The 1808 Mystery Eruption: The big volcano that scientists can't find

The thought that big blasts like that should've been noticed back then made things even more puzzling. People checked old records from around the world during that time.

Nothing new happened until 2014. Dr. Caroline Williams from the University of Bristol and a student named Alvaro Guevara-Murua found a story by a scientist from Colombia named Francisco José de Caldas about air stuff that fit with what happens when a volcano goes boom.

From 1805 to 1810, Caldas was in charge of the Big Star Watching Place in Bogotá. Caldas wrote in a report on December 11, 1809, that there was a strange cloud in Bogotá that was blocking the sun's light. Acidic acidic air could have been coming from this strange cloud. He also said that it was very cold and frosty in the same report.

Hipólito Unanue, a doctor from Peru, saw the same thing happening in Lima. These results led experts to believe that the 1808 eruption took place about a week after December 4, 1808. A strange mist was talked about by both Caldas and Unanue. It covered at least 1,600 miles and reached both the north and south poles of the Earth. Scientists thought that the volcano that was erupting might be in the tropics, most likely in the south of the world.

The Pacific Ocean is home to volcanoes in an area between Indonesia and Tonga, close to Colombia and Peru. There weren't any European colonies in that area back then, though, so there weren't many written records from there. That means there isn't much history from the people who live there, either in writing or in spoken form. It would make sense for strange weather to be seen in South America, though, if there was a volcano there.