How do you imagine the world's most powerful volcano eruption?
Boiling-hot orange lava spilling over the slopes of a mountain and destroying everything
in its path?
Ginormous clouds of ash, blacking out the sky and wiping out all the life in nearby
towns?
Toxic gases that sneak into the smallest nooks?...
(Hmm, I give up.)
But what if I tell you that you might not even notice this devastating event?
Few people know that around 80% of all volcanic eruptions happen underwater.
What's more, submarine volcanoes alone spit out more than 75% of the world's magma.
There are over 1 million underwater volcanoes on our planet, and at least 75,000 of them
rise above the seabed by more than half a mile.
But as you may guess, it's very hard to explore and examine these underwater monsters.
No wonder scientists almost missed the largest underwater volcano eruption of our time!
A Kiwi passenger was flying back home after having an amazing vacation in Samoa, when
something strange attracted her attention.
At that moment, the plane was several hundred miles away from the coast of New Zealand,
and from her window seat, the traveler saw a bizarre large mass, floating on the ocean’s
surface.
She took a photo, and after returning home, she sent this picture to researchers.
It turned out that the mass was a huge raft of pumice rocks, some of them as big as a
car.
This moving carpet, which spread for a whopping 150 square miles, was the result of the greatest
submarine eruption in modern history!
Even more, several months later, satellites spotted that the pumice rock raft had already
spread over an area the size of two New Zealands!
Havre Seamount volcano, which exploded on July 18, 2012, lies between American Samoa
and New Zealand in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
Three years after the eruption had happened, scientists packed into two autonomous underwater
submarines and headed to explore the area.
At that time, they already knew that there’d been a massive explosion, comparable to the
largest land eruptions of the 20th century.
In any case, researchers expected to discover some evidence of a common deep-sea eruption.
But they were in for a surprise.
To their endless amazement, scientists didn't find a typical underwater volcano blast pattern.
But what they discovered was so much more unexpected!
The seafloor, miles away from the volcano, was littered with giant pumice blocks, and
some of them were the size of a van!
Scientists admitted later that they’d never seen anything like that before.
At first, those who were inside the submarines even thought that something was wrong with
their imaging systems.
Now, let me go a bit off-topic.
(Like I never do that..ha.)
The thing is that underwater volcanoes are usually gentle giants that don't bother us
too much.
When they erupt, it can easily go unnoticed, due to their distant location.
All the fun happens deep underwater.
When the time comes, the pressure blasts the whole top of the volcano off, and magma gets
thrown high up with an incredible force.
The amount of red-hot magma is so huge that it boils millions of gallons of water in a
matter of minutes.
As a result, the region around the erupting volcano turns into a rolling cauldron of water,
which then floats up to the surface.
If you were somewhere around at that moment, you would see the ocean start to bubble furiously,
and you’d smell the disgusting stench of sulfur.
Whew!
The deadly cloud of boiling water would destroy all the plants and marine animals caught near
the eruption, and later, these remains would rise to the surface to add to the mystery
of the bubbles and smell.
But it turned out that the Havre volcano eruption was an unusual one.
The caldera (which is a large crater that appears after massive eruptions) spanned for
almost 3 miles, and 14 vents in it spewed out huge amounts of lava.
But the most interesting thing was that the volcano produced not only pumice rocks, but
also lava domes, ash, and even underwater lava flows!
Remember the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland which caused unprecedented problems
with air travel that lasted for 6 days?
(Wait wait wait -- hold on.
[put word on screen as in a spelling lesson] Say it with me now: Eyjafjallajökull.
…well, work on it -- there’s your homework assignment.)
Anyway, the Havre underwater eruption was 10 times more powerful than that.
Scientists were ecstatic about this finding.
They stated that the samples they’d found equaled a decade of thorough research.
Thanks to these materials, researchers have a unique opportunity to understand better
what happens when an underwater volcano flares up.
But nowadays, we have a more burning issue on our hands.
It seems that climate changes may affect not only weather and sea level, but also trigger
disastrous volcanic eruptions all over the planet, both underwater and on land!
The thing is that glaciers might be suppressing volcanic activity by making mountains more
stable.
But these days, as the ice starts to melt, mountains don't have the support they had
before.
For a usual mountain, it might mean landslides, and probably even collapse, but if we’re
talking about a volcano, the situation turns much more dangerous.
You might already know that volcanoes experience constant pressure from the inside.
So, remove at least one outer protective layer (and by saying that, I mean the snow or ice
cover) - and you have a huge powder drum that could explode at any moment.
But what if all the volcanoes on Earth lost their stability and went off simultaneously?
Oh, that would be an apocalyptic scenario.
(You kinda knew I was going there, didn’t you?)
You can probably imagine the panic every single person on the planet would feel should all
the volcanoes erupt at once.
Some volcanoes would only ooze liquid lava all over their own slopes and the nearby settlements.
Luckily, in this case, the inhabitants would have enough time to evacuate and get away
from dangerous zones.
As for conical stratovolcanoes, like Mount Fuji in Japan, for example, they would cause
much more trouble.
Such volcanoes would produce so much ash that it would darken the sky for weeks and months.
It would trigger a long and freezing volcanic winter.
Without sunlight, plants and crops would die, unable to get energy from photosynthesis.
Animals, as well as people, would suffer from food shortages.
An even more dangerous problem would be the ash itself.
Once inhaled, volcanic ash turns into a glass-like substance inside people's lungs, and you can
probably guess the tragic outcome.
People hiding inside buildings would be in grave danger, because under the combined weight
of ash, construction would start to collapse.
Since ash is 5 times denser than water, most buildings are simply not designed to withstand
tons of it on their roofs.
Besides, when stratovolcanoes began to erupt, they’d send huge lava explosions into the
air, and lava would also flow down the slopes at unprecedented speeds.
In this case, you wouldn't be able to escape by hopping on a plane, because the aircraft's
engines would stop as soon as the ash re-melted into drops of lava inside them.
But even those wouldn't be the worst consequences of all the volcanoes erupting at once.
(No no, let’s just pile on here.)
By the end of the eruptions, the world would be encompassed by a volcanic winter, and the
very concept of seasons would become outdated.
Huge unstable carbon reservoirs in the oceans would become liquid and would be turned into
methane and carbon dioxide by microbes.
These two greenhouse gases would get into the atmosphere and dramatically accelerate
global warming.
It would create a never-ending vicious circle: a warmer climate would cause more gases to
enter the atmosphere, which would, in turn, warm the climate even more.
Eventually, the climate would get so incredibly hot that all the trees and plants would die
out, all the oceans would boil away, and Earth would turn into a Venus-like place - a planet
with no liquid water and the atmosphere filled with deadly carbon dioxide.
Are you thoroughly depressed yet?
Well enough of this gloom and doom -- We’re on the Bright Side after all – and you can
relax now: luckily, this scenario is highly unlikely to ever occur, and we can just sort
of theorize about the “what ifs...”
How about you?
Have you ever seen a volcano, active or sleeping?
Can you say: Eyjafjallajökull?
Do you know how hard I practiced to say that right?
Let me know down in the comments!
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