the reason the sky is red in this
painting is the same reason there's a
small chance the entire north american
continent might need to be evacuated
soon
i know that sounds crazy and it is but
it's also true
so buckle up cause today you're gonna
learn about super volcanoes
volcanoes are one of those things like
great white sharks or quicksand where
you know it's dangerous but you don't
really care because you're never going
to be near one so
why is it your problem well some of
these volcanoes are so big that if they
ever decide to erupt
it's going to be your problem no matter
where you are for scale let's talk about
nuclear bombs for a second when the us
bombed hiroshima the mushroom cloud that
engulfed the city had a blast yield of
15 kilotons
nuclear weapons have gotten a lot bigger
since then the tsar bomba a russian
hydrogen bomb
had a blast yield 3 000 times more
powerful than that of hiroshima
that sounds big right it's not the
eruption from the krakatoa volcano in
indonesia in 1883 had the equivalent of
13
000 times the explosive yield of
hiroshima and four times the yield of
the tsar bomba
this was obviously bad news for anyone
on the island at the time if you somehow
survived the explosion the shock waves
the poison gas
and raining lava then you had to deal
with the fact that the island was slowly
collapsing
it's mostly underwater now which kind of
makes you wonder if that's what happened
to atlantis
if you were on the coastal town of a
neighboring island like java or sumatra
then you'd be facing a 130 foot high
tsunami that likely would have wiped out
your entire village
let's say you were sailing in the indian
ocean 40 miles away
guess what the sound wave that
eventually hit you could have shattered
your eardrums
like it did for half of the crew of the
hms norm castle but if you were on the
opposite side of the globe
you might have heard this as the
pressure waves that came from that
island in indonesia circled the globe
four times you would also notice no
matter where you were in the world that
the weather was colder than usual for
the next year as a plume of volcanic ash
covered the sky
creating a red hue that could be seen in
this famous painting by edvard monk
norway and many other paintings from
that era oh did i not mention that
krakatau
isn't even a super volcano yeah it only
measures as a six on the volcanic
eruption index and the cutoff is neat
you know what is one though the volcano
that sleeps under yellowstone national
park
this guy is over 50 times larger than
krakatau and if it ever erupts we're all
gonna have to get off this continent
real fast though that might not even
matter since depending on their size
some super volcanoes have been theorized
to have started global ice ages
luckily the chances of this happening
anytime soon are close to zero
according to the u.s geological survey
the chances are actually one in 730
000 and it's only happened three times
in the past two million years
so the chances are low i mean they're
not zero but they're low
also if it ever does we're gonna have
between a few weeks and a few years
warning
so i'm not gonna lose much sleep over
this and i hope you don't either okay
[Music]
bye
[Music]
you