Guest post: We’ll always have a chic side table
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on From the Solfatara crater.
Back in 1980, during my last year of high school, I went on a trip with a number of classmates to the eastern Mediterranean organized and chaperoned by one of our teachers. One of the last stops on the trip was Naples. The original plan was to go to Pompeii, but having arrived on a Monday, the site was closed. Plan B took us to Solfatara, which smelled of rotten eggs and featured many pools of boiling mud. The paths we walked along were roped to keep us from straying off into areas where the thin crust of rock might not have supported our weight, with more boiling mud awaiting the foolish and unwary.
“Super” and “volcano” are not two words you want to see put together. They are a phenomenon best observed from a great distance (like on a planet other than the one you are currently standing on), or from a great time after the fact, (say, a millennium other than the one in which you are currently alive). Here’s why:
The term “supervolcano” implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning the measured deposits for that eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles).
SOURCE: US Geological Survey https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/questions-about-supervolcanoes
Here’s a scary graphic: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/comparison-eruption-sizes-using-volume-magma-erupted
A Google search tells me that the last eruption of the “supervolcano” class was 27,000 years ago, in what is now New Zealand. This is more than 25,000 years before humans arrived in New Zealand, more than 22,000 years before humans wrote, 20,000 years before there were cities to evacuate, and more than 10,00 years before there were crops to fail. Something like this is completely unprecedented in the experience of human civilizations. Our closest parallels are the estimated effects of a “nuclear winter.”
A supervolcano erupting in Solfatara would mean the end of Naples (snd much of Italy along with it), and millions of immediate refugees (or victims, depending on the amount of lead time the eruption deigns to provide). Such an eruption would make the one that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum look like a Christmas cracker. This would be Bad.
It would be ironic if, instead of being laid low by the combined might of the cascading, multiple disasters we’re currently hurtling towards, human civilization were to crippled or snuffed out by something like this, something we could not have possibly caused, or prevented. It wouldn’t be a frog in a pot of water being brought gradually to a boil, but a frog immolated in a pyroclastic cloud. Not karma, or retribution, but plain, dumb luck.
As destructive as this would be to life as a whole, I think it’s possible that this would, in the longish run, be less disruptive biologically than human induced global warming is likely to be. A supervolcano knocking out civilization before it destroys more than it already has (and more than it probably will) might be “better” for the biosphere than letting us continue on our current path. It might just forestall the continuance of the Anthropocene.* Think of it as The Great Reset, 2.0.
*The motion to officially rename our current geological Epoch the Anthropocene was defeated in 2024 at a vote of the International Union of Geological Sciences, but that doesn’t change the scope or degree of human impact on Earth systems. Unless we change our ways, it might not be too long (geologically speaking) before there is no International Union of Anything left to change this decision, assuming the Phlegraean Fields supervolcano doesn’t beat us to the punch.
Why do I find it hilariously/depressingly predictable that the story linked to in the OP contains (at least when I opened it) a further link to the following clickbait:
Woman shares easy IKEA Hack which turns two product into a chic side table
Do I laugh? Cry? Both? Neither? Who knows, this link could end up being vitally important information to future archaeologists as they try to reconstruct livingroom furnishings when, thousands of years from now, they excavate Naples.
“So you’ve three choices. Nukes. Climate Change. Supervolanco. Which is it going to be?”
If I believed in the Gaia hypothesis, I’d wonder if such a “supervolanco” eruption might be a final attempt by the planet’s “immune system” to remove the organisms (humanity) that have been harming it for centuries.
A friend of mine (a rather brilliant law student) years ago in the early 1960s) took a hoiliday in New Guinea, and visited the Mt Lamington volcano, which had last erupted in 1951. He was fascinated by the view from the summit of its ash cone, and, seeking a better view of the lava lake, went as close to the edge of the cone as he could.
But he went too close. The edge of the cone gave way under his feet, and he tumbled down through the volcano’s acrid fumes right into the lava lake. Hopefully, he was dead by the time he hit that lake, because I cannot imagine a worse or more painful death than being burnt alive, particularly by immersion in the molten magma of a volcano.
Anthropogenic global warming offers us all a much slower demise, though some will burn to death by being caught in wildfires and other extreme weather events. Adjustments c/- Gaia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_eruption_of_Mount_Lamington
For a small breath of relief – except for locals – the Phlegraean Fields is thought to ‘only’ be capable of a VEI 7 eruption, i.e. the same order of magnitude as Tambora 1815. And two orders of magnitude greater than the famous Vesuvius eruption.
Many decades ago I studied geology. Taupo’s last major eruption was the Hatepe around 232 CE (VEI 7). Although not as big as the older Oruanui event YNnB referred to, it was still the largest eruption Earth has seen in some millennia and immensely destructive. Here’s a link that’s pretty good if anyone is interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatepe_eruption
The key thing I remember from that lecture was that the ignimbrite flow covered a radius of ~80km in about 400 seconds. The flow filled valleys, scoured ground surface away in some places, and passed over the top of all mountains in the area other than Ruapehu (~9,200 ft / 2,800m). They were able to estimate the speed from the wavelength of surface ripples in the ignimbrite exposed in road cuttings. Between local devastation, dating and diversion of major rivers, massive floods 20-30 years later, ash falls for hundreds of km the effects on inhabitants and ecosystems of such events are extreme. Something akin to that in a densely populated region doesn’t bare thinking about, except that we need to plan for such events because they will affect everyone. Oh well.
In 2010, I was still living in Canberra, unable to fly home to Ireland. My husband was flying to the British Isles occasionally for family reasons. He was on his way back to Australia after his father’s funeral in the West of England and was at Heathrow Airport when Eyjafjallajökull erupted. His plane to the Middle East was the one of the last two out before flights were halted. His onward flight to Australia was almost empty, because no other feeder flights had been able to take off. He had an entire row of seats to himself, and was able to lie down across them to sleep. So many people were stuck in disabled airports with no way out; and that wasn’t a particularly huge eruption, nor was it particularly close to the busiest airports. A bigger eruption in Italy could ground flights around the world for years, couldn’t it?
Tigger, there’s a lot of complicating factors but, generally, yes. Not all volcanoes produce lots of ash. Of those that do, the bigger and longer the bang is the more ash gets into the upper atmosphere. If the volcano is at lower latitudes or the ash gets into one of the systems that change latitude then it will be spread over much of the hemisphere fairly quickly. Cross over between hemispheres is less efficient and takes longer. but yes, a big bang in the latitude of Europe/USA/China et al would be hugely disruptive for a long time, not to mention the local devastation and mid to longer term climate/ecology effects.