Here is a disturbing story for you…

Rich

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=145267

ENVR - Sumatran Super Volcano Ready To Blow Could End Life on Earth

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Could Super-Eruption End Civilization?

Some scientists believe that the Toba eruption, which caused global climatic disturbances, may have even caused a genetic “bottleneck” in human genetic diversity following a dramatic decline in the global population. If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to erupt in a similar fashion the ash that it would spew out would cover three-quarters of North America in a layer deep enough to kill crops and other plants.

Few people would survive in the zone immediately around the eruption as the volcanic gases and choking sulphur dioxide would burn the lungs of anyone caught in the open air. Those sheltering in their homes would not be safe because layers of heavy volcanic ash would eventually cause their roofs to collapse.

The supervolcanic eruption of the Toba volcano in Sumatra ejected about 300 times more volcanic ash than the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 - which caused a “year without a summer” in 1816 and prompted Lord Byron to write his poem “Darkness”.

A report on supervolcanoes compiled by the Geological Society states: “It is easy to imagine that an eruption on the scale of Toba would have devastating global effects. A layer of ash estimated at over 5 inches thick fell over the entire Indian subcontinent with similar amounts over much of south-east Asia. Most recently, the Toba ash has been found in the South China Sea, implying that several inches also covered southern China.

“Just one-third of an inch of ash is enough to devastate agricultural activity … Many millions of lives throughout most of Asia would be threatened if Toba erupted today,” it says.

Orr said the University of Utah and the UK Met Office had helped to compile a map of the fallout that might result from the eruption of ash from the Yellowstone supervolcano.

“From this, we created an ash projection map which took into account wind direction and time of year of our eruption. Every time we refined our storyline we would send it back to them for approval so they were closely involved,” she said.

“But it is the emission of sulphuric acid into the atmosphere that would create the greatest long-term problems for countries further afield, as the biggest volcanic eruptions of the past 200 years have shown,” warns Professor Steve Sparks of Bristol University, a consultant to the program. “They caused major climatic anomalies in the two or three years after the eruption by creating a cloud of sulphuric acid droplets in the upper atmosphere. These droplets reflect and absorb sunlight, and absorb heat from the Earth - warming the upper atmosphere and cooling the lower atmosphere,” Professor Sparks said.

“The global climate system is disturbed, resulting in pronounced, anomalous warming and cooling of different parts of the Earth at different times.”

If enough sulphuric acid were released - and Yellowstone could emit 2 trillion tons - then what could take place would be the equivalent of a “nuclear winter”, when the dust and debris from the fallout of a nuclear war block out sunlight for several years causing worldwide famines.

The Max Planck Institute in Hamburg helped the makers of Supervolcano to model the spread of sulphuric acid around the world.

“We’re talking about catastrophic amounts of sulphuric acid circling the world within just a few weeks. It forms a veil that blocks out sunlight, causing temperatures to plummet,” Orr said.

“The Met Office models predicted a drop of about 50 F degrees across Europe and 68 F in the southern hemisphere, the monsoon would stop, crops would fail and somewhere in the region of one billion people would die through climate change and starvation,” she added.

Supervolcano depicts the Yellowstone caldera erupting over several days, progressively “unzipping” the build-up of underground pressure in a series of eruptions around the rim of the crater rather than releasing everything all at once in one giant eruption.

Orr said: “The first thing we had to get right was to understand the dynamics of a super-volcanic eruption - how it would unfold, what it would look like. It’s very difficult to know for sure because nobody has ever seen a super-eruption happen but we consulted with a lot of scientists and the consensus of opinion was that a super-eruption is not just one big massive eruption but a series of separate eruptions around the rim of the caldera.

“Only towards the end of the eruption process do they all converge into one. Once this scenario had been signed off by the scientists, we got a storyboard artist to visualise it so everyone was clear on what we had to create in the film.”

Nobody knows whether a supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone is imminent. The program-makers say at the start of their film that they have not made fiction, and they have made a true story - it’s just that it hasn’t happened yet.

The Yellowstone supervolcano is known to have erupted three times in the past 2.1 million years at a regularity of about 600,000 years. The last one happened 640,000 years ago.

Yet vulcanologists such as Professor Sparks point out that this does not mean that another eruption is overdue. “It doesn’t work like that. We just don’t know when the next eruption will occur,” he said.

Neither do scientists know how much warning the world will be given. “Frankly we don’t really know, that’s the real problem,” Professor Sparks said.

But what we do know is that we are ill-prepared for such an event if it should take place in the near future. “You can’t stop it. One could have to start to think about the strategies for dealing with consequences and to be frank, that’s not been thought through at all,” Professor Sparks said.

One thing remains certain in this uncertain world of low-risk, high-impact disasters. If the Yellowstone supervolcano should ever blow, our world will never be the same again, and might not even survive in its present form.