London’s volcanic winter


Mass graves were needed all too often in the Medieval world, but establishing the specific tragedy behind any given set is difficult. Now Don Walker believes that a group in Spitalfields cemetery can be linked to a massive volcanic eruption, as he told Matthew Symonds.

The destructive force unleashed by Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Mount St Helensmade those volcanoes household names. Yet all three are dwarfed by the largest eruption of the last millennium. Probably occurring in early 1258 AD, it violently ejected between 200 and 600 megatons of sulphate into the Earth’s atmosphere. Around eight times the yield from Krakatoa, this was an eruption on a cataclysmic scale.

London’s volcanic winter