Eruption led to ‘winter of yellow snow’

Dundee University researchers have published the first study into the impact on Scotland of one of the most important climatic events of the last millennium.

In 1783, a series of volcanic eruptions on Iceland’s Laki fissure sent clouds of choking sulphurous fog across Europe.

The volcanic activity lasted nine months and lingering effects from deadly atmospheric pall would ultimately claim the lives of tens of thousands in northern and central Europe, who succumbed to respiratory failure and the extremely cold winter that followed.

Experts have previously attributed famines as far away as Japan and Egypt to Laki, with claims the volcanic fallout were responsible for crop failures in Europe which contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution.

The eruptions, which began on June 8, 1783, were 10 times the size of Iceland’s 2010 volcanic activity that triggered an aviation shutdown across Europe.

Laki has been implicated in more than 20,000 excess deaths in England, but until now very little was known about its impact in Scotland.

Professor Alastair Dawson and Dr Martin Kirkbride, from Dundee University’s Geography and Environmental Sciences department, have addressed this gap by studying climate and air

quality in Scotland in the years after the eruption.

They have dug into contemporary instrumental records and diaries which provide rare witness records of what happened in Scotland around that time.

“Researching these diaries, held at the National Library of Scotland and National Records Scotland,

makes an invaluable contribution to how we understand the impact of the Laki eruptions in Scotland,” said Dr Kirkbride.

“It’s significant that the chronology and meteorology of haze occurrence in Scotland during the summer of 1783 has clear implications for any future Laki-type

eruption, which has the capacity to create a major public health crisis across Europe.”

In the western Highlands, Laki’s sulphurous effects led to the winter of 1783/84 as the Bliadhne nan Sneachda Bhuidhe, “the year of the yellow snow”.

The paper is published in the journal, The Holocene.

DEVASTATING: The eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in 1783 changed history.