Many people imagine the end of the world as an asteroid strike that destroyed the dinosaurs
or a nuclear war with the entire arsenal of mankind.
But what if all of this is not even close to what could turn the planet into a hot hell?
In order to turn our beautiful blue planet into hell, we need to look inside it.
At a depth of about 70 kilometers, a part of the Earth begins which is called the mantle.
Deeper up to 2890 kilometers, this layer reaches the core of the Earth and contains approximately
80% of the entire volume of our planet.
The deeper, the hotter the mantle becomes, from ~200 degrees Celsius at the Earth's crust
and up to ~4000 degrees at the core.
These are quadrillion tons of hot, molten circulating rock and minerals called magma.
Lithospheric plates move due to the movement of heat in magma from the core to the earth's
crust.
By their movement, they create mountains and depressions, cause earthquakes.
In some places, called magma plumes, hot magma moves to the Earth's surface in relatively
small streams or jets, accumulating in the crust if it does not find an easy way to the
surface.
This leads to the formation of magma chambers and calderas, which will form the basis for
the emergence of volcanoes and supervolcanoes.
So what could happen if millions of tons of hot molten magma did reach the earth's surface?
Let's take a look at two very famous volcanic eruptions.
It will focus on the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 and Tambora in 1815.
Both of these volcanoes are located in the region of Indonesia, but their eruption has
led to consequences across the globe.
To understand the "strength" or danger of any eruption, volcanologists use the VEI scale,
the scale of volcanic activity.
It is estimated by the volume of eruption products thrown onto the surface, the so-called
tephra, and is counted in cubic meters.
The eruption of Krakatoa, which claimed the lives of about 36 thousand people, caused
a 46-meter tsunami, as well as a global cooling of 0.4 degrees Celsius, is estimated at 6
points on the VEI, with the release of tephra up to ten cubic kilometers.
This eruption is equivalent to about a thousand nuclear bombs, 200 kilotons each, detonated
at once.
The eruption of Tambora reached 7 on the scale of volcanic activity, which means the volume
of ejected tephra is up to one hundred cubic kilometers.
Taking the lives of 76 thousand people, it provoked an even stronger cooling of the Earth's
surface by 5 degrees Celsius in some areas.
This led to a “year without summer”, where snow fell even in June in Canada.
Hunger in Europe and Asia due to crop failure, acid rain and “dry fog” in the northwestern
United States.
And this is only part of the consequences we know.
But we are still too far from the complete destruction of humanity.
We would need volcanic super-eruptions reaching 8 points.
Super-eruptions are catastrophically gigantic discharges of magma rocks, ash and aerosols
into the atmosphere.
Super-eruptions, with a volume of thousands of cubic kilometers, occur very rarely, and
volcanoes and caldera systems that produce them are colloquially called "supervolcanoes".
The most famous "supervolcano" is in North America, in the state of Wyoming, the Yellowstone
National Park.
The Yellowstone caldera, slowly moving northeastward, following the lithospheric plate, has already
erupted three times over the course of 2.1 million years.
Each of these super-eruptions led to a global climate change.
Our entire total nuclear reserve does not even come close to comparing with such a destructive
force of the Earth's nature, in terms of the amount of energy in TNT equivalent.
About 630 thousand years BC, one of these eruptions led to the formation of a caldera
70 kilometers in diameter.
The volume of ejected tephra has reached about 2,500 thousand square kilometers, the consequence
of which was the abundant ashfall and the formation of the Huckleberry Ridge tuff, a
layer of volcanic material that is found throughout almost the entire western United States.
For comparison, if we take all this volume of hot ash, magma, volcanic rocks and stuff
it into a cube, we get a structure ~13 kilometers high, which is almost one and a half times
higher than Everest.
If we hypothetically assume that Yellowstone will once again have a super-eruption, with
a volume of ash and solid rocks of 330 cubic kilometers, will this be the “end of humanity”?
This time we are talking about a cube as high as Mount Kilimanjaro.
Using a tephra sediment map, we can see that the ash will spread to almost the entire continental
United States and parts of Canada.
Everything in the states adjacent to Yellowstone is likely to be completely destroyed in the
first hours of the eruption.
In the very same Yellowstone National Park, which is about 64 kilometers in diameter,
lava, magma and other products of the eruption will reach a meter in height.
A super-eruption of this magnitude will cause an almost complete collapse of the North American
agroindustry.
A cloud of ash will block sunlight from reaching farmlands in the central and eastern United
States.
Acid rain and tephra will destroy crops, pollute water sources, and kill livestock.
In addition to the ashfall, the new super-eruption will produce a large number of volcanic bombs,
which are the magma itself ejected from the volcano at great speed.
These bombs will destroy roads, houses and communications in the area up to ~ 150 km
from Yellowstone.
The number of deaths, the total consequences for the whole world, are difficult to calculate.
A catastrophe of this magnitude will be possible to compare with the fall of an asteroid several
kilometers wide.
It is also likely that for a period of up to several years, North America will feel
the full impact of the "volcanic winter", and the climate of the entire world will be
destabilized.
Scientists believe that sudden changes in temperature will lead to anomalous natural
phenomena - hurricanes, tornadoes and thermal domes will appear.
This means damage to farming, not only in the United States but also around the globe.
Crop failures, hunger, droughts and cold snaps will become the norm for several years.
It is important to say that despite the rising and falling seismic activity of Yellowstone,
scientists have no fears.
This supervolcano will most likely never be capable of super-eruptions, or at least for
the next thousands of years.
In fact, the super-eruption has already almost destroyed humanity, approximately 74 thousand
years BC.
The super-eruption of 2,880 cubic kilometers, eight times larger than in the hypothetical
model of the Yellowstone eruption, according to scientists Michael Rampino and Stephen
Self, could lead humanity to extinction.
We are talking about the super-eruption of the Toba volcano on the island of Sumatra
in Indonesia.
In a 1992 article, they suggest that this super-eruption not only led to a volcanic
winter, but also accelerated the glaciation process.
This is also associated with a “bottleneck” in human genetics.
Some studies find evidence that in the period from about 100 to 50 thousand years BC, human
civilization shrank to 10 thousand individuals at best.
This is evidenced by the low genetic diversity of our ancestors, according to the same Michael
Rampino and Stephen Self.
Until some time, it was believed that the super-eruption of Toba led to a volcanic winter
of at least six years in Africa and Europe, but recent research actually suggests otherwise.
In 2018, the results of a study of the tuff and traces of this super-eruption were published.
And surprisingly, there is evidence that human activity did not stop, but on the contrary,
increased.
On the southeast coast of Africa, tools were found in the layers of the earth, both before
and after the eruption.
In addition to small sharpened stones, there were also more complex arrowheads and spearheads.
Excavations around Lake Malawi, also in Africa, do not provide any evidence of a catastrophic
volcanic winter from a super-eruption.
Most likely, the effect of ash and aerosols was overestimated and could not lead to a
six-year winter in Africa, and proximity to the mankind’s extinction.
But what if the super-eruptions are just part of an even more catastrophic event, which
has likely lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs along with the asteroid, which has also contributed
to this?
Only now will we come to an event that is really capable of creating a global hell - volcanic
floods.
A volcanic flood is an event that does not fit into the scale of volcanic activity, because
the total emissions of ash, magma and rocks already vary in millions of cubic kilometers.
Returning to our comparison with a cube, its height on average reaches space or 125 kilometers.
All this volume of magma and ash pours out over millions of square kilometers, covering
them with a giant layer hundreds of meters high.
The consequences of this form huge plains, the Traps, with a characteristic relief that
resembles a staircase.
Even if scientists now cannot name the exact reason for the formation of the Traps, which
cover huge areas in Siberia and India, there is no doubt that this is a large-scale and
catastrophic process.
Nor is it surprising that the age of the Traps' formation roughly coincides with the dates
of the largest mass extinctions.
One of these led to the extinction of 95% of species of living beings.
Unlike super-eruptions and asteroid impacts, the impact of a volcanic flood on Earth can
last for hundreds of thousands of years.
They occur when a plume or a long "torch" of magma reaches the uppermost layers of the
earth's crust.
By comparison, the caldera of the Yellowstone "supervolcano" is located at a depth of ~8000
meters.
Volcanic floods begin with a series of powerful earthquakes and a rise of the surface by several
hundred meters.
Cracks and ruptures in the uplifted earth will be accompanied by a series of super-eruptions,
ejecting tephra and lava in pillars averaging 50 km in height.
Magma will slowly melt through the earth's crust and begin to spread over an area the
size of entire countries.
In the case of the Siberian Traps, which formed about 640 thousand years from the beginning
of the volcanic flood, we are talking about an area as big as the ​​continental Europe,
covered with tephra and magma, hundreds of meters high.
This, for example, most likely led to the Permian-Triassic extinction of 250 million
years BC.
The formation of the Deccan Traps led to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, ~66 million
years ago, and the death of the dinosaurs.
The effect of volcanic floods on the climate is thousands of times greater than that of
super-eruptions or nuclear war.
After most of the magma rock from the plume reaches the surface and spreads, the remaining
magma will seek another path, spreading horizontally, reaching coal deposits and other fossils.
This alone will lead to a huge emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which
will heat the Earth by an average of five degrees.
A seemingly small figure means the transformation of most of the earth's surface into a desert
for hundreds of thousands of years.
The oceans will turn into toxic, hot acidic liquid, due to the abundance of carbon dioxide
and the activation of methane deposits at the bottom.
But, as we can conclude from the fact of our existence, the planet is able to endure such
disasters.
And more than once.
Scientists are sure that for the next hundreds and thousands of years, mankind is unlikely
to meet with such cataclysms.
What about you?
Would you like to observe similar phenomena?
We will inform you if the plans of the volcanoes change and such an opportunity arises in the
world.
So stay tuned and thanks for watching.