Kuwae Eruption of the 1450s: Missing or Mythical Caldera?

If you read this blog regularly, you know I have a fondness for the so-called "missing eruptions" -- that is, volcanic events found in ice core or sediment records but not yet identified in the geologic/volcanic record. The most glaring right now is the eruption of 1258 A.D., supposedly 1.8 times as large as the 1815 eruption of Tambora, but no candidate volcano has been conclusively identified as the source. Another enigmatic climate event that has a little more potential to be matched with a volcano happened during the mid-1450s, a period that saw cold winters in China, dry fogs in Constantinople and stunted tree ring growth around the world. It also saw one of the biggest cases of sulfur loading in the atmosphere in the last few thousand years, rivaling that of the famous 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland. All these climatic effects have been attributed to an eruption ...