About Me
Just like Old Faithful, you can expect me to erupt in evenly spaced cycles, which for me is every 600,000 years. It has been 640,000 years since my last eruption... I'm way overdue.
Immediately before I erupt, there will be large earthquakes in the Northwestern US. The ground will swell, with most of the area being uplifted. One earthquake will finally break the layer of rock that holds the magma in, and all the pressure the Earth can build up in 640,000 years will be unleashed in a cataclysmic event.
Magma will be flung more than 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life will be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. Volcanic ash will cover places thousands of miles away. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava will pour out of the volcano itself, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer a few inches thick. The explosion will have a force 1000-2500 times that of Mount St. Helens. It will be the loudest noise heard by man for more than 75,000 years, the time of the last super volcano eruption in Toba, Indonesia.
The long-term effects would be even more devastating. The thousands of cubic kilometres of ash that would shoot into the atmosphere could block out light from the sun, making global temperatures fall dramatically. This is called a nuclear winter. As during the Toba eruption, a large percentage of the world's plant life would be killed by the ash and severe drop in temperature. Effects world wide would cause massive food shortages. If the temperatures decline by the 21 degrees they did after the Sumatra eruption the Yellowstone super volcano eruption could truly be an extinction level event.
According to the Toba catastrophe theory, modern human evolution was affected by a recent, large volcanic event. The theory was proposed by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Knowledge of human prehistory is largely theoretical, based in fossil, archeological, and genetic evidence. Within the last three to five million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of human species. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a massive volcanic eruption changed the course of human history by severely reducing the human population.
Around 70,000–75,000 years ago the Toba caldera in Indonesia erupted with a force three thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. According to Ambrose, this led to a decrease in average global temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius for several years. This massive environmental change is believed to have created population bottlenecks in the various human species that existed at the time; this in turn accelerated differentiation of the isolated human populations, eventually leading to the end of all the other human species except for the branch that became modern humans.
Some geological evidence and computed models support the plausibility of the Toba catastrophe theory, and genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps around 1,000 individuals. Using the average rates of genetic mutation, some geneticists have estimated that this population lived at a time coinciding with the Toba event.
