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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Dave Jones answered on 17 Jun 2014:
It definitely wouldn’t be good news! Big volcanoes spew lots of molten lava onto the surrounding area, so anyone nearby would be burnt quite badly. Worse than that, they also eject lots of ash into the atmosphere. These causes lots of problems, just like we saw a few years ago when the volcano in iceland erupted, the amount of ash it ejected meant that planes could fly over Europe for quite a few days. But, if it was a much bigger volcano it wouldn’t just stop us from flying, it would also begin to change the composition of the atmosphere and prevent sunlight from reaching the ground. This would be absolutely catastrophic for us, it would be just like when the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. In wasn’t the impact from the asteroid that caused the mass extinction, it was the huge amount of ash that it released when it hit the Earth! Luckily, there aren’t that many big volcanoes and certainly none of the active ones are big enough to cause an event like that, phew!
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Aimee Hopper answered on 17 Jun 2014:
The largest volcano in the world is Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and is apparently much larger than Everest when measured from the sea floor to summit!
Apparently this particular volcano isnt explosive like Mt St Helens, and so wouldnt have the massive gas and ash clouds one might expect. It does, however, have very runny lava, and could quite easily cover the entire island it’s on in up to an hour!
Not good for the people living there!
If Yellow Stone went up, that Would do the whole gas and ash cloud thing, but people are watching the volcanoes there very closely 🙂 as seen here! http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/index.html
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 18 Jun 2014:
In history there has been a number (about 20) of very explosive, very dangerous volcano eruptions. Usually, those volcanos are referred to as ‘supervolcanos’, and when they erupt, they do it in what is called an ‘explosive eruption’. Like Aimee said, it’s true that the largest volcano in the world is Mauna Loa in Hawaii, but it’s not explosive so it’s not that dangerous.
Currently, there is a small number of active supervolcanos (but it’s really hard to know where they are). One is in Yellowstone national park, in Wyoming, USA. This one exploded in the past, three times, and the blast were between 1000 to 2500 times greater than the Mount St-Helens blast. So it was REALLY massive!! It’s possible it’ll explode in the future, but it’s almost impossible to know with good accuracy. Here is a documentary about the Yellowstone supervolcano:
It’s a bit long but it’s very good! However I should emphasize that an eruption of this (or any) supervolcano is thought to be very unlikely in the very near future.
In the video they also explain what would happen if it exploded. Mainly, the long term world-wide consequences are due to ashes, not the lava. The lava can cover around 1000km^2 around the blast, and kill almost everything in that region. Ashes can kill and sicken humans and animals, reduce sunlight, trigger rainfall causing mudslides, severely disrupt air, road and rail transport, crush buildings – 30 cm of dry ash is enough to collapse a roof, contaminate water supplies, kill crops and other vegetation, clog machinery such as air filters, etc…
But most importantly, ashes blasted in the atmosphere, and in particular sulfur gases, would cover the globe in a matter of days, and cause major climate change and extinction of many species all around the planet. It’s possible to study these things by looking at the last supervolcano explosion that happened about 75 000 years ago, in Lake Toba, in Indonesia. It’s believed that this eruption caused a mini ice age, and cause a massive bottleneck in the evolution of many species, including humans. You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
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