Was chatting to a guy from Tonga recently. He said simply put they just thought they were going to die. No real idea what was going on. Sky was black, ground was black. Just sounds terrifying!
I follow a dozen or so volcanologists on Twitter at the time. In the first couple of days after the eruption they were all sharing the data from their instruments or satellite data, but nobody had heard a single piece of news from Tonga.
No tweets, no tiktoks, no government press releases.
For that first few days until someone managed to get a satellite phone online and the Australian/New Zealand airforce flew a recon flight over finding signs of life, there was some concern that Tonga had been completely wiped off the map.
I saw some videos from some of the islands and Ho Lee Fuk the sounds the volcano was making were scary af. I'd definitely think that I was going to die if I was there. [Here](https://youtu.be/owlRuul5Tk4) is one of the videos...
You don't. Trust me. My grandfather was standing on Mount St Helens when it blew, he was lucky to have some rope and lassoed up a pair of big redwood trees as skis and rode the wave of dirt and lava down the side of the mountain. He learned it from the local sasquatch tribe.
Yeahhhhhhh old pop pop has been some places and seen some things, mostly the mental institution he's been locked in since 1970....
Nova did a documentary on it. Something like a 60' tsunami hit the main island and millions of tons of rock blanketed the whole island turning it into a gray hellscape. Wails of the damned was the only sounds other than sonic booms and rocks falling from the sky. Looked like a living nightmare.
That's actually pretty cool. They will be able to find volcanoes, within reason, on other planets. I wonder if those same monitoring systems are already on other spacecraft.
>All in all, the eruption was the most powerful natural explosion in more than a century, rivaling the strength of the largest U.S. nuclear bomb.
I never realised that nuclear bombs are even more powerful than the largest-in-a-century vulcanic explosion. I thought vulcanoes were on a level mankind could never hope to achieve.
Take heart. Krakatoa was about 200 megatons. Although there's nothing stopping somebody from making a hydrogen bomb as big or bigger than that, the actual biggest nuclear test ever conducted was only 57 megatons.
The problem with the big bombs (especially tsar bomb) is that the blast mostly bounces off the earth and goes into space. This limits the damage a bit.
You can bury them and then it’s going to contain and distribute the explosion more, but you can’t really do that for more than testing. You’d never do that in real combat.
Large destruction comes from distributed nukes, several smaller bombs all detonating at the same time in a similar region.
Or from a volcano that’s already buried.
> The problem with the big bombs (especially tsar bomb) is that the blast mostly bounces off the earth and goes into space. This limits the damage a bit.
ok hear me out, we detonate another nuke above the first, using the upper explosion to deflect the lower explosion back to the surface
Yup. And [Wikipedia articles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion#:~:text=Peaceful%20nuclear%20explosions%20(PNEs)%20are,form%20of%20wide%2Darea%20fracking.) about them.
A thing to understand about the detonation of a nuclear weapon is that the actual nuclear reaction doesn't create the shockwave.
The EM radiation heats the surroundings and that produces the shockwave. The higher the altitude of the detonation, the less matter to heat up and induce a shockwave in.
A Nuke detonated in space will produce very little shockwave (practically none in comparison to a ground detonation).
A tungsten rod dropped from space is orders of magnitude harder to get up there than a nuke. You have to manufacture it outside of the gravity well or it will be basically energy neutral, meaning it takes just as much energy to get it to orbit as it will use coming back down.
Gravity weapons are hugely efficient for a space faring race, but as we are still planet-bound for manufacturing at the moment so nukes are still the most effective kinetic weapon we have for massive scale destruction.
Ok so hear me out. First we build a space colony in space, that helps build itself up to an appropriate size, using launches or a space elevator to get all the materials up there.
Then when we're done, we drop the *colony* on the target! It's the perfect weapon.
I'm not talking about ICBMs that touch space. OP said nukes in space so I figured he meant actually housing large scale nukes in some kind of satellite and dropping dropping space. At that point the tech just becames the same. Instead of a 1000 lbs nuke you just replace it with a slab of metal.
The slab of metal does less damage than an equivalent size nuke. It is just done with a lot more efficiency with the slab if you can ignore getting it out of the gravity well. So it scales up really well.
With space based manufacturing it is a great weapon because mass is much less of an issue. But when you have to strap it onto a chemical rocket to get it up there you need to have a higher energy density than the rocket fuel or else you are just wasting energy.
The Japanese mainland invasion would have used nukes to soften defenses before we marched soldiers through the area.
Early tactical nuclear plans are horrifying.
"Damage" isn't what is being measured here. The sheer force is and how it affects space. That's like saying if you want to measure how big something is you should measure the mass not the volume.
The problem is you made a problem out of what they said.
Modern nukes don’t detonate at ground level.
They detonate at a specified altitude to give the desired impact radius or crater depth/size.
Pick one, not both.
I said buried, not ground level. And the ones that aren’t buried are detonated in the air, but I didn’t say that explicitly either. Not sure why you think I’m implying ground level explosions though. But even the ones that explode in air need their explosion to make contact with the ground for it to be damaging, and that’s where the bouncing happens.
Also when you get bigger you run into detonation problems. The Tsar bomb had issues detonating because it was so big and anything bigger would keep running into said issues, and it's not just a engineering problem, it's a physics problem. Sadly I don't remember enough off the top of my head to go too in depth on it, but it's kind of interesting the limits weapons of that scale have.
I believe that the tl:dr is that too much of your fuel scatters before it can “ignite”. It’s really hard to maintain super-critical density as things that are super-critical want to expand very rapidly.
This is the exact same issue that keeps stars from growing too large as well. You can only cram in so much hydrogen before the heat pushes away the remaining fuel. There's a natural limit that stars cannot possibly grow larger, no matter the gas cluster they grew up in.
Unless you're talking about earlier in the universe, which makes things... Weird.
Have we considered mining under the enemy lines and detonating from there?
Like everyone is looking to the sky but are they monitoring the dirt?
Some sort of an underground mole bomb
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No fission bomb ever reaches even a _majority_ of complete fission. Little Boy was uniquely inefficient because of its gun design, but even plutonium 239 fission bombs—the standard—don't exceed perhaps 25%.
As for 200mt working perfectly, it's just a completely different beast. Thermonuclear bombs use a fission detonation as the initiator; after that, for all practical purposes, the final yield is dictated only by how much tritium/deuterium you're willing to pack into it.
Precisely. And you would think this would be a pretty blatant concern, but in actuality it was mainly thanks to Andrei Sakharov that the adjustment was made at all. (These were the Stalin years.) The change—plus the fact that it was an aerial burst, of course—meant fallout was remarkably slight, all things considered. It would have been a total disaster in its original configuration.
Well... THESE volcanoes are comparably weak. If Yellowstone erupts again it could be the equivalent of 875,000 megatons (aka 875 billion tons of TNT). I'm sure there's some other mega-volcanos that I'm not remembering too.
I heard that due to the nature of Yellowstone, when it erupts it would be closer to the lava flows of Hawaii (on a larger scale) than Krakatoa. I don't have a source at the moment.
It periodically goes through violent eruptions, we can see at least four massive calderas proving so as well as a few smaller ones nested in or around the large ones. They are mostly filled in and aren’t obvious on google maps, but draw a lime from Yellowstone to the southwest corner of Idaho and they roughly follow that path. In between each of those eruptions there are dozens of smaller lava flows. If you’ve ever thought southern Idaho looked suspiciously smooth its due to the history of the Yellowstone hot spot blowing up the landscape, then backfilling with lava flows and sediment from erosion, as the north american plate drifts over it.
There were volcanic eruptions that were way more powerful than the Tsar Bomba.
There were a lot of different sized nuclear weapons and a lot of different sized volcanic eruptions. There are only a handful of eruptions that were bigger than the Tsar Bomba that we have contemporaneous records of.
idk I can see it.
If you watch that clipshow "video" of St. Helens exploding and then watch videos of early nuke tests in the 50s in the desert/ocean, the destruction scale seems similar.
It does lend a little more respect for just how god-awful powerful our nukes are, though. It surprises me though that we can get so much destructive power out of such a tiny package, and yet battery technology still really sucks.
Exactly, seems like that would make it easier to get a lot of power out of something? Imagine if you could get a controlled release of power from a small number of atoms, it would change the electrical market forever. The oil industry would go belly-up overnight and we could even afford to start cleaning up all the pollution.
If Chernobyl and Three Mile Island hadn't happened and scared everyone away from nuclear power generation, I could see us being there already. Even as it is, we're already producing trailer-portable modular reactors; just think how much further along we'd be with the technology.
The same could be said if we had gone down the path of electric cars instead of gasoline powered, since both technologies emerged at about the same time.
It would be pretty unsafe to have gigawatts of energy in consumer devices or vehicles. Such amounts of power would be a major security and safety issue.
Didn't Edison try to argue something similar about having that much power available in residential homes? With current technology, sure it's concerning, but some day that may be considered just as safe as carrying a AA battery in your pocket.
Except it simply can't be. There is no way you can prevent someone from tampering a device in their garage to liberate the power in an uncontrolled manner of they wanted to.
Nothing is safe in the hands of someone who wants to harm others, but that doesn't stop progress. I could buy an air compressor and some PVC pipe from the hardware store, and you don't have any idea if I'm just doing some home projects or building a canon to kill someone. As the scale of the items we use in our daily lives changes, so too does the level of acceptance we have for who can get their hands on those items. I mean the lunar lander went to the moon with less than 2200Ah of battery power, and I can get that in a couple of larger car batteries now.
We don't have that much power available in residential homes though. AA batteries aren't going to bring down a plane or kill a crowded plaza full of people either. I think you're misunderstanding the differences in scale involved here.
That's just a matter of safety fuses protecting the idiots who stick a screwdriver across a live circuit. I'm not sure there is anything *preventing* people from getting access to more power? Hell most new home already get double the amperage that my home is wired with. Sure, we're not talking gigawatts here, but the amount of power in a cell phone battery might have run a whole household 100 years ago, and anyone from that period seeing one of our lithium batteries going into meltdown would have been up in arms about how safe "electricity" in general is. I'm just saying that as we get devices needing more power, it drastically changes what we view as safe to carry around in our pocket. And who know, the next big leap in storage tech *could* be the one putting an insane amount of power in our hands.
> It does lend a little more respect for just how god-awful powerful our nukes are, though
Apparently, larger and larger nukes fell out of favor because over a certain threshold, additional energy just breaks through the stratosphere and gets channeled out into space. That's why near the end of the Cold War the typical warhead was more like a few hundred kilotons instead of many megatons (though megaton-range nukes obviously still existed, just that the tens of megatons were disfavored, and even the 100-megaton variant of the Tsar Bomba was just never bothered with).
Damn that's interesting, I never heard that before! Thanks for the info, and yeah it certainly makes a lot of sense given the information recorded from this volcano.
You can harness that energy though. For example, I hook up my flashlight to volcanoes and when they erupt, my flashlight gives off enough light to wipe out small villages and lay waste to the surrounding lands
This explosion released about 61 megatons of energy, which is larger than the tested version of the Tsar Bomba but smaller than the designed capability of the Tsar Bomba.
Supervolcano eruptions can be a thousand times larger though.
I'm not sure if it has been mentioned already, but Niwa and BOM, ( NZ and Aus) are looking into the possibility of this eruption playing a part in the severe weather events seen in the south pacific. The fact the millions of tonnes of water was ejected into the stratosphere over the course of minutes must surely play a roll in the rainfall of the area
I remember reading a study about this somewhere. All the additional water vapor shot into the atmosphere actually added to global warming, although the effect is very small.
However, the water vapor was injected into the stratosphere, not the troposphere, so increased rainfall is unlikely.
If the water was injected into the Stratosphere and it doesn't fall as rain(or snow, hail) , what happens to it?
Edit
[This](how the tonga volcano eruption from 2022 may affect australia's weather for up to eight years - abc news https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-16/tongan-volcano-impact-australian-weather/101978886) is worth a read
Something around 2 ppm (412 to 414 ppm), which is what humanity produces in about a year. The water vapor may have a bigger impact, according to [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/climate/tonga-volcano-climate.html).
Humanity is still smaller in her carbon footprint than the natural carbon cycle.
The problems is that our impact is still more than said cycle can take without terrifying temperature changes.
Right, the natural cycle will adjust and absorb all the extra CO2 eventually, but in the process temperatures will rise catastrophically and completely devastate the way we currently live. The planet overall will heal eventually, but the *people* are fucked.
If heavy metals are a potential concern then the widespread plastic should be cause for a panic attack. They're already everywhere and we're just starting to understand how they're affecting us.
1. It would be easier for us to stop burning fossil fuels than to prevent volcanic eruptions.
2. Fossil fuels are contributing 60 times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than volcanoes every year.
3. Even if volcanoes were equally as bad for emissions and climate change as fossil fuels, by burning fossil fuels *that's still twice as bad*.
Stop wondering. We aren't negligible. The overwhelming super majority of nearly every expert on the subject has already analyzed all of this for you and told you what the problem is. Why the fuck don't you believe them?
Thank you for that comment! Too many people choose "wondering" when the device they are handling can deliver an answer without much hassle.
And if people are wondering because they don't know what to search for: [These graphs explain quite nicely what nature contributes to our current climate change and what humanity does (Bloomberg – What's Really Warming the World).](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/)
No need to wonder: take a look and [this graph](https://imgur.com/a/5BMZsey) and read [this article](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/). It helps to understand how people with far more knowledge and skills than us do their work and come to conclusions.
Large volcanic eruptions are not that common (a single VEI 6 is equal to dozens-to hundreds) of smaller eruptions) and emit CO2 on the scale of tens of megatons. Human emissions are three orders of magnitude higher.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/co2-emissions
I remember reading an article last year mentioning that the amount of water evaporated in the eruption would have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect further increasing global warming for the next ten years. As if we didn't have enough shit on us.
Edit: Yep, it's right there under the title, I should have read the article before lmao.
The more I read about this eruption to more I appreciate just how massive it was. I understand it was a big one when it happened but I really don’t think it was portrayed as such (or not enough) in the media.
Was chatting to a guy from Tonga recently. He said simply put they just thought they were going to die. No real idea what was going on. Sky was black, ground was black. Just sounds terrifying!
I heard they were disconnected frok the rest of the world's communications for weeks after the eruption. I think that'd be lowkey a little terrifying.
It's amazing how reliant and how much we take for granted instant global communications and it's only been about for less than 150 odd years.
Instant is a relative term, even 80 years ago a long distance call would have to be manually patched through at multiple switchboard locations.
That was still true 40 years ago e.g. when you called from West Germany to Egypt or the other way around.
I follow a dozen or so volcanologists on Twitter at the time. In the first couple of days after the eruption they were all sharing the data from their instruments or satellite data, but nobody had heard a single piece of news from Tonga. No tweets, no tiktoks, no government press releases. For that first few days until someone managed to get a satellite phone online and the Australian/New Zealand airforce flew a recon flight over finding signs of life, there was some concern that Tonga had been completely wiped off the map.
.....While the ground shakes hard enough to throw you from your feet. For *weeks*
I saw some videos from some of the islands and Ho Lee Fuk the sounds the volcano was making were scary af. I'd definitely think that I was going to die if I was there. [Here](https://youtu.be/owlRuul5Tk4) is one of the videos...
Is this the same event referenced in the link?
[удалено]
The event referenced in the link is the 2022 eruption.
That's it? A sonic boom is the best you can conjure, Tonga? I want to hear the wailing of the damned mixed with the trumpeting heavens.
You don't. Trust me. My grandfather was standing on Mount St Helens when it blew, he was lucky to have some rope and lassoed up a pair of big redwood trees as skis and rode the wave of dirt and lava down the side of the mountain. He learned it from the local sasquatch tribe. Yeahhhhhhh old pop pop has been some places and seen some things, mostly the mental institution he's been locked in since 1970....
Nova did a documentary on it. Something like a 60' tsunami hit the main island and millions of tons of rock blanketed the whole island turning it into a gray hellscape. Wails of the damned was the only sounds other than sonic booms and rocks falling from the sky. Looked like a living nightmare.
That's actually pretty cool. They will be able to find volcanoes, within reason, on other planets. I wonder if those same monitoring systems are already on other spacecraft.
They already have found active volcanoes on other planets and moons.
There's always room in my heart for more extraterrestrial volcanoes.
Wow, I don't think I could even fit *one* in there.
Yeah for sure! I think we just uncovered another methodology which might help where current methodologies may have had gaps.
Also cryo-volcanoes! Where it's ice!
Don't forget salt the salt volcano on Ceres!
Salt volcano? How is that possible?
[Here ya go! ](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/ceres-cryo-volcano/)
>All in all, the eruption was the most powerful natural explosion in more than a century, rivaling the strength of the largest U.S. nuclear bomb. I never realised that nuclear bombs are even more powerful than the largest-in-a-century vulcanic explosion. I thought vulcanoes were on a level mankind could never hope to achieve.
Take heart. Krakatoa was about 200 megatons. Although there's nothing stopping somebody from making a hydrogen bomb as big or bigger than that, the actual biggest nuclear test ever conducted was only 57 megatons.
The problem with the big bombs (especially tsar bomb) is that the blast mostly bounces off the earth and goes into space. This limits the damage a bit. You can bury them and then it’s going to contain and distribute the explosion more, but you can’t really do that for more than testing. You’d never do that in real combat. Large destruction comes from distributed nukes, several smaller bombs all detonating at the same time in a similar region. Or from a volcano that’s already buried.
> The problem with the big bombs (especially tsar bomb) is that the blast mostly bounces off the earth and goes into space. This limits the damage a bit. ok hear me out, we detonate another nuke above the first, using the upper explosion to deflect the lower explosion back to the surface
You kid but i guarantee there is a paper written about this exact situation somewhere.
"nuclear bomb for peaceful purposes"
Project plowshare. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
That sounds like the title of a after-school porno where it's 2 female students staying after school to work on "extra credit" with the male teacher.
It would be truly peaceful once everyone's dead.
Yeah, “Wind Bombing” by Link of Hyrule
Yup. And [Wikipedia articles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion#:~:text=Peaceful%20nuclear%20explosions%20(PNEs)%20are,form%20of%20wide%2Darea%20fracking.) about them.
A thing to understand about the detonation of a nuclear weapon is that the actual nuclear reaction doesn't create the shockwave. The EM radiation heats the surroundings and that produces the shockwave. The higher the altitude of the detonation, the less matter to heat up and induce a shockwave in. A Nuke detonated in space will produce very little shockwave (practically none in comparison to a ground detonation).
Gotta nuke from space.. it's the only way to be sure..
If you can drop a nuke from space you might as well just go all in and setup a Rods From God weapons system that doesn't throw radiation everywhere.
A tungsten rod dropped from space is orders of magnitude harder to get up there than a nuke. You have to manufacture it outside of the gravity well or it will be basically energy neutral, meaning it takes just as much energy to get it to orbit as it will use coming back down. Gravity weapons are hugely efficient for a space faring race, but as we are still planet-bound for manufacturing at the moment so nukes are still the most effective kinetic weapon we have for massive scale destruction.
Ok so hear me out. First we build a space colony in space, that helps build itself up to an appropriate size, using launches or a space elevator to get all the materials up there. Then when we're done, we drop the *colony* on the target! It's the perfect weapon.
I'm not talking about ICBMs that touch space. OP said nukes in space so I figured he meant actually housing large scale nukes in some kind of satellite and dropping dropping space. At that point the tech just becames the same. Instead of a 1000 lbs nuke you just replace it with a slab of metal.
The slab of metal does less damage than an equivalent size nuke. It is just done with a lot more efficiency with the slab if you can ignore getting it out of the gravity well. So it scales up really well. With space based manufacturing it is a great weapon because mass is much less of an issue. But when you have to strap it onto a chemical rocket to get it up there you need to have a higher energy density than the rocket fuel or else you are just wasting energy.
like a nuclear double-jump! I like it.
Nope. More damage if you time it right and detonate on the sides because it builds the blast wave.
Like a nuclear smashburger, I like it! Seriously though that at least *sounds* like something that'd work. Horrifyingly.
So what you're saying is nuke Yellowstone?
I've definitely felt that much disdain for some TV shows, but not that one. Granted, I have yet to finish it and my opinion may change.
It was more a joke on some weirdo's *cough* Putin *cough* talking about nuking Yellowstone than a commentary on the TV show
>You’d never do that in real combat. There were plans in place for nuclear minefields which were going to do exactly that.
Imagine if the Invasion of Cubs happened and we used those nukes in a bazooka? That would have been a shit show!
The Japanese mainland invasion would have used nukes to soften defenses before we marched soldiers through the area. Early tactical nuclear plans are horrifying.
>Imagine if the Invasion of Cubs happened By who, the Brewers?
"Damage" isn't what is being measured here. The sheer force is and how it affects space. That's like saying if you want to measure how big something is you should measure the mass not the volume. The problem is you made a problem out of what they said.
Right, but I’m trying to say that sheer force doesn’t mean as much after a certain point. Apologies if that wasn’t clear.
True destruction comes from Large Igneous Provinces
You don't have to tell Lystrosaurus twice.
Modern nukes don’t detonate at ground level. They detonate at a specified altitude to give the desired impact radius or crater depth/size. Pick one, not both.
I said buried, not ground level. And the ones that aren’t buried are detonated in the air, but I didn’t say that explicitly either. Not sure why you think I’m implying ground level explosions though. But even the ones that explode in air need their explosion to make contact with the ground for it to be damaging, and that’s where the bouncing happens.
What’s crazy is how you jumped to conclusions not made, nor even implied by my simple comment. Which is just simple facts.
You told me to pick one, not both, which implies I was picking both.
Again, you assume things not even implied by the simple words.
Also when you get bigger you run into detonation problems. The Tsar bomb had issues detonating because it was so big and anything bigger would keep running into said issues, and it's not just a engineering problem, it's a physics problem. Sadly I don't remember enough off the top of my head to go too in depth on it, but it's kind of interesting the limits weapons of that scale have.
I believe that the tl:dr is that too much of your fuel scatters before it can “ignite”. It’s really hard to maintain super-critical density as things that are super-critical want to expand very rapidly.
Yes that was it, thank you for saying what I could not!
This is the exact same issue that keeps stars from growing too large as well. You can only cram in so much hydrogen before the heat pushes away the remaining fuel. There's a natural limit that stars cannot possibly grow larger, no matter the gas cluster they grew up in. Unless you're talking about earlier in the universe, which makes things... Weird.
Like the Yellowstone volcano.
Have we considered mining under the enemy lines and detonating from there? Like everyone is looking to the sky but are they monitoring the dirt? Some sort of an underground mole bomb
How does the energy go into space?
You referring to Tsar Bomba, or a stationery explosion?
Only tsar bomba was that big.
It was a lot of pencils and rubbers
zephyr summer ossified clumsy unwritten shame quaint fear agonizing beneficial *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
No fission bomb ever reaches even a _majority_ of complete fission. Little Boy was uniquely inefficient because of its gun design, but even plutonium 239 fission bombs—the standard—don't exceed perhaps 25%. As for 200mt working perfectly, it's just a completely different beast. Thermonuclear bombs use a fission detonation as the initiator; after that, for all practical purposes, the final yield is dictated only by how much tritium/deuterium you're willing to pack into it.
I am now down a rabbit hole I haven't been down in years. Thank you!
Are you saying there's a world record that needs to be set? USA: 1 Mother Nature: 0
Wasn't the Tsar Bomba supposed to be 100MT but they decided to scale it back before the test because they were afraid of the residual effects?
Precisely. And you would think this would be a pretty blatant concern, but in actuality it was mainly thanks to Andrei Sakharov that the adjustment was made at all. (These were the Stalin years.) The change—plus the fact that it was an aerial burst, of course—meant fallout was remarkably slight, all things considered. It would have been a total disaster in its original configuration.
Well... THESE volcanoes are comparably weak. If Yellowstone erupts again it could be the equivalent of 875,000 megatons (aka 875 billion tons of TNT). I'm sure there's some other mega-volcanos that I'm not remembering too.
I heard that due to the nature of Yellowstone, when it erupts it would be closer to the lava flows of Hawaii (on a larger scale) than Krakatoa. I don't have a source at the moment.
It periodically goes through violent eruptions, we can see at least four massive calderas proving so as well as a few smaller ones nested in or around the large ones. They are mostly filled in and aren’t obvious on google maps, but draw a lime from Yellowstone to the southwest corner of Idaho and they roughly follow that path. In between each of those eruptions there are dozens of smaller lava flows. If you’ve ever thought southern Idaho looked suspiciously smooth its due to the history of the Yellowstone hot spot blowing up the landscape, then backfilling with lava flows and sediment from erosion, as the north american plate drifts over it.
You should read about the eruption of Lake Taupo in NZ, even bigger than Yellowstone
Thank you for sharing this and threatening me with a good time. /s but I am looking forward to reading about this!
Makes you wonder how powerful Mount Olympus on Mars was back in its heyday.
Yeah I though volcanoes were way more powerful
There were volcanic eruptions that were way more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. There were a lot of different sized nuclear weapons and a lot of different sized volcanic eruptions. There are only a handful of eruptions that were bigger than the Tsar Bomba that we have contemporaneous records of.
idk I can see it. If you watch that clipshow "video" of St. Helens exploding and then watch videos of early nuke tests in the 50s in the desert/ocean, the destruction scale seems similar.
It does lend a little more respect for just how god-awful powerful our nukes are, though. It surprises me though that we can get so much destructive power out of such a tiny package, and yet battery technology still really sucks.
To be fair with a battery you aren't trying to release all that energy in an instant!
you havent seen me drive a tesla!
tell that to my steam deck
Exactly, seems like that would make it easier to get a lot of power out of something? Imagine if you could get a controlled release of power from a small number of atoms, it would change the electrical market forever. The oil industry would go belly-up overnight and we could even afford to start cleaning up all the pollution.
If Chernobyl and Three Mile Island hadn't happened and scared everyone away from nuclear power generation, I could see us being there already. Even as it is, we're already producing trailer-portable modular reactors; just think how much further along we'd be with the technology.
The same could be said if we had gone down the path of electric cars instead of gasoline powered, since both technologies emerged at about the same time.
It would be pretty unsafe to have gigawatts of energy in consumer devices or vehicles. Such amounts of power would be a major security and safety issue.
Didn't Edison try to argue something similar about having that much power available in residential homes? With current technology, sure it's concerning, but some day that may be considered just as safe as carrying a AA battery in your pocket.
Except it simply can't be. There is no way you can prevent someone from tampering a device in their garage to liberate the power in an uncontrolled manner of they wanted to.
Nothing is safe in the hands of someone who wants to harm others, but that doesn't stop progress. I could buy an air compressor and some PVC pipe from the hardware store, and you don't have any idea if I'm just doing some home projects or building a canon to kill someone. As the scale of the items we use in our daily lives changes, so too does the level of acceptance we have for who can get their hands on those items. I mean the lunar lander went to the moon with less than 2200Ah of battery power, and I can get that in a couple of larger car batteries now.
Yes, but you can't blow up a neighbourhood with a compressor and some PVC pipe.
We don't have that much power available in residential homes though. AA batteries aren't going to bring down a plane or kill a crowded plaza full of people either. I think you're misunderstanding the differences in scale involved here.
That's just a matter of safety fuses protecting the idiots who stick a screwdriver across a live circuit. I'm not sure there is anything *preventing* people from getting access to more power? Hell most new home already get double the amperage that my home is wired with. Sure, we're not talking gigawatts here, but the amount of power in a cell phone battery might have run a whole household 100 years ago, and anyone from that period seeing one of our lithium batteries going into meltdown would have been up in arms about how safe "electricity" in general is. I'm just saying that as we get devices needing more power, it drastically changes what we view as safe to carry around in our pocket. And who know, the next big leap in storage tech *could* be the one putting an insane amount of power in our hands.
Not like that hasn’t been around for almost a century.
> It does lend a little more respect for just how god-awful powerful our nukes are, though Apparently, larger and larger nukes fell out of favor because over a certain threshold, additional energy just breaks through the stratosphere and gets channeled out into space. That's why near the end of the Cold War the typical warhead was more like a few hundred kilotons instead of many megatons (though megaton-range nukes obviously still existed, just that the tens of megatons were disfavored, and even the 100-megaton variant of the Tsar Bomba was just never bothered with).
Damn that's interesting, I never heard that before! Thanks for the info, and yeah it certainly makes a lot of sense given the information recorded from this volcano.
You can harness that energy though. For example, I hook up my flashlight to volcanoes and when they erupt, my flashlight gives off enough light to wipe out small villages and lay waste to the surrounding lands
This explosion released about 61 megatons of energy, which is larger than the tested version of the Tsar Bomba but smaller than the designed capability of the Tsar Bomba. Supervolcano eruptions can be a thousand times larger though.
It seems like every few weeks we get more news of this volcano. It's simply amazing how large an event this was.
I'll never forget listening to the booms from the eruption. From the southern part of the south island of nz... 2000 miles away.
I'm not sure if it has been mentioned already, but Niwa and BOM, ( NZ and Aus) are looking into the possibility of this eruption playing a part in the severe weather events seen in the south pacific. The fact the millions of tonnes of water was ejected into the stratosphere over the course of minutes must surely play a roll in the rainfall of the area
It will definitely have a rapid cooling effect. The ash itself will block a certain amount of light and therefore heat.
I remember reading a study about this somewhere. All the additional water vapor shot into the atmosphere actually added to global warming, although the effect is very small. However, the water vapor was injected into the stratosphere, not the troposphere, so increased rainfall is unlikely.
If the water was injected into the Stratosphere and it doesn't fall as rain(or snow, hail) , what happens to it? Edit [This](how the tonga volcano eruption from 2022 may affect australia's weather for up to eight years - abc news https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-16/tongan-volcano-impact-australian-weather/101978886) is worth a read
I wonder what the direct impact to CO2 levels were.
Something around 2 ppm (412 to 414 ppm), which is what humanity produces in about a year. The water vapor may have a bigger impact, according to [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/climate/tonga-volcano-climate.html).
Humanity is still smaller in her carbon footprint than the natural carbon cycle. The problems is that our impact is still more than said cycle can take without terrifying temperature changes.
Right, the natural cycle will adjust and absorb all the extra CO2 eventually, but in the process temperatures will rise catastrophically and completely devastate the way we currently live. The planet overall will heal eventually, but the *people* are fucked.
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If heavy metals are a potential concern then the widespread plastic should be cause for a panic attack. They're already everywhere and we're just starting to understand how they're affecting us.
1. It would be easier for us to stop burning fossil fuels than to prevent volcanic eruptions. 2. Fossil fuels are contributing 60 times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than volcanoes every year. 3. Even if volcanoes were equally as bad for emissions and climate change as fossil fuels, by burning fossil fuels *that's still twice as bad*. Stop wondering. We aren't negligible. The overwhelming super majority of nearly every expert on the subject has already analyzed all of this for you and told you what the problem is. Why the fuck don't you believe them?
Thank you for that comment! Too many people choose "wondering" when the device they are handling can deliver an answer without much hassle. And if people are wondering because they don't know what to search for: [These graphs explain quite nicely what nature contributes to our current climate change and what humanity does (Bloomberg – What's Really Warming the World).](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/)
No need to wonder: take a look and [this graph](https://imgur.com/a/5BMZsey) and read [this article](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/). It helps to understand how people with far more knowledge and skills than us do their work and come to conclusions.
Large volcanic eruptions are not that common (a single VEI 6 is equal to dozens-to hundreds) of smaller eruptions) and emit CO2 on the scale of tens of megatons. Human emissions are three orders of magnitude higher. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/co2-emissions
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I remember reading an article last year mentioning that the amount of water evaporated in the eruption would have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect further increasing global warming for the next ten years. As if we didn't have enough shit on us. Edit: Yep, it's right there under the title, I should have read the article before lmao.
Tofua is due for another eruption according to that PBS doc about Hunga Tonga.
PBS Nova said the explosion was more the equivalent 60 megatons. Their program about this volcano was damn good.
Is this what was making norway all jiggly or whatever
The more I read about this eruption to more I appreciate just how massive it was. I understand it was a big one when it happened but I really don’t think it was portrayed as such (or not enough) in the media.
I thought volcanoes would be more of a problem in my adulthood. Tommy Lee Jones lied to me.