Question

Reconciling the chronological placement of the catastrophic Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano has long divided Mediterranean archaeologists and natural scientists. Traditional relative chronologies, anchored to ceramic typologies correlated with historical Egyptian New Kingdom dynastic records, date the eruption to roughly 1500 BCE. Conversely, radiocarbon analyses of short-lived botanical remains—most notably an olive branch entombed within the primary tephra fall—coupled with annual tree-ring calibration sequences yield calendar dates centered in the late seventeenth century BCE. To reconcile this discrepancy without revising dynastic chronologies, several conventional archaeologists posited that subterranean magmatic vents released fossil carbon dioxide prior to the paroxysm, artificially depleting the local ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 absorbed by vegetation on the island. However, this localized degassing hypothesis is severely challenged by the observation that contemporaneous annual plants excavated throughout the wider Aegean archipelago, far beyond the physical dispersal perimeter of Santorini's volcanic gases, demonstrate identical isotopic shifts corresponding precisely to the seventeenth-century BCE calibration curve.

Based on the passage, which one of the following statements concerning the hypothesis of subterranean carbon dioxide degassing is most strongly supported?