Improving air quality should be a top goal across the planet. Air pollution, after all, contributes to 7 million premature deaths per year globally. To be absolutely clear: This is not at all to say that air pollution is a good thing. And while extreme, Mount Pinatubo’s cooling effect is not an anomaly - nor are volcanoes the only sources.Īir-polluting sources - such as volcanic eruptions, wildfires, and industrial factories - all emit particles that reflect light and cool the planet. That doesn’t sound like a huge jump, but if you were to warm the planet by an additional 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit today, that could trigger increased flooding and fire events, sweeping heat waves, super storms, and even famines.Ĭollectively, volcanoes around the globe emit 20 to 25 million tons of the cooling aerosol sulfur dioxide annually, but in 1991, Mount Pinatubo alone released 15 million tons of the compound. Mount Pinatubo’s eruption temporarily dropped global temps by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Sulfur dioxide is one of many aerosol particles that reflects the sun’s light and can act to make temperatures globally cooler than they would be otherwise.

Yes, that’s right: A hot volcanic eruption made the planet cooler. While almost a foot of muddy ash covered the surrounding area, the sulfuric gas mixed with water vapor in the air, creating a layer of a reflective acidic compound that cooled the Earth for two years. The eruption also sent a sulfuric gas cloud into the atmosphere 28 miles high - or five Mount Everests stacked on top of each other. (An additional 426 people died in the three months following the explosion due to poor conditions in the evacuation zones.) The eruption forced approximately 30,000 indigenous Aeta people to evacuate the nearby area and killed over 200 people. “It’s just like what we saw in Hiroshima.”Īfter 500 years of dormancy, Mount Pinatubo’s June explosion represented one of the largest volcanic events of the 20th century. “The smoke is very thick, like a dark mushroom in the sky,” said reporter Gus Abelgas in a 1991 television broadcast on the ongoing volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

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