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We all know that volcanoes can cause a massive amount of destruction whenever they erupt.
They can wipe out entire cities like what happened to Pompeii in the Roman Empire
or devastate entire regions like when Mount St. Helens erupted in the United States,
but is it possible that if a volcano erupted with a massive enough force sometime in the future
could actually destroy all of human civilization on the planet?
At some point in the past, volcanoes have actually come pretty close to doing exactly that.
First, we need to understand something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index,
which is a scale used to measure the eruptions of volcanoes.
The scale goes from zero being a relatively tiny eruption that is happening all over the world continuously
all the way up to an 8, which would be a mega colossal eruption with earth-shattering consequences,
similar to an asteroid impact that only happens about every 50,000 years on average.
For reference in regards to how powerful volcanoes can actually get,
both the Mount Vesuvius eruption that annihilated ancient Pompeii and the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980
would both be classified as only a level 5 (Cataclysmic) eruption on the scale,
which is incredible because the Mount St. Helens eruption released 24 megatons,
or 1,600 times the scale of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
which means the things only gets ridiculously more powerful from here.
Perhaps the best-known level 6 volcanic eruption was the Krakatoa nightmare in 1883.
The volcano was located on this island in Indonesia and exploded with the awe-inspiring force of 200 Megatons...
13,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb
and four times more powerful than even the mighty Tsar Bomba,
the largest nuclear weapon humanity has ever detonated.
This epic explosion generated the loudest sound ever known to have happened in human history,
shattering sailors' eardrums that were located 64 kilometers from the blast
and capable of being heard perfectly clear as far away as Perth, Australia.
Almost the entire island of the volcano it was located on was completely blown apart.
The blast was so powerful that it sent coral reefs that have been dormant for centuries on the ocean floor
hurtling towards land as if they were asteroids,
and the explosion generated 30 meter high tsunamis that ravaged the rest of Indonesia.
Everybody on the nearby island of Sebeesi was killed in the immediate aftermath,
and in total up to 120,000 people in the islands were killed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
There were reports of human skeletons on rafts that have gotten lost at sea trying to escape
that began washing up on the east coast of Africa one entire year after the explosion.
But perhaps the worst part about volcanic eruptions is the massive amount of ash that gets pumped into the atmosphere
that can block out the sunlight and cause global temperatures to drop dramatically
In the case of Krakatoa, global temperatures fell by 1.2 degrees Celsius the following year and did not recover for another four years.
The ash in the atmosphere caused weird optical effects too that made the moon occasionally appear blue or even green,
and even this famous painting is theorized by some to actually depict what an accurate sky above Norway looked like in the year following the eruption.
Another deadly level 6 eruption happened exactly 100 years previously than this in Iceland,
in which more sulfur dioxide was pumped into the Earth's atmosphere in just a few months
than the entire industrial output of all of modern-day Europe combined for three years.
This created a toxic gas cloud that killed fifty percent of all animal life on Iceland,
which caused a famine that killed twenty five percent of the human population on the island.
The toxic cloud then moved across the sea over to the rest of Europe,
where 23,000 more people died in Britain alone from the poison gas.
But let's get a little more crazy and move up to what a level 7 on the scale would look like.
One of these such eruptions created the largest explosion ever witnessed in recorded history
back only two centuries ago in 1815.
Also taking place on an island in Indonesia,
this explosion shot 400 million tons of ash into our atmosphere that plunge the entire planet into a year-long winter.
All life on the island where the eruption took place was annihilated.
A circle 600 kilometers wide from the blast was shrouded in darkness for days.
And the year of 1816 became known as The Year Without a Summer,
due to the fact that it snowed in New York and Maine in the middle of June,
and Quebec City got a full 30 centimeters of snow during the same month.
This was certainly a very devastating eruption that may have immediately killed up to 100,000 people,
but it may have also caused famines worldwide due to the cold temperatures that killed crops across the world.
But 75,000 years ago an enormous volcano may have caused humanity
to come the closest that it's ever been to ultimate extinction.
The Toba supervolcano, also located in Indonesia, exploded with a level 8 on our scale in these prehistoric times.
It was three thousand times more powerful than what happened at Mount St. Helens
and ejected 100 times more ash than even the Tambora explosion did in 1815.
This was enough ash to completely bury all of Luxembourg beneath a full kilometer of this stuff,
or all of Argentina beneath one meter.
It sent the planet into a decade-long winter where global temperatures dropped by as much as 15 degrees Celsius,
and early humanity was possibly almost destroyed by it.
The global human population may have dwindled to as few as a mere 3,000 people during those hard times,
which is about the same number of people that currently follow me on Facebook and Twitter.
But humanity managed to persevere, which leaves the interesting question of what would happen if a level 8 supervolcano exploded today.
The most likely and devastating culprit would be the Yellowstone supervolcano in the United States.
The entire Yellowstone National Park is hiding a volcano of gargantuan proportions right beneath her visitors' feet.
It is experienced three level-8 eruptions in the past 2.1 million years,
with the most recent one happening 640,000 years ago.
There's enough magma in the volcano system underneath the surface today to fill the entire Grand Canyon 11 times over,
or bury the entire Netherlands with one full kilometer of molten rock.
It is estimated that the volcano has about a one in 700,000 a chance of exploding each year,
which is absurdly unlikely, but what would happen if we were absurdly unlucky?
Well, here's a map of what the damage would look like.
The states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana would be largely buried beneath a full meter of ash,
which would render them all uninhabitable.
Anybody who didn't evacuate from these three states would likely be killed in the aftermath of the explosion.
Salt Lake City and Denver would also likely suffer major damage and casualties.
The only part of the mainland us that would escape any ashfall would be southern Texas and southern Florida.
This event would likely create either the largest mass grave or the largest refugee crisis in history
as entire states where the people would have to be evacuated and probably flee east.
The entire western United States will be completely devastated and agricultural production in the country would be crippled.
It would be the biggest disaster in history and likely throw the United States into a depression multiple times worse than the 1920 stock market crash.
This in turn would throw the entire world economy into a severe depression,
and coupled with a 10 year long winter caused by lingering ash in the atmosphere
and the resulting massive crop failures and famines
and the world will be a very tumultuous, cold and frightening place.
Human civilization may be changed forever by that eruption and who knows what catastrophic change it may bring about,
but it likely wouldn't completely end us as a species.
Life would go on in some way or another as it always has.
Now after saying all of that, I must take
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