ESSIC / Geology Professor James Farquhar recently co-authored a new paper, “2600 years of stratospheric volcanism through sulfate isotopes,” in Nature Communications. Using 2,600 years’ worth of records contained in ice cores from Antarctica, Farquhar and his colleagues developed a new isotopic method to analyze the recent history of large stratospheric volcanic eruptions.
By understanding the history of these big eruptions, researchers can begin to place short cooling episodes and other discrete climate events into the context of large-scale climate patterns.
Farquhar’s research focuses on sulfur isotope geochemistry in a variety of terrestrial and extraterrestrial systems. Farquhar and coworkers are best known for the discovery and interpretation of mass independent sulfur isotope signatures in samples from the early Earth that trace the evolution of oxygen and chemistry in the early atmosphere.
To read the CMNS press release on this work, click here.
To read the paper itself, click here: “2600-years of stratospheric volcanism through sulfate isotopes”.
