Posted on 05/31/2008 2:28:14 PM PDT by blam
Big Bangs: 'Stirring' Secrets Of Deadly Supervolcanoes Uncovered
Supervolcanoes are orders of magnitude greater than any volcanic eruption in historic times. They are capable of causing long-lasting change to weather, threatening the extinction of species, and covering huge areas with lava and ash. (Credit: iStockphoto/Koch Valérie)
ScienceDaily (May 30, 2008) — Researchers from McGill University and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have simulated in the lab the process that can turn ordinary volcanic eruptions into so-called “supervolcanoes,” with potentially devastating worldwide impact.
The study was conducted by Dr. Ben Kennedy and and Dr. Mark Jellinek of UBC’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and Dr. John Stix, chair of McGill University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Their results were published May 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Supervolcanoes are orders of magnitude greater than any volcanic eruption in historic times. They are capable of causing long-lasting change to weather, threatening the extinction of species, and covering huge areas with lava and ash.
Using volcanic models made of plexiglass filled with corn syrup, the researchers simulated how magma in a volcano’s magma chamber might behave if the roof of the chamber caved in during an eruption.
“The magma was being stirred by the roof falling into the magma chamber,” Stix explained. “This causes lots of complicated flow effects that are unique to a supervolcano eruption.”
“There is currently no way to predict a supervolcano eruption,” said Kennedy, a post-doctoral fellow at UBC. “But this new information explains for the first time what happens inside a magma chamber as the roof caves in, and provides insights that could be useful when making hazard maps of such an eruption.”
The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 – the only known supervolcano eruption in modern history – was 10 times more powerful than Krakatoa and more than 100 times more powerful than Vesuvius or Mount St. Helens. It caused more than 100,000 deaths in Indonesia alone, and blew a column of ash about 70 kilometres into the atmosphere. The resulting disruptions of the planet’s climate led 1816 to be christened “the year without summer.”
“And this was a small supervolcano,” said Stix. “A really big one could create the equivalent of a global nuclear winter. There would be devastation for many hundreds of kilometres near the eruption and there would be would be global crop failures because of the ash falling from the sky, and even more important, because of the rapid cooling of the climate.”
There are potential supervolcano sites all over the world, most famously under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the setting of the 2005 BBC/Discovery Channel docudrama Supervolcano, which imagined an almost-total collapse of the world economy following an eruption.
Adapted from materials provided by McGill University.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen the 1815 Tambora eruption listed as a supervolcano, even a small one.
Great! Something else to worry about!
We’re all living on the crust of one gigantic, all-around zit. Sooner or later...
We’re all going to die!!!!!!
From WiKi:
Tambora erupted in 1815 with a rating of seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it the largest eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in AD 181.The explosion was heard on Sumatra island (more than 2,000 km or 1,200 mi away). Heavy volcanic ash falls were observed as far away as Borneo, Sulawesi, Java and Maluku islands. The death toll was at least 71,000 people (the most deadly eruption of all time), of whom 11,000–12,000 were killed directly by the eruption; the often-cited figure of 92,000 people killed is believed to be an overestimate. The eruption created global climate anomalies; 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer because of the effect on North American and European weather. Agricultural crops failed and livestock died in much of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora#cite_note-Oppenheimer2003-3
Big Science meet Big Corn
Clearly, We Are Doomed. Does the article say if Gorebal Warming causes super volcanoes?
A current volcano, Chaiten in Chile, dramatically erupted after 9000+ years on May 5, and, it is still erupting. There have been concerns that as it weakens in its eruption, there might be a chaldera collapse and a resultant pyroclastic flow....some reports do not fear an explosion. This volcano is worth following, even as the news media have lost interest. One of the most dramatic volcano eruption photos ever taken is from this eruption. It is here...
http://icono-clast.blogspot.com/2008/05/volcano.html
and another less dramatic here: http://jeanhuets.livejournal.com/32840.html
Well, those ARE super!
We live on an active planet. An inactive planet would not be hospitable to life. It’s a trade off. Enjoy your life while it is yours.
Suppose I was having trouble proving super volcanoes ever occurred. It would be tempting to look back on the limited records at hand, pick out a big one, and move the definition to accommodate my theory.
Chicken Little is ALIVE and very, very WELL!
One can only hope that a super volcano eruption will happen soon, to save us from global warming and the melting of all ice on the surface of Mother Earth ( sarc. off).
Nobody has the remotest problem proving the existence of supervolcanoes. The evidence is obvious.
There's no real official definition of a supervolcano. Tambora was indeed pretty small for one.
What’s remotely fear-mongering about this article? And what remotest scrap of evidence do you have that the scientists are “liberal?”
Apparently the climate absorbed that glich and returned to "normal" within a couple of years. Obviously there was no cascading effect on the climate in spite of an event so tremendous that its effects were almost immediate.
I’m unclear why snide comments about global warming must be dragged onto any discussion of science. That a scam is being run in one field doesn’t invalidate all scientific investigation and analysis. Dynamic-earth Geology is a fairly straight-forward field of study.
This is the first time I've ever seen the 1815 Tambora eruption listed as a supervolcano, even a small one.Hey, standards have changed as more data (quantity and quality) has accumulated.
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