The caldera would slowly refill with magma, building a new volcano, which erupted and then collapsed in an ongoing cyclical process. In a repeating process, the volcano would violently erupt, then eventually collapse into a roughly circular seawater-filled caldera, with numerous small islands forming the circle. Geological evidence shows the Thera volcano erupted numerous times over several hundred thousand years before the Minoan eruption. The Chinese Bamboo Annals reported unusual yellow skies and summer frost at the beginning of the Shang dynasty, which may have been a consequence of volcanic winter (similar to 1816, the Year Without a Summer, after the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora). Since tephra from the Minoan eruption serves as a marker horizon in nearly all archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, its precise date is of high importance and has been fiercely debated among archaeologists and volcanologists for decades, without coming to a definite conclusion.Īlthough there are no clear ancient records of the eruption, its plume and volcanic lightning may have been described in the Egyptian Tempest Stele. With a VEI magnitude between 6 and 7, resulting in an ejection of approximately 28–41 km 3 (6.7–9.8 cu mi) of dense-rock equivalent (DRE), the eruption was one of the largest volcanic events on Earth in human history. It destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri, as well as communities and agricultural areas on nearby islands and the coast of Crete with subsequent earthquakes and paleotsunamis. The Minoan eruption was a catastrophic volcanic eruption that devastated the Aegean island of Thera (also called Santorini) circa 1600 BCE.
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