Towering above a remote Pacific island, the volcano is some 8,000 miles from Britain — but nowhere is safe from the devastation it will unleash on the world.
For days, explosions like distant cannon fire have terrified locals and now it’s about to blow with a force 50,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
As the molten rock finally punches through the surface, giant flames shoot up into the sky with a blast that can be heard 1,200 miles away and sends a red-hot river of lava flowing down the volcano’s slopes. In addition to choking off noxious gases this also incinerates many tens, thousands of islanders or kills their homes.
The giant ash cloud that has been spewed into our atmosphere causes extreme weather conditions in other parts of the world, including Western Europe. Famine kills millions, and planes become grounded.
Scientists believe there is a one in six chance of a super eruption someone on Earth before the end of this century, pictured a depiction of the Mount Vesuvius eruption taking from the 2014 movie Pompeii
Pompeii, which was devastated by the Vesuvius explosion in 79AD, was destroyed within hours.
When they fled the port city, their victims found themselves covered in ash.
These include those in Britain, where many crematoriums become overwhelmed by bodies piling up at mass morgues. Protests against rising food prices are turned to violence.
This isn’t a Hollywood movie disaster story. It’s a scenario that was based on past eruptions, and has one in six chance of occurring this century according to an article in Nature.
The grim prediction comes from Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcanologist from the University of Birmingham, and Dr Lara Mani, from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
It’s based on deposits of sulphur — a main component of volcanic gases — found in ancient ice deposits in Antarctica and Greenland. These indicate how frequently major eruptions have happened in the past and so how likely they are in the future, and challenge what they call the ‘broad misconception’ that the risks of a major eruption are low.
Terrifyingly, those odds — equivalent to the roll of a dice — relate to an eruption rating of at least seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), a measure which is equivalent to the Richter scale for earthquakes and runs from one for the smallest to eight for the most powerful.
For context, Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in Pompeii in 79AD claimed 16,000 lives in the city. It was rated 5 on the VEI.
You can see the potential consequences of such a devastating event by looking at two historic VEI-level seven eruptions. They both occurred in Indonesia and had severe ramifications throughout the world (including Britain).
Mount Pelée — Martinique, 1902 was the worst volcanic event of the 20th century. When the volcano erupted at 4,500 feet, snakes and insects were disturbed, so they rushed down the mountain to attack anyone in their way. In total, 30,000 perished
Lombok’s first recorded instance was 1257. The only eyewitness accounts, contained in a document written on palm leaves, describe how ‘Mount Samalas collapsed, followed by large flows of debris accompanied by the noise coming from boulders.
‘All houses were destroyed and swept away, floating on the sea, and many people died.’
An estimated 36 mile-long cloud made up of ash, pumice, and other rock, is said to have circled the earth in a matter of weeks. It filled the stratosphere, blocking out the sunlight, with sulphuric acids particles.
At his abbey in St Albans, Hertfordshire, English monk Matthew Paris recorded that the year 1258 began with ‘such unendurable cold, that it bound up the face of the earth, sorely afflicted the poor, suspended all cultivation and killed the young of the cattle’. That was only the beginning.
That summer, he wrote that ‘owing to the scarcity of wheat, a very large number of poor people died; and dead bodies were found in all directions, swollen and livid, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties, on dunghills, and in the muddy streets’.
It is believed that this volcano triggered the Little Ice Age. This chill, which lasted for centuries and caused phenomena like the freezing over the River Thames, began in the early 1900s.
Krakatoa — Sunda Strait, 1883: This small, uninhabited island east of Sumatra and west of Java saw an explosion which sent five cubic miles of earth 50 miles into the air. The explosion destroyed the island and caused tsunamis of 120ft height and hurricanes. Over 50 countries heard the eruption and at least 36.400 people died as a result.
That ended in the mid-19th century, shortly after the world had suffered another VEI level seven eruption — that of Mount Tambora in April 1815. It was only 100 miles away from Samalas and killed around 100,000 people within its immediate aftermath, before creating havoc further afield.
In 1816, Europe experienced what became known as ‘the year without a summer’.
Global temperatures plummeted by about one degree during that winter. There were wild rumors that the sun had died.
Mary Shelley was a British author who spent days indoors due to frequent storms and continuous rain. She had been vacationing in a similarly gloomy Switzerland when she dreamed up Frankenstein’s story.
That begins with polar explorer Robert Walton, the man to whom the monster’s creator Victor Frankenstein tells his story, yearning for the North Pole, ‘a region of beauty and delight where… the sun is forever visible’.
In England, the decimation of the wheat harvest and subsequent rise in prices saw riots break out in various parts of East Anglia, where protesters armed themselves with wooden clubs studded with spikes and carried flags demanding ‘Bread or Blood’. Protesters destroyed the threshing machine, torched the grain sheds, and threatened the death penalty.
It was a combination of cold and damp and people moving around as they beg for food that caused one of the most devastating typhus outbreaks in human history. 65,000 people died as it spread from Ireland to Britain.
These lessons aren’t enough to make you scream. Today, there could be more consequences with 8x the global population and 40x the trade. ‘Our complex global networks could make us even more vulnerable to the shocks of a major eruption,’ says Mike Cassidy.
Just how vulnerable became clear with the VEI level four eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano in the spring of 2010. The closure of international airspace caused by the resulting ash cloud cost the world economy an estimated £4 billion.
A six-level VEI subsea volcano erupted in the South Pacific Ocean near Tongan Archipelago. Producing a vertical plume extending 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, and volcanic ash falling over hundreds of miles, it caused damage equivalent to almost one-fifth of Tonga’s gross domestic product.
Underwater cables were severed, cutting off Tonga’s communications with the outside world, and the blast created an atmospheric shockwave that travelled at close to the speed of sound, creating tsunamis that reached the coasts of South America and Japan, thousands of miles away. Fortunately the eruption, which killed three people, lasted only 11 hours, but the Nature article describes it as ‘the volcanic equivalent of a “near miss” asteroid whizzing by the Earth’.
‘Had it gone on for longer… it would have had repercussions for supply chains, climate and food resources worldwide,’ it added.
Other research has suggested that likely hotspots for future VEI level seven eruptions include the Taupo Volcano in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island and Iran’s Mount Damavand, which lies just 30 miles from the densely populated capital Tehran. It may not only be known volcanoes we should worry about.
Greenland’s sulphur deposit and Antarctica’s sulphur deposits suggest that there has been at least 97 explosions with large magnitudes within the last 60 years. Yet, only a small number of these have been identified and may still be available to blast again.
‘Volcanoes can lie dormant for a long time, but still be capable of sudden and extraordinary destruction,’ explains Dr Cassidy.
Lara Mani and he are calling for research to reduce the effects of volcanoes. The short-lived warming agent hydrofluorocarbon could be used in counteracting the sun-blocking sulphuric acids particles in the atmosphere. They also might be removed using substances spray from high-altitude aircraft.
Nevado del Ruiz — Colombia, 1985 After a small first eruption which was ignored, the volcano blew again, melting a glacier which released 43 million tonnes of water mixed with ash, rocks and trees. Within half an hour, Armero had been submerged. It was home to more than 29,000 people.
Alternativ options include manipulating magma under active volcanoes for less explosive pockets.
This research is essential. Dr Mani compares the effects of massive volcanic events to the impacts of an asteroid of 1km diameter hitting Earth.
‘They would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision,’ she says.
She adds that while Nasa pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into asteroid threats annually, ‘there is a severe lack of global financing and coordination for volcano preparedness’.
‘This urgently needs to change. We are completely underestimating the risk to our societies that volcanoes pose and the current underinvestment in responding to this risk is simply reckless.’
It’s a dire warning — and one we ignore at our peril.