow than the reverse, and thus I don’t always personally agree with going by averages to contextualize a season. Some seasons are above average, or the average would be lower. And those seasons are generally favorable ENSO state with a cooperative polar domain. I say it like this because even back in the prior -PDO cycle decades ago we snowed regularly with an unfavorable Pac (-PNA), due to -AO/-NAO pulling its weight. Just IMHO. And of course, it snows less at the coast than the elevated interior. But we still get snow here. We still have had outstanding seasons and outstanding single storms. But I do think WRT snow at the coast it’s more about temperature, because it needs to be cold to offset any imperfections with the synoptics of the storm or track itself. The coast is far more temperature sensitive than inland, elevated areas. We just had a BN week and the coast snowed twice.

Just looking at snowfall to date the strip of purple to blue at the immediate coast from Boston all the way to DC is pretty crazy. I hadn’t realized the Cape & CT coast are pretty much in the same position as the immediate NYC metro. Shows how the warmth is a problem all the way to Boston along the immediate coast, though them doing a touch better is of course expected. Really hoping something works out in Feb.

This week has averaged 24.1 degrees for me, so a very wintry week. January MTD is 33.3, no doubt dragged down by this very cool week. Last January the month averaged 41.5 for me.

@40/70 Benchmark’s suggestion to change his name to MJO456 was legendarily funny. It still cracks me up. Poor guy, he needs a proper damn storm (as do we all!).

Whatever happens from this point on, I’m grateful for the week of actual winter we had. Cool to cold, two separate mild snowfall events within a few days, and I’ve actually retained much of what fell going back to Tuesday. In a warm winter, this is pretty great. I agree with Justin that if you’re a turbo weenie and need more, take a trip north. My wife and I are going to Vermont or NH for my birthday in mid Feb. We’re going on a hiking / snow shoeing trip (and no matter where we go we’re definitely stopping by The Alchemist brewery, that’s been on my bucket list for ages!) and just want to get up into the mountains and into some deep snow. Really looking forward to it! We’ve just been so damn unlucky the past two years it’s hard to be surprised by the fact that we’re staring down yet another warm and highly unfavorable period. All we can do is hope for some chances, a bit of luck, and that we’ll catch at least one more favorable period before winter’s end. At the very least the winter hasn’t been a complete shutout in the vein of last season. We’ll see where things go from here.

I made it to 15. Surprisingly not my coldest season to date, which is 14. I hadn’t paid much attention to forecasted temps but I assumed I’d break that with the snowcover everywhere.