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The Supervolcanoes Scientists Say We Should Be Paying Attention To | Astrum Earth
Thu, 01 May 2025
Welcome to the formidable world of Supervolcanoes - colossal volcanic systems capable of eruptions more powerful than anything in recorded history. From Yellowstone to Toba, discover how these geological giants form, what makes them so dangerous, and the chilling signs scientists are watching for. Could another super-eruption happen in our lifetime? And if it did… what would it mean for humanity?From Alex McColgan and the Astrum team comes an illuminating new adventure that turns our gaze homeward. Astrum Earth invites you to rediscover the most extraordinary planet in our universe - our very own Earth.Journey with us as we explore Earth's most captivating mysteries and marvels, from the global dance of El Niño to the intricate rhythms that have sustained life for billions of years. With the same meticulous research and breathtaking visuals that define Astrum, we'll reveal our planet's stories in unprecedented detail.Narrated by James Stewart, Astrum Earth promises to transform how you see the world beneath your feet and the skies above. Because to truly understand the cosmos, we must first understand home.Discover our new Astrum Earth YouTube channel: hhttps://www.youtube.com/@AstrumEarth
Chapter 1: What are supervolcanoes and why are they dangerous?
Volcanoes are nature's ticking time bombs. In full flow, one of humanity's most fearsome sights. Mythical, almost otherworldly. Nothing and no one on the planet can alter their course once they decide to remain silent no more. But that really is just the beginning. Because dotted around the globe, super volcanoes are ready and waiting to awaken, with the power to wipe out entire continents.
Chapter 2: What was the recent eruption in Tonga?
Some are hidden beneath our feet. Others hide in plain sight. But when they make themselves known, there's nowhere to hide. The most violent volcanic eruption to occur this century was fairly recently. In January of 2022, the eruption of a submarine volcano near the main island of Tonga, about 2,000 kilometres northeast of New Zealand.
The eruption of Hunga Tongaunga Haapi, to give the volcano its full name, constituted an explosion far larger than that produced by any nuclear bomb. It could be heard in Alaska, nearly 10,000 kilometres away. and it generated a tsunami that was two metres high even after crossing the Pacific Ocean to Peru. The 2022 Tonga event was undoubtedly a big one.
Chapter 3: How do volcanic eruptions compare on the VEI scale?
But how does it compare to other volcanic eruptions? I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrum Earth. In this video we'll look at the volcanic rating scale, ancient clues of super volcanic eruptions and potentially dangerous regions across the world. Just how worried should we be about the possibility of future eruptions that are bigger, much, much bigger than the Tonga event? Let's find out.
Geologists quantify the violence of a volcanic eruption using a scale called the Volcanic Explosivity Index . Although a given eruption can be assigned a single score on this scale, exactly what score is awarded depends on a combination of factors, such as the volume of rock ejected by the eruption, the height reached by the volcano's ash cloud , as well as some more qualitative descriptors.
The VEI scale is open-ended in principle, but all known events are graded between 0 and 8. Events scoring 0 are represented by eruptions of low viscosity, or runny, lava at volcanoes such as Kilauea or Manalahu on Hawaii. Although these eruptions can involve large volumes of material and are dangerous in their own right, they are what geologists term effusive in nature.
This means that the lava flows rather than explodes from the volcano's vent. Go up the scale to a VEI of 2 and you reach the sort of eruption represented by the ongoing activity at Mount Etna in Sicily. Keep going, and at a VEI of 3, you get to something like the eruption of Sufriere Hills, which covered much of the Caribbean island of Montserrat with ash in 1996 and 1997.
At a VEI of 4, you reach the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano whose ash clouds spread over Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, disrupting air travel for several weeks. Because many of an eruption's attributes can't be determined with certainty, there's sometimes disagreement about what score should be assigned to a given eruption.
The 2022 Tonga event, with an erupted rock volume of about 1.9 cubic kilometres and a plume that reached a height of 58 kilometres, earns a five on the VEI scale by most estimates, although some volcanologists push it up to a six. This is roughly on a par with the famous 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State in the US.
And in case you're wondering what 1.9 cubic metres looks like, it's roughly the volume of a large open-pit mine, such as the Myrrh Diamond Mine in Russia, or the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in the US.
Even more violent eruptions than Tonga, those firmly within category 6, include the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused a small but measurable cooling of the globe due to the aerosols it injected into the stratosphere.
And the 1883 eruption of Krakatawa in Indonesia, whose ash might have been responsible for the lurid red sky depicted by Edvard Munch in his painting The Scream. A VEI of 7 is reserved for the greatest eruptions in recorded history. These come with the accompanying descriptor super colossal compared to the merely cataclysmic eruptions like Tonga in the VEI 5 bracket.
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Chapter 4: What are the characteristics of super volcanic eruptions?
The huge quantities of material blasted out by these top category eruptions form volcanic plumes that punch high up into the atmosphere, injecting ash and other aerosols that can disrupt the climate for years. Speaking of life-changing eruptions, I had a few of my own to worry about having suffered from pretty bad acne as a teenager.
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Thankfully, given their global impact, super volcanic eruptions are very rare, occurring only once every few tens of thousands of years or so. And the super volcanoes that produce them are also uncommon, with only about 20 of them known worldwide. This is because super volcanic eruptions can only occur under very particular geological conditions.
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Chapter 5: What historical eruptions have shaped our understanding of super volcanoes?
All magma has various gases dissolved in it, such as hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and water vapour. In fact, it's the behaviour of these gases that determines how explosive an eruption is. As the magma moves up through the volcano's plumbing system to be erupted as lava, the pressure decreases and the gases come out of solution.
If the magma is runny, like that which feeds the volcanoes on Hawaii, the gases can bubble up and escape. But when the magma is thick and viscous, as is the case at Toba and other super volcanoes, it's much harder for the gases to get out. Now when the pressure drops, the gases explode suddenly, like a shaken bottle of lemonade when the lid is removed.
These blast the lava into pieces as fine as ash and as large as boulders. So these gases are responsible for pulverizing some of the erupted material into particles, small enough to linger in the atmosphere for years, shading the planet and lowering temperatures. But sulfur dioxide makes the problem even worse.
When it reaches the atmosphere, this gas reacts with oxygen and water to form tiny droplets of sulfuric acid and other aerosols. These aerosols can remain in the stratosphere for as long as a decade, reflecting sunlight back into space and plunging the Earth into a so-called volcanic winter. The super eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago released huge quantities of sulfur dioxide.
Although it's difficult to distinguish volcanic effects from background climate cycles, scientists have found evidence that the eruption was followed by a century-long period of cooling. It has also been proposed, based on archaeological and genetic data, that the climatic effect of the Toba super eruption caused our species to pass through a genetic bottleneck.
The global population might have dwindled to just a few thousand. This so-called Toba catastrophe hypothesis is contested. Some scientists doubt that the climatic effect of the Toba eruption was large enough to induce a global multi-year volcanic winter. And some question the severity of the population crash that supposedly coincided with it.
But whether or not the Toba super volcano really did cause the population of humans worldwide to shrink to a number that would fit into a large concert hall, if a similar eruption were to happen today, the effects on global agriculture would be truly catastrophic. So how worried should we be? Well, we know that these events are rare.
Topor and Toba are the only super eruptions known to have occurred in the last 100,000 years. If you travel back in time from the Toba event, the next one you would come to is another super eruption of Topor, around 340,000 years ago. But let's not get complacent.
At both Toba and Topor, smaller eruptions have occurred since their most recent super eruptions, and there's no reason to think that their super volcano is now extinct. Both locations are on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, a region of extreme volcanic hazards surrounding the Pacific Ocean, where volcanism is triggered by oceanic crusts being forced down into the underlying mantle.
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Chapter 6: What climate effects did the Toba super eruption have?
Volcanoes associated with the Andean volcanic complex show signs of unrest. Swelling ground suggests a filling magma chamber, for example. But not on a scale that makes geologists think that a super eruption is imminent.
The eruptions in North America all originated in a volcanically active region known as the Yellowstone Hotspot, which is one of the most intensively monitored volcanic sites on Earth.
The geology of the region is complex, and geologists don't know whether the source of the magma is a plume originating deep in the Earth, or a piece of the ocean crust that's been forced under the North American continent.
Whatever the origin of the magma, the Yellowstone hotspot is thought to have hosted six VEI-8 eruptions in the last 10 million years, the last one being approximately 640,000 years ago. These eruptions formed the Yellowstone caldera, now at the centre of Yellowstone National Park.
If the supervolcano were to erupt similarly today, it would devastate the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana with red-hot clouds of rock, ash and gas moving at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Further from the site, ash would be deposited in a thick blanket, disrupting travel and collapsing the roofs of buildings.
and the climatic effect of airborne ash and sulphates would likely be pronounced cooling of the sort thought to have occurred after the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago, which might have lowered temperatures by several degrees Celsius across much of the world.
Because of this threat, and because of the region's long history of activity, scientists continually observed the Yellowstone volcano for signs of ground deformation, earthquakes and volcanic gases, which could indicate magma on the move. The problem is the Yellowstone region is so active that such occurrences are almost constant.
And because nobody has ever actually witnessed the buildup to a super volcanic eruption, we can't be absolutely sure what we should expect to see before it blows. Based on the average times between the last few eruptions of the Yellowstone volcano, the chance of an eruption occurring there in any given year has been estimated at one in 730,000. But that's not really how volcanoes work.
They don't hold to schedules like that, so it would be inaccurate to say whether an eruption is due or not. Still, geologists monitoring the Yellowstone supervolcano are confident that there are currently no signs that magma is accumulating in a large enough quantity to feed such an eruption at any time soon.
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