Glass signature
The Toba super-eruption was the biggest volcanic blast on Earth in the past 2.5 million years, and probably further back than that as well.
Researchers estimate some 2,000-3,000 cubic kilometres of rock and ash were thrown from the volcano when it blew its top on what is now the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Much of that debris landed close by, piling hundreds of metres deep in places. But a lot of it would also have gone into the high atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and cooling the planet. Sulphurous gases emitted in the eruption would have compounded this effect.
The cores record climate changes in East Africa stretching back half a million years
Some scientists have argued that the winter conditions this would have induced could have posed an immense challenge to early humans and have pointed to some genetic studies that indicated our ancestors likely experienced a dramatic drop in numbers - a population "bottleneck" - around the time of the eruption.
The Oxford team reasoned that if this perturbation was so great, it ought to be evident in the sediments of Lake Malawi.
This body of water is some 7,000km west of Toba in the East African Rift Valley, from where our Homo sapiens species emerged in the past 100,000 years or so.
The lake is said to retain an excellent record of past climate change which can be inferred from the types and abundance of algae and other organic matter found in its bed muds.
Tens of metres of sediments have been drilled to retrieve cores, and it these recordings of past times that Dr Lane and colleagues examined.
They identified tiny glass shards mixed in with the muds almost 30m below the lake bed. The shards represent small fragments of magma ejected from a volcano that have "frozen" in flight.
"They're smaller than the diameter of a human hair, less than 100 microns in size," explains Dr Lane. "We find them by sieving the sediments in a very long process that goes through every centimetre of core." Chemical analysis ties the fragments to the Toba eruption.
Glass signature
The Toba super-eruption was the biggest volcanic blast on Earth in the past 2.5 million years, and probably further back than that as well.
Researchers estimate some 2,000-3,000 cubic kilometres of rock and ash were thrown from the volcano when it blew its top on what is now the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Much of that debris landed close by, piling hundreds of metres deep in places. But a lot of it would also have gone into the high atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and cooling the planet. Sulphurous gases emitted in the eruption would have compounded this effect.
The cores record climate changes in East Africa stretching back half a million years
Some scientists have argued that the winter conditions this would have induced could have posed an immense challenge to early humans and have pointed to some genetic studies that indicated our ancestors likely experienced a dramatic drop in numbers - a population "bottleneck" - around the time of the eruption.
The Oxford team reasoned that if this perturbation was so great, it ought to be evident in the sediments of Lake Malawi.
This body of water is some 7,000km west of Toba in the East African Rift Valley, from where our Homo sapiens species emerged in the past 100,000 years or so.
The lake is said to retain an excellent record of past climate change which can be inferred from the types and abundance of algae and other organic matter found in its bed muds.
Tens of metres of sediments have been drilled to retrieve cores, and it these recordings of past times that Dr Lane and colleagues examined.
They identified tiny glass shards mixed in with the muds almost 30m below the lake bed. The shards represent small fragments of magma ejected from a volcano that have "frozen" in flight.
"They're smaller than the diameter of a human hair, less than 100 microns in size," explains Dr Lane. "We find them by sieving the sediments in a very long process that goes through every centimetre of core." Chemical analysis ties the fragments to the Toba eruption.
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