Next chapter, - Brenjen. Subject: Volcanoes.
Good thing to bring up the subject of volcanoes, and their effect on global climate. BTW, there are members of this board that have claimed that volcanoes are to blame for warming, there are also members that claim that warming isn't happening.
Anyway, your elephant frose to death, so it must have cooled quickly. Like it did in 1816, which was, by the way, the direct result of the massive volcanic explosion & eruption on Mt. Tambora in Indonesia a year before.
Now, the Mt.Helens eruption is by no means a huge event, and is dwarfed by bouth Mt-Tambora and another really big one, Laki in my neighbourhood 1783 to 1786. Laki cooled the atmosphere all the way down to Egypt, caused death through poison and famine through cold and bad crops in most of the N-Hemisphere in the following years. What was released:
An estimated 122 Tg (120 Million tons) of sulphur dioxide was emitted into the atmosphere: approximately equivalent to three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006, and also equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo-1991 eruption every three days. (This causes cooling, and the quantity was actually enough to kill people outside some thousands of Km's away),it produced about 15 km³ (3.6 mi³) of basalt lava (some rough 500 sq km if I remember right), and the total volume of tephra emitted was 0.91 km3, fluorine was some 800 million tonnes.
Tambora was a big kaboom, easily heard 2.600 kilometres, the mountain basically blew up and got thrown away. While being the largest observed eruption in history, Laki probably holds the cards for released lava and perhaps other material, - these are two kinds of eruptions you see.
By comparison to both, St. Helens isn't really much.
So, they did cool, and that very quickly, but beware, it doesn't calculate into the N-Hemisphere temp numbers with high numbers. This is what Benjamin Franklin wrote of the summer after Laki:
"During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effect of the sun's rays to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been greater, there existed a constant fog over all Europe, and a great part of North America. This fog was of a permanent nature; it was dry, and the rays of the sun seemed to have little effect towards dissipating it, as they easily do a moist fog, arising from water. They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it, that when collected in the focus of a burning glass they would scarce kindle brown paper. Of course, their summer effect in heating the Earth was exceedingly diminished. Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted, and received continual additions. Hence the air was more chilled, and the winds more severely cold. Hence perhaps the winter of 1783-4 was more severe than any that had happened for many years. "
In England and N-Europe the cooling was even more severe, and some go as far to say that this was what kindled the French revolution in 1789, - it was after all related to famine.
So, here ya go, - big volcanic eruptions have a fast cooling factor, and once the fallout has cleared the effect is going away. We can expect this, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
