This is a video by RealLifeLore, sponsored by the Great Courses Plus. 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 the time now to once again thank my incredible sponsor, The Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is a subscription on-demand video learning service where you can subscribe to and watch unlimited top-notch courses that are taught by brilliant ideally professors, as well as experts from National Geographic, the Smithsonian, The Culinary Institute of America and hundreds of other extremely qualified individuals. They offer an unlimited access to thousands of different lectures over pretty much anything that you could possibly be interested in. If you enjoyed the video that you just watch, then I would strongly recommend their course titled "The Joy of Science," which includes lectures on volcanic activity, earthquakes and plate tectonics. It's a really fun subject to learn about and help out a lot with the research that I conducted for this video. 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Hey all, budding volcanologist here.
I watched this video and I need to clear a few things up. It was well done for the most part, but the way it's delivered is a little too... Sensational. First, the VEI scale is a scale of volume of material released in an eruption. It is exponential, so a VEI 5 is 1km3, VEI 6 is 10km3, VEI 7 is 100km3, etc. This is not explained in the video.
Second, I would like to address his use of "explosion". In large (VEI 6+) eruptions, volcanoes don't merely explode outwards in some gigantic, instantaneous blast. Most eruptions of this size take place over days, even weeks in the larger events (VEI 7-8).
Third, I'd like to clarify the death tolls of earlier eruptions and why they were so high. Before volcanology was a concrete science without relevant technology, people had a very difficult time telling how large an eruption was going to be. When volcanoes such as Vesuvius, Tambora, or Krakatoa erupted, many died due to lack of warning. These days, we can actively identify when a volcano is displaying activity and help evacuate people in time. A good example of volcano monitoring saving lives is the Pinatubo eruption of 1991, which was a VEI 6. I don't like how this wasn't mentioned in the video as a counterexample to Krakatoa (VEI 6). Should a large eruption occur today, we would likely know about it due to pre-eruption volcanic activity (stream chemistry changes, hot spring temperature changes, volcanic edifice changes).
The reason I don't like these videos that discuss events such as a Yellowstone eruption is because they don't clarify many things and mostly leave it to fear to do the job. Yellowstone, being a volcano capable of producing large VEI 8 eruptions, operates on timespans of hundreds of thousands to millions of years--far beyond a human timescale. I wouldn't be surprised if something else has wiped us out before Yellowstone erupts again. Most people think Yellowstone is on the brink of eruption, and that's due to misinterpreted fear-mongering by people who don't know much about it. I'd suggest some literature on the issue if an eruption concerns you so much. I would also have liked if the video provided sources--some of the numbers seemed off.
Basically, this video is interesting and it does bring light to volcanic events, but the scare factor is a little too much. Please don't worry about Yellowstone dooming us all--we've got MUCH more immediate issues to deal with!
If you have questions regarding this issue: please ask! I'd be glad to try and answer them. Edit: This is a good article by the USGS: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3024/
1 in 700,000 is actually pretty terrifying. Better odds then your plane crashing...
It's crazy to thing how much energy is stored in the core of our planet, making it so that the equivalent of a pimple on its surface could wipe us all out...
Jesus christ Indonesia, chill out
I felt like that could have been way more informative and was cut short when it came time to discussing the Yellowstone super volcano.
HE-ROH-SHIH-MAH...
Really dude?
I was always under the impression that the Krakatoa eruption was massive, but the Tambora eruption was apparently 800 fucking megatons. Holy shit
TIL, don't move to Indonesia.
Wow, Indonesia needs to get it's shit together.