jan 1, 540 - 540 AD - Maya Civilisation El Chichón Volcano Explosion Causing a Cooling/Drought Event

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Quote from Scientific American (link below) -

A dark plume leapt into the sky over southern Mexico. Below, waves of hot gas and rock screamed down volcanic slopes, stripping the mountain and surrounding area of vegetation, killing any living thing in their path. It mixed with rivers to create torrents of water, mud and other material as thick as wet concrete. For days afterward the air was choked with ash—microscopic shards of glass—that sickened survivors who inhaled it. It fell like snow onto the surrounding landscape, jamming rivers to create massive floods that wreaked havoc on agriculture. It was A.D. 540, and El Chichón—a small and previously unremarkable volcano—had plunged Maya civilization into darkness and chaos.

The Maya, who thrived from A.D. 250 to 900, are widely considered the most advanced civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas. They developed a writing system, precise calendars, new mathematics and magnificent cities with pyramids that still cast their shadows today. But a major mystery remains. In 1938 an archaeologist noticed a strange gap in dated Maya monuments. For more than 100 years the Maya inexplicably halted construction projects, seemingly deserted some areas and engaged in warfare. And in the 75 years since the discovery archaeologists have failed to find an explanation—although they have come up with a lot of hypotheses. Some have speculated an earthquake or hurricane struck the area. Others think trade routes might have collapsed.

An early hint that an ancient volcanic eruption might be the culprit came far from the Maya lowlands, in Greenland and Antarctica. A volcano can send a large amount of sulfur particles rocketing into the stratosphere, where they can easily spread across the globe. Once they reach the area over the poles they fasten to snow crystals and eventually become trapped in the ice sheets below, leaving a precise record for scientists to uncover centuries later.

Tree ring records indicate that sunlight-reflecting sulfur particles high in the atmosphere caused the global temperature to plummet by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius at the same time. A volcanic eruption had clearly rocked the world.

Nooren’s team assumes it was as large as the devastating event that occurred in 1982, when the mountain released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide gas, buried nine villages and killed 2,000 people. Juan Espindola, a volcanologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who was not involved in the study, agrees with this assessment given the large distance between the deposited ash that Nooren’s team studied in the Mexican Delta and El Chichón itself. Only a massive eruption would blow ash more than 100 kilometers, he thinks. Volcanologists will have to search for other ash deposits in order to really measure the event’s magnitude.

Quote from Nat Geo (link below) -

Using chemical fingerprinting techniques, the team showed that the smectite at Tikal didn't come from dust ferried from Africa by air currents—the common assumption—but rather from volcanoes within Guatemala and in what are now El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.

"We believe we have a series of volcanic events" represented in the minerals, said team leader Ken Tankersley, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati.

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