Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
They left before the eruption came, abandoning their island, their frescoes, their furniture. When the volcano blew, sending ash more than 18 miles up, into the stratosphere, it blanketed the the island and darkened the sky.
Across the Mediterranean, people saw the effects of the eruption at Thera, which was so large it changed the climate for a time. It was larger than Vesuvius, or Tambora, or Krakatoa. It’s thought to be the largest volcanic eruption ever witnessed by humankind, or the largest volcanic eruption in the current geological era, which goes back almost 12,000 years.This catastrophic event, which spelled the end of Bronze Age Minoan civilization, may have cast a shadow over Mediterranean tales and myths for ages. It is thought that the eruption could be the origin of the myth of Atlantis, a lost island world, or the source for the Biblical plagues of Egypt—polluted river, darkened sky.
But over thousands of years, details and dates have a way of blurring, so that now no one knows exactly when the eruption took place. It was almost certainly more than 3,500 years ago. Evidence in texts from Egypt’s New Kingdom suggests the 16th century B.C. Radiocarbon dating of materials found from Thera (known today as Santorini), though, put the date a little further back, in 17th century B.C.
For years, experts have struggled to reconcile this gap and pin down the exact date of the eruption. The ash that spewed from the volcano settled across the Mediterranean and the layer can still be found in the ground. If the event could be precisely dated, that layer would provide a very useful time horizon for understanding chronology across the region. In a new paper published in Science Advances, a team led by scientists at the University of Arizona has gathered new data that they think could help resolve the mystery.
The problem of the Thera eruption gets at one of most basic questions of archaeology: How do we know when things happened in the past? In the absence of written records that can be lined up with known calendar systems, pinning down the specific year of an event can be tricky, if not impossible.
But archaeologists have a few strategies. The growth rings of trees, for instance, keep a record that can be traced back thousands of years by matching up rings of trees whose lives overlapped. Some long-lived species, such as bristlecone pine,…
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