We 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 for 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 1980 would both be classified as only a level five 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 on firing force of 200 Megaton 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 curve Australia.
Almost the entire island of the volcano is located on was completely blown apart the blast was so powerful that it sent coral reefs that have a dormant for centuries on the ocean floor hurtling towards land as if they were asteroid and the explosion generated 30 meter high tsunamis that ravaged the rest of Indonesia.
Everybody on the nearby island of the beefy 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 graphs that have gotten lost it he 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 to get pumped into the atmosphere that can block out the sunlight and caused 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 ashen atmosphere cause weird optical effect to that made the moon occasionally appear blue or even green.
And even this famous painting is theorized by some to actually depict when an accurate sky above more way look like in the year following the eruption.
Another deadly level 6 eruption happened exactly 100 years previously than this and 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 move across the sea over to the rest of Europe where 23,000 more people died in person 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 and 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 with annihilated.
A circle 600 kilometers why 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 whole 30 centimeters of snow here in the same bump.
This was certainly a very devastating eruption that they have immediately killed up to 100,000 people but they have also called famines were applied the future the cold temperatures that killed crops across the world.
About 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 eight on our scale.
In these prehistoric time it was three thousand times more powerful than what happened at Mount st. Helens and ejected 100 times more ash than even a tempura explosion did in 1815.
This was enough ash to completely bury all of luxembourg but he's a full kilometer of the stuff.
For all of Argentina beneath one meter is sent the planet into a decade-long winter more global temperatures dropped by as much as fifteen degrees celsius and early humanity was possibly almost destroyed by it.
The global human population they have dwindled to a 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 preserve which leaves the interesting question of what would happen if a level eight super volcano 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 eight 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 x 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 what would happen if we were absurdly un- lucky.
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 Casualty 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 for the largest refugee crisis in history.
And the 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 nineteen twenty 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 ashy 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.
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