Mar 27, 2014 10:35 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

Before photographs, there were only paintings to capture moments in time. The best ones, according to a new study, were made skillfully enough to accurately record (knowingly and unknowingly so) the world's changing atmospheres in sunset scenes and other depictions of the sky, Laboratory Equipment reported.

Specifically, a team of international researchers analyzed the colors of sunsets and how they differed in response to world events, like major volcanic eruptions and the Industrial Revolution. They found sunsets to be redder when painted near an eruption. One example was the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Volcanic gas and ash injected into the atmosphere scattered the colors of sunlight in a way that for two years, sunsets were a brilliant red, a phenomenon captured by the artist J.M.W. Turner, among others.

"Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists," said lead author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens. "But we have found that, when coloring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information."

More than just the impact of volcanoes, Zerefos and his team wanted to track the level of all types of aersol, or air pollutants, in the atmosphere by studying hundreds of paintings from 1500 to 2000. Though analyzing paintings most directly correlated with volcanic aerosol, it also related to other forms of air pollution. By digitizing paintings and then analyzing them for color patterns, they were able to map air pollution for 500 years.

 "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.

As further proof of their model, researchers had an artist paint sunset scenes in the Sahara Desert in 2010 -- before and after a dust cloud. The two paintings abided by the same principles found in previous pieces of art for the last 500 years.

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