How a mystery volcano caused global catastrophe

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17.

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation — a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.

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Scientific evidence - including radiocarbon of the bones and geological data from across the globe - shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years.

Such was the size of the eruption that its sulphurous gases would have released a stratospheric aerosol veil or dry fog that blocked out sunlight, altered atmospheric circulation patterns and cooled the Earth’s surface, causing crops to wither, bringing famine, pestilence and death.

Mass deaths required capacious burial pits, as recorded in contemporary accounts. In 1258, a monk reported: “The north wind prevailed for several months… scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared, whence the hope of harvest was uncertain...

It was assumed to be God’s punishment. The loss of 15,000 would have radically changed the city, which at that time had a population of around 50,000.

The volcano’s exact location has yet to be established. Mexico, Ecuador and Indonesia are the most likely areas, where evidence was found in ice cores from the northern hemisphere and Antarctic. GNS