Researchers have shown that famous paintings of sunsets can reveal the amount of natural aerosols in the environment after volcanic eruptions.
Published Tuesday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the new scientific study was based on dozens of paintings from the year 1500 to 2000, the AFP reported.
While paintings of the sunset can vary depending on the artist's mood, the Greek and German researchers also showed that ash and gas from volcanic eruptions made for redder sunsets, said a European Geosciences Union press release.
Because aerosol particles scatter sunlight, skies appear to be redder during sunsets, something that can also be seen with man-made aerosols.
"Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists," lead author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece, said in the press release. "But we have found that, when coloring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information."
William Turner, a British landscape artist who worked in rich colors, is one artist who unconsciously illustrated the effects of pollution levels through his paintings.
After the 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Tambora volcano, ash and gas in the atmosphere caused sunsets to be especially vivid for around three years afterward, an effect that Turner and other artists captured in their work.
The research team compared the red-to-green ratio on Turner's paintings to records of volcanic eruptions, discovering that the vivid colors in Turner's sunsets correlated to seismic outbursts as well as amounts of sulfate in the area.
To confirm the findings, the researchers commissioned a series of sunset paintings from Greek landscape artist Panayiotis Tetsis. Painting near his home on the island of Hydra in the Aegean Sea, Tetsis was not aware of the experiment's purpose, which was to see if his paintings reflected the aerosol concentrations contained in the air.
The sunset paintings correlated well with the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, showing that paintings in the past could be used to measure such concentrations.
"We wanted to provide alternative ways of exploiting the environmental information in the past atmosphere in places where, and in centuries when, instrumental measurements were not available," Zerefos said in the press release.
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