จำนวนการดูหน้าเว็บรวม

วันพุธที่ 6 มิถุนายน พ.ศ. 2561

THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT TOBA ALMOST ENDED HUMANITY

Day 33 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and the latest official count of homes overwhelmed by flowing lava is up to 130, including Mayor Harry Kim's vacation place.  This would make the past 24 hours the worst economic loss in Hawaii from volcanoes, ever.  As shown in the below USGS summary, 5000 acres have now been covered by this event, passing the damage of the 1955 Kapoho eruption.


Day 2 of the Volcan de Fuego Eruption, and the death count is up to 75, with another 192 missing.  Here are some details.


I might add that the Big Island could face another natural disaster in a week to ten days, for Tropical Storm Aletta has formed in the East Pacific and is headed for Hawaii:


However, Pacific waters are still not warm enough to support this storm, so the odds are minuscule that this potential hurricane will get close to Hawaii.  Future storms this year will be called Bud, Carlotta, Daniel, Emilia, Gilma, Hector, Ileana, John and hopefully not any more.

Since the Year 1500 a quarter million people have been killed by volcano eruptions.  That total, over half a millennium, would not reach the top ten of single incident natural disasters.  China has a monopoly with the top three:
  • 1931 flood (up to 4 million)
  • 1887 Yellow River flood (up to 2 million)
  • 1556 Shaanxi earthquake (830,000, moment magnitude of 8.0)
Indonesia has the top two death tolls from volcanoes:
  • 1815 Mount Tambora (71,000+)
  • 1883 Krakatau (36,000+)

However, and this is quite controversial, Mount Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia, where the 2004 earthquake occurred, near what is now Lake Toba, killing a quarter million people, mostly from the resultant tsunami) is said to have erupted 73,500 years ago, with 70 times more magma than the  Tambora Eruption (note the location of Toba, Tambora and Krakatau--frequently, and erroneously, referred to as Krakatoa--on the above map), the most severe in the past 25 million years.  Six inches of ash were deposited throughout all of Southeast Asia.  Climate cooling of 5-15 C ( 9-15 F for up to two years), leading to a decade of winter, reducing our human population to 3,000 - 10,000.  Related genetic evidence suggests 1,000 - 10,000 breeding pairs remained.

Our species, thus, only survived in Africa, where mitochondrial DNA estimates that migration from that continent began 60,000 to 70,000 years ago.  Note that the scale below is in million years, so that the Toba event occurred roughly around the period that Homo sapiens began to evolve:






















-
เขียนโดย ที่

ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:

แสดงความคิดเห็น

สมัครสมาชิก: ส่งความคิดเห็น (Atom)