A volcanic eruption that likely led to the end of an ancient civilization may have been dated more accurately by tree rings, according to new research led by the University of Arizona.
The eruption of Thera on the Greek island of present day Santorini more than 3,400 years ago buried the Minoan settlement on the island in a layer of ash and pumice more than 130 feet deep, the university said in a statement Wednesday.
The explosion could be felt as far away as Egypt and what is now Istanbul in Turkey, according to the university. It is believed that the explosion was impactful enough to inspire the legend of Atlantis and stories in the Bible's Old Testament in the book of Exodus, according to Britannica.com.
But researchers have long debated on the time the Thera volcano erupted because of discrepancies between archeological and radiocarbon methods, the university said.
The University of Arizona-led team used radiocarbon measurements from the annual rings of trees that lived at the time of the eruption to date it somewhere from 1600 to 1525 BC, a time period which overlaps with the 1570-1500 date range from the archeological evidence, the university's statement said.
"The volcano erupts and represents one short moment in time," Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, said in the university's statement.
"If you can date precisely when that moment is, then whenever you find evidence of that moment at any archeological site, you suddenly have a very precise marker point in time — and that's really powerful for examining human/environmental interactions around that time period," Pearson continued.
A paper documenting the research of Pearson and her colleagues was released Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
"It's about tying together a timeline of ancient Egypt, Greece, Turkey and the rest of the Mediterranean at this critical point in the ancient world — that's what dating Thera can do," Pearson said in the university's statement.
The university's statement said that such massive volcanos like Thera eject so much material into the atmosphere that it cools the earth. For cold-climate trees such as Irish oaks and bristlecones, that exceptionally cold year shows up as a much narrower tree ring.
Researchers found at least four different years within the new radiocarbon age range for Thera where the bristlecone pines had exceptionally narrow rings that might indicate a huge volcanic eruption.
"This research is about Thera, but really, the implications of it are profound for anyone that uses radiocarbon dating throughout the world for this time span," the study's coauthor Gregory Hodgins, said in the university's statement. "There's a kind of revolution in the radiocarbon community to revise the calibration curve using these more precise measurements."
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