Well, is this one later than Mt St Helen? I don’t recall 75% of the US becoming uninhabitable. What’s the diff?
The real killer is the amount of material ejected, its type and the duration of the eruption. Yellowstone would put so much ash (powdered stone by the cubic mile) into the air that much of the northern hemisphere would not have full day light for years and lower the temperature by 10s of degrees for over a 100 years. This is not to mention the effects of the mega-million tons of sulfur dioxide and other noxious gasses.
See the diff, yet?
Mount Pinatubo, Philippines in 1991 was a 6.0 VEI and the largest known in the 20th century; as was Krakatoa 1883. Mount Tambora, Indonesia in 1815 was a 7.0.
The only know super volcano eruption was Mt Toba 75,000 years ago and is credited with wiping out most of the human race.
“Each number is 10X the previous, so a 10 would be 50 times bigger than a 5.0, or technically: the scale is logarithmic, with each interval on the scale representing a tenfold increase in observed ejecta criteria.”
An event with a VEI of 10 would be much more than 50 times larger than a 5. The difference would be a factor of 10 to the fifth power, or 100,000 times.
Other than that, good post.
And Toba left a caldera 18 x 65 miles. So big it took a long time for people to realize it actually was a volcano. I have read that there was probably 6 years of nuclear winter which reduced the breeding population to no more than 10,000 sapiens.