Tag: Iceland

One Volcano = Up to Four Times As Much SO2 As All Of Europe

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

There is an AGW site called RealClimate (I’m not going to link to them). They have a post up mocking  the use of volcano’s as a source of CO2/SO2 etc compared to human sources.

I did a post a while back looking at the amount of SO2 produced by one volcano.

Here is another news snippet from the same period.

“The sulfur dioxide (SO2) emitted from the Holuhraun eruption has reached up to 60,000 tons per day and averaged close to 20,000 tons since it began. For comparison, all the SO2 pollution in Europe, from industries, energy production, traffic and house heating, etc., amounts to 14,000 tons per day.”

Admittedly this is unusual. But there are 3,000,000 undersea volcanoes.

And they could have pumped out a lot of CO2 in the past.

The climate-driven rise and fall of sea level during the past million years matches up with valleys and ridges on the seafloor, suggesting ice ages influence underwater volcanic eruptions, two new studies reveal. And because volcanic chains suture some 37,000 miles (59,500 kilometers) of ocean floor, the eruptions could pump out enough carbon dioxide gas to shift planetary temperatures, the study authors suggest.

“Surprisingly, the deep seafloor matters in the long-term climate cycle,” said Maya Tolstoy, lead author of one of the studies and a marine geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.”

 

 

 

One Volcano = Twice As Much SO2 As All Of Europe’s Smokestacks

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

Wow.

“Sulphur dioxide has been spurting too — 35,000 tons of it a day, more than twice the amount spewing from all of Europe’s smokestacks. The gas has spread across the Icelandic countryside, causing people to wheeze and trapping some indoors.

The record-setting amount of pollution has surprised even volcanologists in the middle of a major project funded by the European Union to understand the island’s fiery activity. They had been preparing for a repeat of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, which led to a billowing ash plume that grounded planes across Europe. “Everybody was expecting a big ash cloud, and now we have something totally different,” says Anja Schmidt, an atmospheric modeller at the University of Leeds, UK, who studies how volcanic gases spread.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gas-spewing-icelandic-volcano-stuns-scientists/

 

(h/t Instapundit)