Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Alison Anom like the Science or how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. This is Robert Lamb Signs, writer at
Speaker 1: how stuffworks dot com. And this week we're talking about
Speaker 1: death by Volcano, which which kind of takes me back
Speaker 1: because when I was a kid. Um, I think everybody
Speaker 1: had a variation on this game, but me and my
Speaker 1: sisters should played this. This game where would be like
Speaker 1: in the living room and suddenly somebody would yell out
Speaker 1: everything but the couch is is lava and we'd all
Speaker 1: have to jump on the couch because if you were
Speaker 1: stuck on the floor, then you were burned alive by lava.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was never ending pit, but most of the
Speaker 1: time I think it was law. Do you guys do that? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: occasionally it wasn't. One of our central games were more
Speaker 1: like Ghost in the Graveyard type of crew. I don't
Speaker 1: know that one. Oh really goes to the graveyard where
Speaker 1: you uh, you're outside, takes place at night and there's
Speaker 1: like somebody who is I guess the ghost and anyway,
Speaker 1: you have to make a lap around a prescribed circuit
Speaker 1: and make it back safely. Well that sounds fun. It's
Speaker 1: actually really fun. Yeah, it's a really good summer game.
Speaker 1: But I did we did play the volcano game as well. Okay, well, um,
Speaker 1: well yeah, so basically we're talking about ways since you
Speaker 1: wouldn't you're not actually going to have your living room
Speaker 1: suddenly turned into lava and burn you alive. Um, but still,
Speaker 1: volcanoes can be pretty deadly. So we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about him a little bit here today. If you
Speaker 1: have if you have any personal experience with volcanoes, yeah,
Speaker 1: not so much. Um, I've seen some. But the story
Speaker 1: that stuck out to me when we've decided on this
Speaker 1: podcast topic was that there was this story in winter
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten about this climber who fell into
Speaker 1: the crater at Mount St Allan's. Did you hear about that? No?
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, he was a he's a pretty expert climber.
Speaker 1: I think he climbed Mount Saint Helen's like to the
Speaker 1: tain of almost seventy times, and so you know, he
Speaker 1: was up at the heat, he was at the summit
Speaker 1: and here have just backpack and he took up his
Speaker 1: jacket and he was going to pose for a picture.
Speaker 1: Why not? Yeah, and he fell into the volcano. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: Cornis gave away the great way to go. I mean
Speaker 1: that's like, that's like the manliest death ever. Oh I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean I I got to debate that
Speaker 1: because you know, what if you're still living and you know,
Speaker 1: he's at the bottom wherever he fell, and he's wondering
Speaker 1: if somebody's going to get to him, or maybe he's
Speaker 1: kind of dying, you know, slowly, and he sees help
Speaker 1: because they did actually recover his body. Yeah, but I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking, like you know, it's like later, it's like
Speaker 1: they're talking about mountaineers and mountain climbers and they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was old Carl and he h he died in
Speaker 1: the old folks home up there, and uh in uh
Speaker 1: in Coffee County. You know. How about about Doug Oh
Speaker 1: he uh he sprained his leg real bad. He's still
Speaker 1: around Medda and do much. Well. How about what's his
Speaker 1: name is that? Oh? He fell into a volcano. Like
Speaker 1: that's the most awesome death ever. Like people were probably
Speaker 1: thinking when I'm premated, I want my nevs, like I
Speaker 1: want my ashes to go into a volcano. Like, that's
Speaker 1: just so epic. And this guy that's how he died
Speaker 1: and that's I mean, if you have to tick away,
Speaker 1: it's pretty fantastic. Right, So that's one way to uh,
Speaker 1: to die by way of a volcano. Um. And what
Speaker 1: are volcanoes again? In case you guys need a quick review,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to provide such review to you. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, most of the time we do think about
Speaker 1: like Mountain St. Helm's we think of or we think
Speaker 1: of a big fiery mountain, you know, like the kind
Speaker 1: of place where a dark lord might board some sort
Speaker 1: of horribly powerful ring to enslave the population of a
Speaker 1: fantasy world. But but but they can be a little
Speaker 1: more than that. Um. Generally speaking, a volcano was any
Speaker 1: place on a planet where some material from the inside
Speaker 1: of the planet makes its way through to the planet's surface. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like, you know, sort of like
Speaker 1: a pimple or something, you know, except more geologic terms, right.
Speaker 1: And the geologic terms would be lava, ash and gases
Speaker 1: right right. And the layers wouldn't be skin, muscle, et cetera.
Speaker 1: They would be core, mantle, and outer crust. So magma
Speaker 1: can rise where two plates meet. That's right, right. So
Speaker 1: you remember the crust of the Earth is about it
Speaker 1: into you know, about twelve different plates, right yeah, and right,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, Robert doing a fun job, magma
Speaker 1: can rise up for the two places. It's like the
Speaker 1: ring of fire all that stuff. You know, It's like
Speaker 1: wherever they meet. Um, you basically have this this rift
Speaker 1: where magma can rise. Um. But it can. Magma can
Speaker 1: also push up, push up under the middle of a plate.
Speaker 1: It's much less common, but this is the interplate interplate
Speaker 1: volcanic activity is casban an unusually hot mantel material forming
Speaker 1: in the lower mantle, then pushing up into the upper mantle, right,
Speaker 1: and then this uh, this wells up and uh and
Speaker 1: it basically creates a hot spot, okay, And it's not
Speaker 1: just some tiny hot spot. It's a hot spot that's
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds to maybe even a thousand kilometers wide.
Speaker 1: We're talking a huge hot spot. And due to the
Speaker 1: unusual heat of the mantel material, it melts, forming magma
Speaker 1: just under the Earth's crust, all right, and then that
Speaker 1: burst up and you have a volcano. Um. But it
Speaker 1: is a since the this is kind of interesting though,
Speaker 1: Since a continental plate move is over this spot, the
Speaker 1: magma will create a string of volcanoes which die out
Speaker 1: once the plate moves past the hot spot. So you
Speaker 1: have situations like the volcanoes in a white uh, which
Speaker 1: which were created by the spot forming this volcano. And
Speaker 1: then this is like an assembly line of of geologic strife,
Speaker 1: if you will. Yeah, I mean speaking of geologic strife,
Speaker 1: I mean the ring of fire has to take the kick.
Speaker 1: And incidentally Indonesia has the most oh yeah yeah in
Speaker 1: the US. I feel like Mount St. Helens gets a
Speaker 1: gets a lot of credit, gets a lot of volcanic credit.
Speaker 1: But really they're a hundred sixty nine active volcanoes in
Speaker 1: the US. Did you know that, Robert I did not
Speaker 1: have that figure of floating around my head. Of course,
Speaker 1: we have Haaii too, and they have they have they
Speaker 1: have some awesome volcanic activity there as well, which I
Speaker 1: got to see firsthand several years back. Did you know
Speaker 1: you've been yeah no, no, uh no, we did not
Speaker 1: did my honeymoon to Mexico. But this was like during
Speaker 1: a time when I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 1: But a friend of mine and uh J P. Collen
Speaker 1: if he's listening. Um. Moved out to Honolulu. He had
Speaker 1: an architect job out there, so he's like, Hey, everybody
Speaker 1: wants to come visit me. You got a fruit place
Speaker 1: to stay in? Why So I went out there and
Speaker 1: visited him for as long as he put up with
Speaker 1: me to see it was awesome, got to see the
Speaker 1: volcano is a beautiful place. Yeah. I was a big
Speaker 1: fan of Hawaii. Only been to twice though. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: well you can pretty much any of those islands are great,
Speaker 1: even the leaper ones so or the Leopard one, it's
Speaker 1: just the one. So death by lava. Yeah, while I
Speaker 1: was in a way, I saw a guy get hit
Speaker 1: by a bus, But I did not see anybody killed
Speaker 1: by a lava flow. Um, and that's what we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about here. Did you really see a guy hit
Speaker 1: by a bus? Well, I didn't see it happened, but
Speaker 1: I like, I went in to get a coffee and
Speaker 1: came out and I'm like, huh, what are they doing
Speaker 1: over there in front of that bus as parked in
Speaker 1: the middle of the road, and it's like some guy
Speaker 1: with a lay on had been hit by a bus. Yea. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the back to the lava. All right, so
Speaker 1: lava flows or streams of malt and rock that poor
Speaker 1: oo's out of an erupting vent, all right. Now, this
Speaker 1: can come out explosively, uh, you know, like an eruption
Speaker 1: lava fountains, like you know we're used to seeing, well,
Speaker 1: we're used to seeing images of anyway. Um, but it
Speaker 1: can also occur non explosively, where it just seeps out
Speaker 1: a slower rate. Um. The speed that at which lava
Speaker 1: moves depends on several different factors. It depends on the
Speaker 1: type of lava erupted. It's viscosity, uh, the steepness of
Speaker 1: the ground over over which it travels. You know, like
Speaker 1: you know, if you're uphill from the lava, you know,
Speaker 1: you're a lot safer than you are if you're you know,
Speaker 1: if you're looking up at it on a mountain peak. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: whether the lava flows in a broadsheet or it's confined
Speaker 1: to a channel down a lava tube, et cetera. It's
Speaker 1: kind of the difference between putting a kink in the hose.
Speaker 1: You know, water moves faster through the kink. Lava is
Speaker 1: going to move faster through a confined space fluid The
Speaker 1: salt flows can extend tens of kilometers from an erupting vent.
Speaker 1: All right, the leading edges of these flows can travel
Speaker 1: it's mass fast, six miles per hour, ten kilometers per
Speaker 1: hour on steep slopes. Um, when they're confined to a
Speaker 1: channel or something, they can they can hit like nineteen
Speaker 1: miles per hour. Okay. So I wasn't really thinking that
Speaker 1: death by lava flow was Um, it was a real
Speaker 1: certainty for a lot of us who can who can
Speaker 1: move quickly. But now that you're getting into some of
Speaker 1: these faster speeds than you know, it seems like it's
Speaker 1: posing more of an issue. Yeah, one of the one
Speaker 1: one of the things is reading them. Basically, it's still
Speaker 1: moves slow enough that most of the time the lava
Speaker 1: itself is not a risk because generally you're gonna see
Speaker 1: you know, you can Hey, oh the mountain is now
Speaker 1: spewing fire and ash into the air and it just
Speaker 1: became like pitch dark. You know, So maybe I should
Speaker 1: run away, right, But maybe you're in the middle of
Speaker 1: a very you know, serious text, you know, to your
Speaker 1: to your partner, girlfriend, boyfriend. You're not paying attention, You're texting, Hey, Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the the shortcuts for this would
Speaker 1: be like, hey, volcano just erupted, I'm gonna go get
Speaker 1: a picture of it and send you Gonna get a
Speaker 1: picture of my iPhone and send you a picture. So
Speaker 1: they run out to the law going to get a
Speaker 1: picture of it and then get burned alive. UM. That
Speaker 1: that is actually the more the more common form of
Speaker 1: people getting killed by lava or like getting out around
Speaker 1: it and sudding suddenly getting cut off from their escape
Speaker 1: by the flow of lava or UM one thing that
Speaker 1: they have to be real careful with. UM. On the
Speaker 1: Big Highland in Hawaii, UM at the Volcanic National Park,
Speaker 1: we actually when I was there, I got to actually
Speaker 1: go down and walk on the lava flows and get
Speaker 1: really close to lava where people were being really disrespectful,
Speaker 1: like like like I don't know, I thought it was
Speaker 1: disrespectful to bring marshmallows so you could get your picture
Speaker 1: made with a marshmallow over the lava flow. The marshmallows
Speaker 1: were tasty. I don't know, but it's like likezz so people,
Speaker 1: you know, you get tourists down there around lava and
Speaker 1: it's a wonder they don't lose. Just people every day
Speaker 1: because one of the things about this particular area this
Speaker 1: is that where it's flowing out towards the water and
Speaker 1: you can walk on where it's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: become rock. But a lot of times there's there's lava.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a you know, there's there's molten rock
Speaker 1: right underneath there. So if you don't know what you're doing,
Speaker 1: you could easily walk out into an area where there's
Speaker 1: not all that much rock. It's like walking out into
Speaker 1: thin ice um. You killed that way. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: generally you're you're gonna be pretty safe from the lava
Speaker 1: unless you're you're stupid or slow. So the next method
Speaker 1: is perhaps not as exciting as a lava flow. It's
Speaker 1: a vogue And no, I did not say fog, I
Speaker 1: said vogue. Yeah, so let's take you. Let's take you
Speaker 1: into the vogue um. In June of New Zealand's Mount Ruapa,
Speaker 1: who erupted violently. It had an ash cloud blotting out
Speaker 1: the sun for miles, and that ash cloud climbed almost
Speaker 1: about th fet into the atmosphere. It is a classic
Speaker 1: example of the erupting volcano fire mountain ash all the
Speaker 1: all the bells and whistles you'd expect. Yeah, we're talking
Speaker 1: seven million tons of rock and ash rejected. But good news.
Speaker 1: Nobody was killed, at least initially, and at least not
Speaker 1: within sixty miles of the volcano. In the cities of
Speaker 1: Auckland and Hamilton's, however, which I located hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: from Ruape, who something strange started to happen. There are
Speaker 1: no warnings sounded, and the skies mostly appeared normal. But um,
Speaker 1: a lot of people started showing up at hospitals, and
Speaker 1: a lot of them started dying of aggravated respiratory diseases.
Speaker 1: In fact, about sixty nine people in the two cities
Speaker 1: died from unexplained respiratory illness that July, according to public
Speaker 1: health statistics. So you could have surmised that perhaps it
Speaker 1: was undiagnosed flu or something else, But a bunch of
Speaker 1: researchers that just published a study in the journal Atmospheric
Speaker 1: Environment I think no. They think it was invisible particles
Speaker 1: of acid coated volcanic ash wafting into the cities. I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't want that stuff in your lungs. Over in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: Kilauea has been erupting since nineteen eighty three, using streams
Speaker 1: of lava in you know, relatively peaceful volcanic way. And
Speaker 1: this is where we get this is where we get
Speaker 1: the term vog, right, because it's volcanic fog or fog.
Speaker 1: Little portmanteau going on there, right. I wonder how Hawaiians
Speaker 1: feel about their vog versus you know, the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: folks with their fog. Which would you rather have Los
Speaker 1: Angeles fog smog? Oh? Right, right, right? Los Angeles have smog.
Speaker 1: San Franciscans have fog, and Hawaiians have vog. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think vog is definitely more exciting. Yeah, vog is pretty
Speaker 1: much more exciting. So, like I said, Kilauea has been
Speaker 1: erupting since but these are, you know, pretty mellow eruptions
Speaker 1: as far as eruptions go, and the gas from the
Speaker 1: eruption is rich and sulfur. Diack said. What happens is
Speaker 1: that trade winds regularly waffed it towards small communities on
Speaker 1: the southern part of the island. Along the way, some
Speaker 1: of the gas can morph into these hazy sulfate particles,
Speaker 1: and together this is what makes up Hawaii's much maligned
Speaker 1: volcanic smock a k talk and they looked at they
Speaker 1: started looking at it was affecting people. Between two thousand
Speaker 1: and four and two thousand nine, they found that the
Speaker 1: high exposure to VOG nearly doubled the risk of coming
Speaker 1: down with sore throat or asthma attack. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: also elevated bronchitis risk and adults by actually yeah, and
Speaker 1: of course children proved pretty susceptible to VOG related diseases,
Speaker 1: with risks of upper respiratory infections nearly doubling, and the
Speaker 1: likelihood of an asthma attack rose by a factor of five.
Speaker 1: And also bronchitis, as you just were talking about, the
Speaker 1: risk for bronchitis was six times higher. So vo poses
Speaker 1: a serious public health threat. Yeah, and they've started, they've
Speaker 1: gotten to where they're they're doing a lot more real
Speaker 1: time air quality monitoring. Just make sure that they're on
Speaker 1: top of it. And yeah, they're aware of this situation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's a sparsely populated area by the name of
Speaker 1: Ku that's by far the most grievously affected. Yeah, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess. We drove through Ku when we were when
Speaker 1: we were there, did you did you know that? Um who?
Speaker 1: I also boast the niest place on Earth. I seem
Speaker 1: like I have hear that. Well, that's why the they
Speaker 1: have so many rainbows and thens. You know they have
Speaker 1: the rainbow and the license plate at all. M Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. You go to vote the Volcano National Parking.
Speaker 1: You can see complete rainbows inside a crater. Like I
Speaker 1: walked under a rainbow and then look back and saw it.
Speaker 1: And at one point we're on top looking down into
Speaker 1: a crater looking down complete rainbow underneath this. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: I didn't even think it's possible. Um. So yeah, our
Speaker 1: next method that a volcano might use to a tempera
Speaker 1: kill you. Um, it's actually this is a kind of
Speaker 1: a double pyrocrasts pyroclastic flows and lahars. All right, these
Speaker 1: are pretty pretty awesome unless you're, you know, in their path.
Speaker 1: A pyroclastic flow is a cloud of hot volcanic gas, ash,
Speaker 1: and volcanic bombs that sweet down the volcano sides and
Speaker 1: other steep hills. It speeds approaching a hundred miles. That's fast.
Speaker 1: That's a heck of a lot faster in this one
Speaker 1: is really more of a far are more of a
Speaker 1: killer than than just lava flows. When a volcano erupts finolently,
Speaker 1: it's coming for large volumes of rock to just pulverize
Speaker 1: in the explosion, and they were reduced to these tiny particles,
Speaker 1: and these mixed with high temperature gases ash larger pieces
Speaker 1: of rock and it all forms together into this big
Speaker 1: hot cloud. Um. Like imagine like opening your you know,
Speaker 1: when you open your oven, check on the cookies or whatever,
Speaker 1: and that blast comes out, like you just imagine that
Speaker 1: just a huge blasts like that, except just intensely hot um.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't smell like cookies, right, does not smell
Speaker 1: like cookies though, and none of your cooking pork. I
Speaker 1: guess you know that might be accurate because of all
Speaker 1: the burning flesh. Because this is a great example. Well
Speaker 1: we're talking about ways it would kill you. Um. So
Speaker 1: like the classic example is this is when Mount Vesuvius
Speaker 1: erupted in Italy back August seventy nine. It was on
Speaker 1: the twenty five though, that the pyroclastic flow came down
Speaker 1: and hit Pompeii. So it damaged the walls of the buildings,
Speaker 1: it ripped roofs off, and it killed every in their path.
Speaker 1: They found about two thousand bodies UM in the in
Speaker 1: the later when they were excavated the site. And and
Speaker 1: this is what's really weird and grotesque is that they
Speaker 1: discovered all these fractured skulls among the Pompeian dead signs
Speaker 1: of basically the pyroclastic flow like heated them up so
Speaker 1: fast that it boiled their brains and their skull and
Speaker 1: shattered their heads like eggshells. Again a very nice image.
Speaker 1: The the other um thing to worry about is the lahar,
Speaker 1: all right, and this is this is actually caused by
Speaker 1: the pyroclastic flow. UM. When the pyroclastic flow mixes with water,
Speaker 1: then the ashtional water mix can form into a type
Speaker 1: of mud. It sets like concrete. The incident stops, so
Speaker 1: think of it as like a pyroclastic mud flow. Really,
Speaker 1: this happened with Mountain St. Helen's pyroclastic flow melted the
Speaker 1: snow and the ice and the upper slopes and it
Speaker 1: formed this All this fast flowing mud swept down the
Speaker 1: mountain uh into the river and UH and and instantly
Speaker 1: heated the river up. The mud flows UM and you
Speaker 1: ended up going through houses, picked up trucks, cars, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And they once it settled into into into place, it
Speaker 1: just sets. Yeah, it's like a moment in time of destruction,
Speaker 1: just frozen forever. Like when when Mount Vesuvius went off,
Speaker 1: the town of Herculaneum was hit by the lahar and
Speaker 1: so they've been digging around in that for for a
Speaker 1: while now. It's just you know, everything was just sealed
Speaker 1: up in it, in this concrete. So this is one
Speaker 1: of those ways to die that if you're looking to
Speaker 1: die fast stuff, I would think that this would be
Speaker 1: the way to go. Yeah. The pyroclastic flows definitely gonna
Speaker 1: hit you hard. Um, just instant death. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: next one is a volcanic winter. Do you've ever sat
Speaker 1: the campfire, and I know you guys probably have. Um,
Speaker 1: you've probably noticed the smoke and the bits of ash
Speaker 1: that are rising from the flames. These are the product
Speaker 1: of combustion. The smoke you see it sending out of
Speaker 1: an erupting volcano, on the other hand, and consists mostly
Speaker 1: of these tiny mineral particles formed by the explosive release
Speaker 1: of gases. One's volcanic ashes airborne. Three factors determine how
Speaker 1: far it will travel before falling back to the Earth.
Speaker 1: Can you guess one of the factors particles, right, The
Speaker 1: larger the particle, the closer it's going to fall to
Speaker 1: the volcano. Smaller the particle, the farther the winds are
Speaker 1: gonna be able to carry it and drift it into
Speaker 1: a town near you. Another factor that determines how far
Speaker 1: it's going to fall from the volcano is the wind
Speaker 1: speed in direction you know, I mean, what kind of
Speaker 1: winds do we have blowing. If if it's just a
Speaker 1: strong direct wind, then it's just the volcanic ash is
Speaker 1: going to blow in a relatively straight line. But for
Speaker 1: some storm type winds into the mix, and they're going
Speaker 1: to be much more effective at distributing volcanic ash in
Speaker 1: many different directions. Eruption type also determines how far away
Speaker 1: the ash is going to fall um and there are
Speaker 1: several different kinds of volcanic eruptions, and their severity plays
Speaker 1: into both of the above factors. So if you have
Speaker 1: um a particularly powerful eruption, then that's going to be
Speaker 1: able to blast particles perhaps into the upper levels of
Speaker 1: the planet's atmosphere. If you have kind of a nondescript
Speaker 1: front of the mill explosion, then you know, the volcanic
Speaker 1: ash won't be blasted quite as high into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So once in the air, the volcanic ash kind of
Speaker 1: mills around and it joins other dush particles, and UH,
Speaker 1: it forms what's called condensation nuclei, which water vapor condenses
Speaker 1: around form clouds. Some violent eruptions can even add volcanic
Speaker 1: ash cloud cover to the atmosphere to drop global temperatures
Speaker 1: by several degrees. So this is sort of like your
Speaker 1: nuclear winter. UM. So back in three the eruption of
Speaker 1: Krakatoa lowered global temperatures by two point two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: And in fact, some of these are cases that scientists
Speaker 1: point to UM when making arguments and calculations about nuclear winter.
Speaker 1: So there's one theory called the Turba catastrophe theory UM
Speaker 1: so named for Lake Tobin, Indonesia. And according to this theory, UM,
Speaker 1: modern human evolution was affected by a recent large volcanic event.
Speaker 1: That's the thought, and by recently means seventy to seventy
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago, but it's still pretty recent geologic terms. UH,
Speaker 1: and the event that they point to they think there's
Speaker 1: a category eight or what's called the Mega colossal eruption
Speaker 1: on the Volcanic Explicitty Index. Yeah, this was a six
Speaker 1: year A six year long volcanic winner followed this, and
Speaker 1: that was followed by an estimated thousand year long instant
Speaker 1: ice age. Yeah, and of course also followed by a
Speaker 1: decimation of humanity. Yeah. And by recent we mean seventy
Speaker 1: to seventy five thousand years ago. Yeah, the Toba Caldera
Speaker 1: in Indonesia underwent a category eight UM eruption on the
Speaker 1: Volcanic Explicity Index. So this is the mega the mega colossal,
Speaker 1: as so dubbed. That's the actual term. No wonder what's over?
Speaker 1: Is it like like mega awesome? After that? Um, And
Speaker 1: there's some pretty serious ramifications after this particular eruption. There
Speaker 1: was a six year long volcanic winter and pretty much
Speaker 1: in a thousand year long instant ice age that followed
Speaker 1: Mount Toba's eruption, and of course modern man uh was decimated.
Speaker 1: The population of modern man just you know, plummeted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I felt it. They think to around ten thousand adults
Speaker 1: between and this was between fifty and a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. The survivors they think would have found a
Speaker 1: refuge in isolated tropical pockets mainly in equatorial Africa. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: populations living in Europe and northern China would have been
Speaker 1: basically wiped out. Um, So just a twelve twelve degree
Speaker 1: change in temperature can have just catastrophic effects. Right, So
Speaker 1: that's volcanic winter. Why don't you talk to us about
Speaker 1: tsunamis and earthquakes? Yeah, well, earthquake earthquakes are related to
Speaker 1: volcanic activity. Can produce hazards which include ground cracks, ground deformation,
Speaker 1: and and damage demand made structures. Obviously, um. And there
Speaker 1: are two categories of volcanic earthquakes volcano tectonic earthquakes and
Speaker 1: long period earthquakes. Alright, volcanic earthquakes there are pretty pretty
Speaker 1: simple to imagine. Um Right, Volcano volcano erupts, and this
Speaker 1: creates all these stress changes in the solid rock due
Speaker 1: to either the injection or withdrawal of magma. So you
Speaker 1: have like all this liquid rock moving around. Suddenly there's uh,
Speaker 1: it's you know, areas that used to have you know,
Speaker 1: rock under them, um end up falling in other areas,
Speaker 1: blast out, um and produce all these large ground groundcracks.
Speaker 1: The earthquake can occur as rock is moving in to
Speaker 1: fill the spaces where magma is no longer present. Um
Speaker 1: and uh, and then they just happened. They're just a
Speaker 1: part of the volcanic eruption. The other category are long
Speaker 1: period earthquakes, and these are produced by the injection of
Speaker 1: magma into the surrounding rock. All right. These are are
Speaker 1: the result of pressure changes during the unsteady transport of magma.
Speaker 1: So this is the type of These are the type
Speaker 1: of seismic activities that scientists will study and sit and
Speaker 1: and and be able to say, like, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: the seismic activity is increasing around this particular of polcano
Speaker 1: eruption exactly, yeah, whereas the other type just is a
Speaker 1: part of the eruption and like a byproduct of the
Speaker 1: eruption see yeah. And then of course, um, if volcano
Speaker 1: volcanoes are producing seismic waves, this can also um produce tsunamis,
Speaker 1: especially in the case mainly in the case with like
Speaker 1: sub submarine volcanoes. UM it quickly collapsed downwards few fourth
Speaker 1: lava which heats the surrounding water quickly, which generates these
Speaker 1: massive waves which which can be catastrophic so Krakatoa. The
Speaker 1: explosion in um actually had a pretty large impact on
Speaker 1: the population due to a crazy tsunami um. The tsunami
Speaker 1: in that instance killed about thirty people. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: think out of all the ones that we've mentioned, I
Speaker 1: think the way to go is falling off of the
Speaker 1: mountain into a volcano. No, I disagree. I think that
Speaker 1: I would much rather be gone in one of those
Speaker 1: paraclastic flows instantly. You'd rather your skull explode? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would rabber. That's what I want to go, I think.
Speaker 1: All right. If you want to find out more about
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