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Perfect Storms, premiering on Monday in Canada, investigates major natural disasters that have changed the course of human history — many from hundreds of years ago that aren’t well known — and presents them through impressive CGI technology and dramatic re-enactments.

In Dull’s episode called “Dark Age Volcano” — airing April 15 — he finds a tree in El Salvador that he believes was living at the time of the eruption of Ilopango, one of the biggest volcanoes in central America, around 1,500 years ago.

After putting it through radiocarbon dating and tree ring analysis, he’s able to date the eruption to a window of sometime between AD 500 and AD 540 and concludes it was most likely the culprit of the AD 536 global climate change that led to famine and disease.

Until Dull’s findings, scientists had only been able to date the eruption to a window of 120 years, sometime between about AD 420 and AD 540 — a range too big to be conclusive that it was behind the AD 536 event.

“We’ve got it narrowed down to just a couple of decades. We’re on the verge of this perfect story to explain this perfect storm event,” said Dull.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, at this point, we’ve identified the cause of the greatest climate cooling anomaly on the globe in the last 2,000 years.”

Dull said his theory is that Ilopango erupted in AD 535, leading to the AD 536 dust veil that led to a global cold period that lasted at least another decade. The eruption had such a major cooling effect on the environment because it was in a tropical region.