20 replies to this topic

[stocks]

The effect of the Mount Tambora eruption is well documented in Europe. 1816 was a year of calamity for most of the continent. Spring saw heavy rains which were followed by snow in June and July that caused widespread harvest failures. Wheat yields in France, England and Ireland were at least 75 percent lower than at the beginning of that decade. Wholesale wheat and rye prices responded by roughly doubling in 1817 across the continent. The area affected the most was southern Germany where prices increased by three hundred percent by the period May to June of 1817. In Germany and Switzerland, people resorted to eating rats, cats, grass and straw as well as their own horses and watchdogs. This was the last great subsistence crisis of western civilisation.

The Volcano That Rewrote History

If you think this winter was unseasonably long and cold, you’re playing history’s tiniest violin.

Instead, with a year without summer, famines on multiples continents, an explosion in the Chinese opium trade, the global scourge of cholera, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a golden age of Arctic exploration, and modern meteorology on its résumé, that distinction belongs to Tambora and its eruption in 1815 on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.

Thomas Jefferson, always on the precipice of financial instability, was brought to ruin after his wheat crops were destroyed by the record cold wrought by Tambora, which occurred at the same time as the panic of 1819

The worldwide cholera epidemic of the early 1800s kicked off in the Bengal delta after volcanic aerosols triggered a three-year disruption of South Asia’s life-giving monsoon.


http://www.thedailyb...te-history.html

[stocks]

Icelandic volcano Bárðarbunga (BOWR-thar-Boon-kah) is part of the same volcanic system as Laki, but is much larger. Barðárbunga stretches out over 200 kilometers long. It has a large eruption every 250-600 years. Like her little brother Laki, she's associated with massive amounts of toxic gas release.

A globally-super-dangerous volcano might be getting ready to go off? Um, yeah, you might want to watch this one just in case...

The winter of 1783-1784. The Revolutionary War had just ended, and Benjamin Franklin was puzzling over the nation's bizarre weather. Congress had been delayed getting to Annapolis to vote for the Treaty of Paris because the Chesapeake Bay just wouldn't melt. The Mississippi River froze down to New Orleans, and ice was reported floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Reports from Europe were of a bizarrely hot summer with thick fog that was choking people to death in Scotland, massive hailstones, lightning, and crop failures. The sun was blood-red at noon. Mass starvation that would ultimately kill 1/6ths of Egypt's population took hold due to a historic drought of the Nile. As many as six million people would die from the bizarre weather.

Franklin was one of the few scientists of the era to (almost) correctly speculate as to its cause:

"The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained [...] or whether it was the vast quantity of smoke, long continuing, to issue during the summer from Hekla in Iceland, and that other volcano which arose out of the sea near that island, which smoke might be spread by various winds, over the northern part of the world, is yet uncertain."

He, however, had mixed up his Icelandic volcanoes, for it was not Hekla that erupted that year, causing the planet-altering weather, but Laki.



http://m.dailykos.co...et-You-All-Know

Edited by stocks, 20 August 2014 - 07:55 PM.

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Large volcanic eruptions were responsible for the coldest temperature extremes recorded since early Roman times

A new study maps the timing and associated radiative forcing of nearly 300 individual volcanic eruptions extending as far back as the early Roman period.

"Using new records we are able to show that large volcanic eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were the dominant drivers of climate variability, responsible for numerous and widespread summer cooling extremes over the past 2,500 years," said lead author Michael Sigl, Ph.D.

"These cooler temperatures were caused by large amounts of volcanic sulfate particles injected into the upper atmosphere," Sigl added, "shielding the Earth's surface from incoming solar radiation."

The study shows that 15 of the 16 coldest summers recorded between 500 BC and 1,000 AD followed large volcanic eruptions - with four of the coldest occurring shortly after the largest volcanic events found in record.

Two powerful volcanoes that produced crop failures and famines likely contributed to the outbreak of the Justinian plague that spread throughout the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 543 CE, and which ultimately decimated the human population across Eurasia.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news...e-cold.html#jCp

Edited by stocks, 12 July 2015 - 10:05 AM.

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Eruption of El Salvador's Ilopango volcano explains A.D. 536 cooling

 

1,500 years ago, it may have been the site of one of the most horrific natural disasters in the world. It may be the long-sought cause of the extreme climate cooling and crop failures of A.D. 535-536

 

The massive Plinian-type event with pyroclastic flows would have instantly killed up to 100,000 people, displaced up to 400,000 more and filled the skies with ash and dust for more than a year. The new findings would make it the second-largest volcanic eruption in the last 200,000 years. “This event was much bigger than we ever thought,” 

 

Such an eruption would explain the episode in Mayan history known as the Classic Period Hiatus, when the Maya stopped building stelae, decorative stone columns erected to mark events, Dull said. It would also finally explain the global cooling of A.D. 535-536, an 18-month period of cloudy skies, crop failures and famines that was described in both Roman and Chinese historical accounts.

 

 

http://www.earthmaga...-ad-536-cooling

 

 

 

 

[stocks]

The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) provides a relative measure of the explosiveness of volcanic eruptions.

Volume of products, eruption cloud height, and qualitative observations (using terms ranging from "gentle" to "mega-colossal") are used to determine the explosivity value. The scale is open-ended with the largest volcanoes in history given magnitude 8.

 

 

 

We only get one year to prepare if a super-volcano erupts

 

Super volcanic eruptions are so catastrophically powerful that they could devastate the entire planet. Ash in the atmosphere would block out the light and heat of the sun for years or decades.

 

Luckily, these kinds of eruptions are few and far between, and they are tens of thousands of years in the making

 

These kinds of cataclysmic super-eruptions have occurred a few times in the geological past. In New Zealand 26,500 years ago, the Taupo Volcanic Zone had a super eruption. Even further back, Campi Flegrei in Italy exploded 40,000 years ago. Yellowstone has also super-erupted three times in the past million years

 

 

 

 

http://www.businessi...-volcano-2016-7

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The Smithsonian's "Eruptions, Earthquakes, & Emissions" web application (or "E3") is a time-lapse animation of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes since 1960.

 

It also shows volcanic gas emissions (sulfur dioxide, SO2) since 1978 — the first year satellites were available to provide global monitoring of SO2

 

 

 

 

http://volcano.si.edu/E3/

 

 

 

[stocks]

Mount Rainier is capable of unleashing a flow of super-heated mud that could cover much of the Seattle/Tacoma area.   

 

Over the last 30 days, there has also been a good bit of seismic activity at Mount Rainier, and much of it has been centered right along the core of the volcano… 

 

Since the last time it erupted in the late 19th century, hundreds of thousands of people have moved into the danger zone around the volcano, and a full-blown eruption now would eclipse any other natural disaster in recorded U.S. history.

 

Mount Rainier is currently listed as a Decade Volcano, or one of the 16 volcanoes with the greatest likelihood of causing great loss of life and property if eruptive activity resumes.[45] If Mt. Rainier were to erupt as powerfully as Mount St. Helens did in its May 18, 1980 eruption, the effect would be cumulatively greater, because of the far more massive amounts of glacial ice locked on the volcano compared to Mount St. Helens,[37]the vastly more heavily populated areas surrounding Rainier, and the simple fact that Mt Rainier is a much bigger volcano, almost twice the size of St. Helens.[46]   

 

 

According to Geoff Clayton, a geologist with a Washington State Geology firm, RH2 Engineering, a repeat of the Osceola mudflow would destroy Enumclaw, Orting, Kent, Auburn, Puyallup, Sumner and all of Renton.[36] Such a mudflow might also reach down the Duwamish estuary and destroy parts of downtown Seattle, and cause tsunamis in Puget Sound and Lake Washington.[48] Rainier is also capable of producing pyroclastic flows and expelling lava.[48] 

 

 

 https://www.lewrockw...-seismic-alert/

 

[stocks]

Do 40,000 volcanoes matter? 

 

People are constantly discovering new volcanoes, like a 3,000m one off Indonesia that no one realized was there til 2010. It turns out the second largest volcano in the solar system is 1,000 miles east of Japan. It’s the size of the British Isles, but who knew? A few months ago a team found 91 new volcanoes under Antarctica. 

 

Not only can we not predict when volcanoes will erupt, we don’t even know how many there are

 

The scope of our ignorance on the sea floor is really something. There are 1,500 active volcanoes on land, but on the sea floor we are still discovering them all the time. at least 39,000 of them rise one kilometer off the sea floor, but there are suspicions there might be up to 3 million.

 

Does hot magma leaking into the oceans that we havent measured and don’t know about, change the currents, the temperature, and eventually our weather? If it’s a bit hotter at one end of a trench than the other, does the water flow alter? Has the big ball of magma got anything at all to do with ENSO/AMO long term trends? Your guess is better than a Global Climate Model. 

  

 

 http://joannenova.co...lcanoes-matter/

 

 

 

 

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2018 update to the U.S. Geological Survey national volcanic threat assessment  

 

1 Kīlauea HI 

2 Mount St. Helens WA 

3 Mount Rainier WA 

4 Redoubt Volcano AK

5 Mount Shasta CA 

6 Mount Hood OR 

7 Three Sisters OR 

8 Akutan Island AK 

9 Makushin Volcano AK 

10 Mount Spurr AK 

11 Lassen volcanic center CA 

12 Augustine Volcano AK 

13 Newberry Volcano OR 

14 Mount Baker WA 

15 Glacier Peak WA 

16 Mauna Loa HI 

17 Crater Lake OR 

18 Long Valley Caldera CA   https://pubs.usgs.go...sir20185140.pdf