These works of art can be used to gage past pollution levels

Mar 25, 2014 13:39 GMT  ·  By
Old paintings contain significant clues about how Earth's atmosphere looked like a few centuries ago
   Old paintings contain significant clues about how Earth's atmosphere looked like a few centuries ago

A collaboration of investigators from Germany and Greece argues that old paintings can be used to keep track of changes that occurred in Earth's atmosphere centuries ago. In a new study, the team determined that the amounts of ash and gas released into the air during past volcanic eruptions have influenced many painters to recreate the fiery-red and bright orange sunsets that followed. 

One clear example is the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which blew its top off in 1815. For the next three years, painters throughout Europe recreated extremely bright and red sunsets, which were produced by particulate matter and ash traveling through the atmosphere all the way to the Old Continent. J. M. W. Turner was just one of the great masters who have covered these sunsets.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the European Geosciences Union's (EGU) open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the research team proposes that similar paintings could be used to learn more about other atmospheric events that may have happened on Earth long ago. In this study, scientists analyzed hundreds of images of paintings completed between 1500 and 2000 AD.

“We found that red-to-green ratios measured in the sunsets of paintings by great masters correlate well with the amount of volcanic aerosols in the atmosphere, regardless of the painters and of the school of painting,” says Academy of Athens Atmospheric Physics Professor Christos Zerefos, the lead author of the paper. “Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” he concludes.

Over the five centuries that the research covered, more than 50 known, major volcanic eruptions occurred throughout the world, producing effects in Europe as well. “We wanted to provide alternative ways of exploiting the environmental information in the past atmosphere in places where, and in centuries when, instrumental measurements were not available,” Zerefos explains.