Interesting.
I admittedly don’t know much about the Minoan culture, but in reading a blurb, it says there is some disagreement on exactly how they disappeared, because the ash from the eruption was not, for them, similar to a Vesuvius/Pompeii event...it was very low ash.
Are they implying that it might have been an overwhelming amount of CO2 that asphyxiated the entire culture or something?
I may be reading more into it than I should.
That's how I read it as well.
If CO2 can accumulate and concentrate in deep pools, and then some geothermal event releases heat that makes that water warm so that it rises to the surface and releases all that CO2 into the atmosphere, it might have adverse effect on anybody nearby.
Maybe I am just being stupid because coffee hasn’t kicked in, but I don’t understand what you mean by ‘low ash’ in this statement. Akrotiri on Santorini (Thera) was covered in some places by 50 meters of ash. However, the residents must have had warning by a series of preceding earthquakes, etc, because as of today, they haven’t uncovered any bodies that got caught in the volcanic deposits.
Now, whether or not the explosion killed off the Minoan civilization on Crete is more debatable, as most of the evidence of destruction inland (scorched buildings, etc.) seems to date a number of years after the volcano. Maybe that is the confusion? Santorini is about 70 km north of Crete, and was wiped out by the volcano. The Minoans on Crete were definitely affected by the blast, but probably not wiped out, but the Minoan culture on Santorini (Thera) definitely was destroyed.
According to Wiki, it was more complicated than that. Pumice buried most of what was left on Thera. Not enough ash descended on Crete, but with such a cataclysmic explosion of the island, a tsunami probably devastated much of the infrastructure on Crete. Weakened them, and Mycena invaded.
That’s the basic nutshell version.
More likely a huge tsunami. I was just in Santorini and Crete. The volcano exploded in Santorini and you can see still the ravaged cliffs remaining from the explosion and where the peak was is now the Aegean see. It makes the St Helen explosion seem like a firecracker.
Some theorize that that was the site of Atlantis.