Hobbyist idea: Tambo Quemado in the Bolivian Andes was the 1808 volcano

Proposed in a 2023 VolcanoCafe blog post by Hector Sacristan, which Ken found through Reddit. Tambo Quemado sits at about 18 degrees south on the Bolivia and Chile border, inside the zone the haze reports point to. From satellite maps the author estimates a young tuff cone of about 7 cubic km plus ash, a large eruption that was 'very big but very weak', which could go unnoticed in an empty high desert.

For it: right latitude, looks geologically young, close enough for the haze to reach Lima and Bogota within days.

Against it: it has never been dated, so it could be thousands of years old. The author guesses its rock is rhyolite, while the glass in the ice is andesite and dacite, a mismatch another blogger pointed out under the post. And Spanish colonial archives are silent; a big eruption 150 km from Arica and near the mining towns of Carangas and Oruro in December 1808 would likely have been reported. Other hobbyist candidates mentioned in the same circles: Putana in Chile (probably too small) and Savo in the Solomon Islands.

Why it is worth keeping: it is cheap to test, and one of the tests is our kind of work.