Nuclear Winter?

Why a supervolcanic eruption could trigger "nuclear winter."

18:32 20 January 2016

Predicting which volcano is going to erupt is something that scientists describe as “easier said than done.”

 

David Rothery, a professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University, said: “We know which volcanoes are overdue,” 

 

"Vesuvius has an eruption, on average, every 50 years. The last was in 1944, so it’s overdue - technically - but it wouldn't be unusual to wait a century to see an eruption,”

 

Researchers at the University of Manchester compiled a list of volcanoes "which have a realistic chance of erupting in the next 100 years and which risk causing the deaths of 1,000,000 people or more.”

 

However, they admitted that identifying which volcanoes can erupt in 2016 is something that cannot be done.

 

There are only a handful of supervolcanoes around the globe and Dr Rothery said that should one erupt, the results could be catastrophic. He said that it can lead to a “nuclear winter” in which ash from the eruption could blot out the sun and suspend photosynthesis in parts of the world.

 

"A Toba-sized eruption in a similar location would, besides killing tens of millions of people throughout Southeast Asia, destroy at least one or two seasons of crops needed to feed some 2 billion people in one of the world’s most densely populated regions,” he said.

 

"This alone would be a catastrophe unprecedented in history, and it could be compounded by much-reduced harvests around the world."

 

“That’s the worst case scenario - and it’s not clear what fraction of supervolcanoes are capable of doing that.

 

"It won’t cause a mass extinction of species but certainly plants could die and ecologies could collapse,” he said.