A volcanic eruption around 1600 BC may have doomed an entire Bronze Age civilization

Sometime around 1600 BC, the volcanic island of Thera (modern Santorini) erupted in one of the largest explosions in recorded history, burying the town of Akrotiri in ash. Many archaeologists argue the eruption's tsunamis and ashfall critically weakened Minoan Crete, whose civilization went into terminal decline within a few generations.

— Spyridon Marinatos, The Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Crete — Antiquity, 1939