In our day to day we use products that make life a little more comfortable; however, some of them are very harmful, both for ourselves and for the environment, as is the case with aerosols.
Although it may be incredible, thanks to an Icelandic volcano we can know how aerosols influence global climate.
This is a very interesting volcano to know how aerosols affect, since between the years 1783 and 1784, the Laki fissure of the Holuhraun volcano was emitting sulfur dioxide for eight months, causing a huge column of particles over the North Atlantic. These natural sprays reduced the size of cloud droplets, but they did not raise the amount of water in them as discovered by a team of scientists led by the University of Exeter (United Kingdom).
In this way, the researchers believe that their results, which have been published in a study in the journal 'Nature' could reduce uncertainty in future climate projections describing the impact sulfate aerosols have from industrial emissions on climate change.
Aerosols they act as nuclei in which the water vapor in the atmosphere condenses to form clouds. While there are industrial sulfate aerosols, there are other natural sources such as the release of sulfur dioxide as a result of volcano eruptions.
During the last eruption of the Holuhraun volcano, which occurred in 2014-2015, it emitted between 40.000 and 100.000 tons of sulfur dioxide every day during its eruptive phase. The professionals used state-of-the-art weather system models which, combined with data obtained from NASA satellites, were able to discover that the size of the water droplets decreased in size, resulting in a larger fraction of the sunlight being reflected back into space. So that, the weather got cold.
Therefore, the researchers believe that cloud systems are "well protected" against aerosol changes in the atmosphere.