Everything about a super-eruption sounds alarming – even down to their name.

Only be biggest volcanic eruptions ever to occur on our planet are classed as super-eruptions, with the most recent happening around 25,500 years ago. The Oruanui eruption of Taupō, New Zealand caused huge amounts of ash to shower the planet whilst a large area of New Zealand collapsed to form a massive caldera. That caldera is now full of water, and is known as Lake Taupō.

Such occurrences are rare, with only a small number ever recorded. But when they do happen, the results are devastating yet predictable.

Not only do super-eruptions cause the volcano to collapse, resulting in the formation of the caldera, they eject huge amounts of rock and ash into our planet’s skies, accompanied by huge quantities of gases.

These gases have the most concerning effect. The significant amount of sulfur amongst these gases reacts in the upper atmosphere to form particles which reflect sunlight. The more sunlight reflected, the less reaches the Earth, causing the planet to cool as a result.

As such, scientists have long predicted that super-eruptions were responsible for the trigger of Ice Ages.

However, according to a recent study from the University of St Andrews in the UK, this is not the case.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, proves that despite the fact that the planet’s climate was temporarily affected by super-eruptions, global temperatures recovered relatively quickly – so if the world was in an interglacial period when the volcano erupted, it stayed that way.

By examining ice cores obtained in Greenland and Antarctica, the research team were able to identify and analzyse ash particles within.

Those ash particles – over 100,000 years of them – are a perfect record, frozen in time beneath the surface of the ice. When extracted, they help us to understand how seismic and atmospheric events affected the climate of our planet through time.

The significant quantity of ash particles that the researchers obtained from the ice cores were dated back to the Los Chocoyos super-eruption of Atitlán Caldera, Guatemala.

And though the team were able to determine that the super-eruption had temporary cooling effects on the planet, it recovered within a few decades to its previous state, rather than triggering a glacial state as expected.

This research takes our understanding of super-eruptions forward by huge strides. Since no super-volcano eruption has happened since human records truly began, our knowledge of them has been limited until now.

Despite the fact that scientists do not predict any super-eruptions in our lifetimes, understanding how they would affect life on our planet – and, in a modern context, interact with delicate climate tipping points – is vital, as the University of St Andrews’ Dr Helen Innes explains in a statement:

“Our findings improve our understanding of how resilient the climate can be to supereruption-scale injections of stratospheric sulphate. Continuing to identify the largest volcanic eruptions in ice cores and assign high-precision ages is essential to our understanding of the risk that major stratospheric sulphate injections pose to global climate.”

And in this sense, it’s good news.

If a super-eruption were to occur, it wouldn’t plunge our planet into an Ice Age.

However, it could be the final straw that tips our climate crisis into catastrophe in other ways, making it clearer than ever that we need to protect our environment before it’s too late.

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