The Laacher See eruption (LSE) in Germany ranks among Europe's largest volcanic events of the Upper Pleistocene1,2. Although tephra deposits of the LSE represent an important isochron for the synchronization of proxy archives at the Late Glacial to Early Holocene transition3, uncertainty in the age of the eruption has prevailed4. Here we present dendrochronological and radiocarbon measurements of subfossil trees that were buried by pyroclastic deposits that firmly date the LSE to 13,006 ± 9 calibrated years before present (BP; taken as AD 1950), which is more than a century earlier than previously accepted. The revised age of the LSE necessarily shifts the chronology of European varved lakes5,6 relative to the Greenland ice core record, thereby dating the onset of the Younger Dryas to 12,807 ± 12 calibrated years BP, which is around 130 years earlier than thought. Our results synchronize the onset of the Younger Dryas across the North Atlantic-European sector, preclude a direct link between the LSE and Greenland Stadial-1 cooling7, and suggest a large-scale common mechanism of a weakened Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation under warming conditions8-10.

Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research Bremerhaven Germany

Climate and Environmental Physics Physics Institute Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research University of Bern Bern Switzerland

Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences University of British Columbia Vancouver British Columbia Canada

Department of Geography Birkbeck University of London London UK

Department of Geography Faculty of Science Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Department of Geography Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Germany

Department of Geography University of Cambridge Cambridge UK

Department of Geosciences University of Bremen Bremen Germany

Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences Brno Czech Republic

Institute of Ancient Studies Department of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Germany

Institute of Applied Botanics and Volcanic Biology Universität Duisburg Essen Essen Germany

Institute of Biology University of Hohenheim Stuttgart Germany

Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental Systems College of Earth and Environmental Sciences Lanzhou University Lanzhou China

Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics ETH Zurich Zurich Switzerland

Römisch Germanisches Zentralmuseum MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution Neuwied Germany

Silviculture and Forest Growth and Yield University of Applied Forest Sciences Rottenburg am Neckar Germany

Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL Birmensdorf Switzerland

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Nature. 2023 Jul;619(7968):E1-E2. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05965-1. PubMed

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