Volcanic Eruptions of the Holocene: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a New Methodology for Absolute Dating.
by
Charlotte Pearson
The University of Reading
Coauthors: Charlotte Pearson (The University of Reading), Sturt Manning (The University of Reading), Max Coleman (The University of Reading), Kym Jarvis (NERC ICPMS facility, Kingston University)

Investigations of volcanic impact on human society and the environment are presently restrained by a lack of absolute dates for eruptions prior to the last few hundred years. Without a precisely known starting point, the time frame of impact and recovery, and the sociological repercussions across broad geographical areas can never be irrefutably established. A potential means to high resolution dating for such events lies with tree rings. Precisely dated tree ring chronologies from around the world have been shown to record short term climatic alterations in periods following various modern eruptions, and, have been used to speculatively link absolute dates with past eruptions. However, no indisputable proof exists to confirm such a connection and it has been argued that such anomalies may reflect numerous other environmental factors effecting the growth of the tree at specific intervals. This paper presents results suggesting that it may be possible to identify a chemical connection between a growth ring of a specific year and a particular volcanic eruption, thus providing the long required causal connection. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) in conjunction with a laser ablation sampling system was used for the multielemental analysis of several sequences of individual growth rings for years of known volcanic eruptions. Preliminary results suggest the technique, though requiring further refinement has the potential to procure, for the first time, an absolute date for some of the major volcanic events of prehistory.

Date received: February 26, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caiq-18.