Epic proportions

The caldera that underlies Yellowstone National Park—"caldera" essentially means humongous crater—is over 50 miles long and nearly 30 miles wide. You could fit four Manhattans placed end to end inside. The amount of magma, or molten rock, thrown out by its most recent supereruption 640,000 years ago was a staggering 240 cubic miles, with an ash volume two to three times that. Yellowstone is a supereruption waiting to happen.



Bristol University's Sparks, who chaired the working group that prepared the Geological Society of London report, referring to another Yellowstone supereruption. "Probably something like a third of the United States would be more or less uninhabitable maybe for a few months, even a year or two."

"We could merrily go on for another 10,000 or 20,000 years without anything of this size happening," Sparks stated. "On the other hand, at some stage, assuming that humanity outlasts all its other problems, we will face one of these eruptions. They are inevitable. So I think they have to be taken seriously.""



The intensity of such convulsions matches the magnitude. In A.D. 79, Vesuvius belched out an astounding 100,000 cubic yards of magma per second over a 24-hour period. Yet this is chicken feed compared to supereruptions, which can emit volcanic debris at up to 100,000,000 cubic yards per second. You might have thought such violence was reserved for astronomical events like supernovas and gamma-ray bursts, but no—our own Earth can generate it.

When looking at Yellowstone National Park, it is not a question of if, it will happen so the only question is WHEN?

 

"The Toba catastrophe 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba, on Sumatra (Indonesia), possibly the largest explosive volcanic eruption within the last twenty-five million years, plunged the Earth, which was already in an ice-age, into an even colder spell.

This resulted in the world's human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution."
~ Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.



Geological evidence and computed models support the plausibility of the Toba catastrophe theory. Ashes from this eruption of Lake Toba is found throught the planet at that time. Also, genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs about 70,000 years ago that survived the epic event.

The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations (2006), Eugene Linden writes that "... the "volcanic winter" brought on by the eruption of Mount Toba roughly 71,000 years ago (...) was the biggest eruption in the past 2 million years. Estimates are that the ash and gases thrown into the atmosphere lowered global temperatures between 3 and 5 degrees centigrade for the next six years ..."

The Toba caldera in Indonesia, 71,000 years ago, underwent an eruption of category 8 (or "mega-colossal") on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, releasing between 2500 and 3000 km3 of dense rock equivalent.

In comparison, the largest volcanic eruption in historic times, in 1815 at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, ejected the equivalent of around 160 km3 of dense rock and made 1816, "The Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere.

Within the last five to three million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of species, including Homo habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, H. sapiens, and H. floresiensis. Toba's event is believed to have lead to the extinction of all the other human species except for the three branches that became Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), the Flores hominins (Homo floresiensis), and modern humans (Homo sapiens).

To those that say "who cares" .. simply let all of this info sink in and be weighted against the global warming histeria, phoniness, and fraud meant to profit those that promote it. BTW, global warming is also happening in Mars - but that is amother story for another day.