ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Ash from the Toba supereruption in Lake Malawi shows no volcanic winter in East Africa at 75 ka.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 202 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sub-annual resolution evidence for limited impact of the 74-ka Toba eruption on eastern African climate.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Article
- Community established best practice recommendations for tephra studies-from collection through analysis.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Four New Horsemen of an Apocalypse? Solar Flares, Super-volcanoes, Pandemics, and Artificial Intelligence.Economics of disasters and climate change · 2022Review
- Global climate disruption and regional climate shelters after the Toba supereruption.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Origin of ethnic groups, linguistic families, and civilizations in China viewed from the Y chromosome.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2021Review
- An upper bound for the background rate of human extinction.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Article
- Giant caldera in the Arctic Ocean: Evidence of the catastrophic eruptive event.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- A progressively wetter climate in southern East Africa over the past 1.3 million years.Nature · 2016Article
- Underestimated risks of recurrent long-range ash dispersal from northern Pacific Arc volcanoes.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Human phylogeography and diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Was millennial scale climate change during the Last Glacial triggered by explosive volcanism?Scientific reports · 2015Article
- First discovery of Holocene cryptotephra in Amazonia.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Cryptotephras: the revolution in correlation and precision dating.Journal of quaternary science · 2015Article
- Toba supereruption: age and impact on East African ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- Reply to Roberts et al.: A subdecadal record of paleoclimate around the Youngest Toba Tuff in Lake Malawi.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- Rethinking the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa.Evolutionary anthropologyArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The most explosive volcanic event of the Quaternary was the eruption of Mt. Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 y ago, which produced voluminous ash deposits found across much of the Indian Ocean, Indian Peninsula, and South China Sea. A major climatic downturn observed within the Greenland ice cores has been attributed to the cooling effects of the ash and aerosols ejected during the eruption of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT). These events coincided roughly with a hypothesized human genetic bottleneck, when the number of our species in Africa may have been reduced to near extinction. Some have speculated that the demise of early modern humans at that time was due in part to a dramatic climate shift triggered by the supereruption. Others have argued that environmental conditions would not have been so severe to have such an impact on our ancestors, and furthermore, that modern humans may have already expanded beyond Africa by this time. We report an observation of the YTT in Africa, recovered as a cryptotephra layer in Lake Malawi sediments, >7,000 km west of the source volcano. The YTT isochron provides an accurate and precise age estimate for the Lake Malawi paleoclimate record, which revises the chronology of past climatic events in East Africa. The YTT in Lake Malawi is not accompanied by a major change in sediment composition or evidence for substantial temperature change, implying that the eruption did not significantly impact the climate of East Africa and was not the cause of a human genetic bottleneck at that time.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.