The Mount Redoubt Warning

First of all, I would like to apologize for letting so much time lapse between posts. Last week was my spring break, so I was busy doing non-blogging related things. Also, I had several friends in town from Philly, so I was a little preoccupied. I won't let it happen again, at least not in the near future. Anyways, on to more serious matters.

As I a sure you are all aware, Mount Redoubt, a stratovolcano located in South-central Alaska began erupting late last night. Now Mount Redoubt is not located near many populous areas, so the expected impact of the eruption is low. A few flights into and out of Anchorage International Airport have been delayed, and a few mountainside towns may need to be evacuated. However, what this eruption should do is to bring about public attention to the looming threat of a supervolcanic eruption. What is a supervolcano, you ask? Well I am happy to inform you.

A supervolcano is capable of an eruption that is thousands of times larger than the eruption at Mount Redoubt or the eruption experienced at Mount St. Helen's in 1980. They form when magma builds up beneath the earth's crust, cannot escape in a traditional eruption, and the pressure builds until crust collapses. A caldera for such a volcano exists in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. If this supervolcano were to erupt, over half the United States could be covered in up to 3 feet of ash, including the Midwest which produces most of the country's wheat and corn. The eruption would also have a devastating effect on the climate of the entire planet, creating a global cloud of ash that would partially block the sun all around the globe, raise the levels of sulfur in the air, and insert toxic ash into the global air supply. The effect would be tremendous global cooling, perhaps creating an ice age, crop failures around the world, global famine and starvation, and the deterioration of many governments worldwide. But on the bright side, at least we wouldn't have to worry about global warming anymore!

Now I know many people are thinking that if these supervolcanos are so bad, why haven't I heard of them, and why haven't they happened in the past? Well first of all, scientists have only discovered their existence within the past decade or so. After the Voyager II spacecraft caught a glimpse of these events on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, geologists began searching for similar conditions here on Earth. Besides the caldera located within Yellowstone, several other supervolcanos have been identified over the past few years.

Secondly, supervolcanic eruptions are decidedly rare events. The last one to occur on Earth was a volcano called Toba, which erupted about 75,000 years ago in Indoensia. The blast was about 10,000 times larger than the blast a Mount St. Helen's, and may have almost caused the extinction of human kind. University of Illinois researcher Dr. Stanley Ambrose, who studies the human genome, has theorized that there must have been a bottleneck in human population between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. Modern humans around the world today have DNA patterns that are much to similar to each other than would be expected by over a million years of evolution. This can only be explained by a hypothesis that present humans are all descended from a relatively small number of humans dating back about 75,000 years ago. According to Dr. Ambrose's theory, the Toba eruption wiped out all but about 2,000-20,000 of the humans alive at the time. This theory is further supported by a study of the DNA parasitic lice that feed on human blood.

Despite these implications, the chances of a supervolcano occurring in any given century is still very low. Scientists estimate that they occur somewhere on the planet on average about once every hundred thousand years with varying severity. This rate, however, still makes a supervolcanic eruption ten times more likely than a large asteroid colliding with the Earth. Not to mention the fact that we are developing technologies that can see asteroid collisions before they occur and perhaps cause them to be avoided. There is no way to avoid a supervolcano. The last one to erupt in the United States occurred in Yellowstone about 620,000 years ago. According to the U.S. Geographical Survey, these type of eruptions are predicted to occur once every 600,000 years or so in Yellowstone. So basically we are due.

Now do I think a supervolcano is going to erupt in our lifetime? Not at all. The chances are very, very, very small. However, human kind must take into consideration that is more than likely that one of these eruptions is probably going to happen while we still inhabit the planet. Right now there is little we can do, but we should invest in research to determine more about these types of eruptions. If we ignore this problem, then one day it could lead to the deaths of billions of humans. So just remember, I was the first person to bring to your attention the emanate threat man kind faces from a supervolcanic eruption.