The book was very interesting
The book was quite captivating. ate dropped by 1 degree Celsius for the next five years
The Earth is a gigantic ball of semi-molten rock with a heart of iron as hot as the surface of the Sun. Titanic amounts of heat left over from its birth and the radioactive decay of trillions of tons of radioactive elements find no escape but up. Currents of rock spanning thousands of kilometers carry this energy to the surface. Earth’s crust is the only thing in their way; it feels solid to us, but it’s only a fragile barrier, an apple skin around a flaming behemoth. True apocalypses can break through and unleash eruptions tens of times more powerful than all of our nuclear weapons combined, subjecting the climate to centuries worth of change in a single year while drowning continents in toxic ash and gases.
Super volcanoes: How big can they get and will they put an end to humanity?
Volcanoes come in many types, from towering mountains to lava domes, but they have two main sources. The first is the boundaries between tectonic plates, the pieces of the crust that cover the Earth like a giant jigsaw puzzle. There are seven major tectonic plates and dozens of smaller ones, drifting against each other at up to 15 centimeters per year. This sounds slow, but on geological time scales it is a Titanic struggle over who gets to stay on the surface. The winning plate crumples into a new mountain range while the loser is shoved underneath into an ocean of hot rock at 1,300 degrees Celsius, the asthenosphere. The temperature here is enough to melt rock into a liquid, but the insane pressures of all that mass keep it a superheated sonnet.
Tectonic plates are usually in contact with water for thousands of years and absorb some of it when they’re submerged into the hot underworld. This water triggers chemical transformations that allow tiny portions to melt into magma. Liquid magma is less dense than solid rock, so it rises to the surface in furious bubbles that accumulate in sponge-like reservoirs right under the crust. If enough magma accumulates, it becomes powerful enough to pierce through the crust, which we experience as volcanoes. This happens under the winning plate, like a revenge attack by the loser before it’s erased forever.
The second main source of volcanoes is thought to be mantle plumes. These are columns of abnormally hot rock that rise all the way from the planet’s core mantle boundary to the surface. Much less is known about them, but in a way it’s as if the Earth’s mantle has weather patterns, and mantle plumes are a little like hot air rising to form storm clouds - storms hundreds of millions of years old made of rocks circulating at a rate of a few millimeters per month. They don’t care about the motion of tectonic plates, so they can break the crust to create volcanoes in the middle of nowhere that stubbornly stay active as the crust shifts around them.
The volcanic boom meter: Scientists love to put big booms on a scale and came up with a logarithmic scale that measures the volume ejected during an eruption, the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). Simply put, it starts really small and gets very big very quickly. A VEI 2 eruption would fill 400 full Olympic swimming pools with lava; we have around 10 of these per year. At VEI 3, we already see devastating effects, like the eruption of the Semaru volcano in 2021 that destroyed thousands of homes in Indonesia. At VEI 5, we see catastrophic amounts of materials, cubic kilometers of debris equivalent to an entire lake of molten rock blasted into the air, like the 2022 Hunger Tonga Hunger Hapai eruption that sent a shockwave around the globe many times and created ocean-wide tsunamis. At a VEI of 6, an eruption can change the world. In 1883, the Indonesian island volcano Krakatoa erupted nearly continuously over the course of five months; one of those eruptions blew it apart, producing the loudest sound recorded in history, 10 trillion times louder than a rocket taking off, heard halfway around the world. 30 meter high tsunamis swept away nearby populations, and so much gas and ash were released the global temperature dropped by 1 degree Celsius for the next five years.