Volcano-Climate Interactions

Volcanism is the primary pathway linking the solid Earth with the climate, and it has the potential to strongly perturb the biosphere, e.g., mass extinctions, on short (~1-50 kyr) timescales. However, this timescale is not accurately represented by current models, as they focus either on individual eruptions (~ years) or long-term carbon cycle effects of volcanism (~100kyr, focusing on CO₂ emissions only). Specifically, we need to model how volcanic emissions other than CO₂ (e.g., volcanic ash, SO₂/SO₄ aerosols, halogens, hydrothermal nutrient flux) affect the climate over multiple eruptions. My research addresses this challenge by a) developing novel data analysis methods to estimate the tempo of eruptions at < 10 kyr resolution, b) developing new models to assess the environmental impact of multi-eruption sequences, and c) comparing model predictions with high-resolution paleoclimate records. During my PhD, I focused on continental flood basalts (CFBs) since they are the best examples of volcano-climate-ecosystem interaction.

I have utilized a variety of multi-disciplinary approaches to provide the first, robust estimates of eruptive rates for CFBs at the scale of individual eruptions. These include constraints from volcanology (lava flow morphology and thickness, Self, Mittal et al 2020; lava flow thermal modeling Katona, Fu, Mittal et al. 2020), geochronology (Sprain … Mittal et al. 2019, Fendley … Mittal et al. 2020), paleo-proxy records (analysis of Deccan Traps Hg records with data inversion methods; Fendley, Mittal et al. 2019), and paleomagnetism (analysis of flow-by-flow paleo-secular variation using a forward models and data inversion, Mittal et al. 2019).