Published today in the journal Antiquity, a new paper by myself and Mike Baillie revises the Greenland ice core chronologies back to around 2000 BC. We show that the massive climate dislocation beginning in 1627 BC, a date that has been associated with the eruption of the Mediterranean volcano of Thera (modern day Santorini), was actually caused by the caldera forming eruption of Aniackchak in Alaska. Furthermore, we find poor agreement between volcanic horizons in our revised ice core chronology and radiocarbon dates on material buried by the the volcanic eruption suggesting that Thera is either an "invisible" eruption in the ice core records, or likely did not erupt in the late 17th century BC. This latter statement is in agreement with the recent discovery of Pearson et al.'s (2018) discovery that the radiocarbon claibration curve may be in error between 1660-1540 BC, resulting in calibrated radiocarbon dates being too old, meaning that Thera is likely to have erupted in the 16th century BC.

The paper is "Absolute tree-ring dates for the Late Bronze Age eruptions of Aniakchak and Thera in light of a proposed revision of ice-core chronologies" by Jonny McAneney and Mike Baillie [www.cambridge.org]

Free pdf of the paper and supplementary material can be accessed (read or downloaded) on my research gate page

Paper [www.researchgate.net]

Supplementary material [www.researchgate.net]

Jonny

The path to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns. - David M Raup



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2019 09:58AM by JonnyMcA.