Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Supervolcanos But Were Afraid to Ask!

Research from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) has shown that the assumption that an earthquake or other external trigger precedes a super volcano eruption, is incorrect.

Wim Malfait, research team leader at ESRF explained:

“The driving force is an additional pressure which is caused by the different densities of solid rock and liquid magma. It is comparable to a football filled with air under water, which is forced upwards by the denser water around it.”

Whether  this additional pressure alone could eventually become sufficiently high to crack the Earth’s crust, leading to a violent eruption, or whether an external energy source like an Earthquake is required has only now been answered.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1992, global temperatures dropped by 0.4°C for months. The predicted temperature drop after a super volcano eruption is a 10°C drop for 10 years. 

This would be a global catastrophe that would cause hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide.

The last super volcano eruption was Lake Toba approximately 74,000 years ago. That eruption was 100 times larger than the Mount Pinatubo eruption.

600,000 years ago, Yellowstone super volcano erupted, ejecting 240 cubic miles (1000 cubic km) of ash and lava into the atmosphere. This would have been enough to cover a large city to a depth of more than a mile.

The global drop in temperatures, should this happen today, would mean starvation for hundreds of millions due to crop failure. Acidification of the oceans would kill off the only source of protein for tens of millions more.

A super volcanic eruption is a catastrophe that will happen one day, which day remains to be seen.

The report is published in Nature Geoscience Journal.