Kuwae - Eruptive History

Eruptive History

Tongoa and Epi islands once formed part of a larger island called Kuwae. Local folklore tells of a cataclysmic eruption that destroyed this island, leaving the two smaller islands and an oval-shaped 12 x 6 km caldera in between (but the story tells of an eruption south of Tongoa). Collapse associated with caldera formation may have been as much as 1,100 metres. Around 32–39 cubic km of magma was erupted, making the Kuwae eruption one of the largest in the last 10,000 years.

In Antarctica and Greenland ice cores, a major eruption or series of eruptions is revealed as a spike in sulfate concentration showing that the release in form of particles was higher than any other eruption since. Also the ice core analyses are able to pinpoint the event to late 1452 or early 1453. This volume of expelled matter is more than six times larger than that of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption and would have caused severe cooling of the entire planet the following three years. The link between the sulphur spike and the Kuwae caldera is questioned in a 2007 study by Károly Németh, et al. proposing the Tofua caldera as an alternative source candidate.