The Volcano That Blotted Out the Sun Over Central America
On January 20, 1835, an entire volcano ceased to exist in a single morning in northwestern Nicaragua. Cosigüina hurled so much sulfur into the atmosphere that the trace of its eruption was recorded simultaneously in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The explosion was heard in Jamaica, Colombia, and on the island of Curaçao — nearly two thousand kilometers across the Caribbean Sea. The sky over Central America darkened to complete blackness in the middle of the day. For three days, torches burned at noon. The planet cooled by three quarters of a degree. The event entered the oral tradition of western Nicaragua under the name «Año del Polvo» — «Year of Dust» — and almost entirely dropped out of the mass memory of the twentieth century. Only in 2014 did new petrology and ice core data return Cosigüina to the ranks of the largest sulfate events of two centuries. This film presents the restored chronology, contemporary eyewitness accounts, and the scientific reconstruction of how a single eruption switched off the sun over two countries.
⏱ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The day the sun went out
01:10 La Unión and the start of the Year of Dust
03:06 The main questions of the catastrophe
04:10 Cosigüina before the eruption
05:21 The first phase and the magma beneath the caldera
07:47 Ash as physical darkness
10:38 Ash thickness and the impact zone
11:41 Pyroclastic flows and new islands
13:21 Destroyed fields, roofs and roads
15:47 The sound heard 1900 kilometers away
18:04 The sulfate trace in ice cores
19:40 Cosigüina among the largest eruptions
20:44 Why the volcano was forgotten
23:34 Global cooling and red sunsets
25:06 The caldera today and a new risk
📚 SOURCES
Galindo, J. (1835). On the Eruption of the Volcano of Cosigüina, in Nicaragua, 17th January, 1835. The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 5, 387–392.
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Longpré, M.-A., Stix, J., Burkert, C., Hansteen, T., & Kutterolf, S. (2014). Sulfur budget and global climate impact of the A.D. 1835 eruption of Cosigüina volcano, Nicaragua. Geophysical Research Letters, 41(19), 6667–6675. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL061205
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Global Volcanism Program (2024). Cosigüina (344010). Smithsonian Institution. https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn...