One of the last things you'd think could be lost is a volcano. Yet, when we look at the record of volcanic activity, even in the past few hundred years, there are signals that a large eruption occurred ... we just don't have any other evidence of the source of that big blast. Slowly but surely, through geochemical sleuthing, some of those mystery eruptions have been matched up with volcanoes. It turns out that many times, that source is more surprising than anticipated.
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by William Hutchinson and others may have found the smoking gun for a mysterious event recorded in the planet's ice cores. If we look at the signal of climate-altering eruptions since 1800 captured by ice core records on both poles, many famous eruptions show up: Tambora (1815), Krakatau (1883), Pinatubo (1991) and many others. However, certain peaks didn't have obvious matches in the known geological or historical records.
