In recent days, news of an undersea volcanic eruption in the South Pacific island nation of Tonga has spread around the world
According to the estimates of relevant experts, the Tonga volcanic eruption is the strongest eruption on earth in nearly 30 years, releasing energy equivalent to the explosion of 1,000 atomic bombs in Hiroshima.
Coincidentally, according to South Korean media reports, Japan's Mt. Fuji has also begun to stir after the eruption of the tonga submarine volcano, and the number of fire vents on Mt. Fuji has increased by nearly 6 times, and Mt. Fuji, which has been dormant for nearly 300 years, seems to have entered the pre-eruption storage stage.
However, in the view of geologists, whether it is the submarine volcanic eruption in Tonga or the future eruption of Mt. Fuji in Japan, at best, it can only affect the natural environment of the region, although it may bring a short period of cooling to the global climate, but this level of volcanic eruption is not enough to destroy human civilization, at most like Pompeii, Italy, let Tokyo, Japan buried by volcanic ash for hundreds of years.
In the history of the earth, there has only been one volcanic eruption that has really posed a threat to all mankind, and that is the supervolcano eruption of Lake Toba in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, with a intensity of 8.
In the classification of volcanic eruptions by the scientific community, the energy released by a magnitude 8 volcanic eruption is equivalent to a magnitude 10.3 earthquake, while the submarine volcanic eruption in Tonga is only 5 magnitude, which is only equivalent to an 8.7-magnitude earthquake.
Let's go back 74,000 years
At that time, after the 8-magnitude volcanic eruption in Lake Toba, Indonesia, the volcanic ash covered half the earth through atmospheric circulation in just three days, and the aerosol particles containing sulfur dioxide and volcanic ash began to gradually spread out in the stratosphere to weaken solar radiation, so that for a long time after the volcanic eruption, the earth could not receive enough solar heat.
The immediate consequence of this is the arrival of a global Xiaoice, in the case of volcanic ash sulfides causing acid rain to envelop the world, plants and animals in the ecosystem began to go extinct in large quantities, and the ecosystem near Lake Toba was close to collapse due to toxic gases erupted from the volcano.
At that time, the global average temperature dropped by 10 degrees Celsius, the embryonic human civilization began to find enough food, and in the case of the severe blow to the entire earth's ecological circle, the human civilization at the top of the food chain was the most miserable, only 3,000 people were left, and the only 3,000 humans left on the earth at that time, which were distributed in different regions, became the ancestors of all later human beings.
To this day, there are still genetic fragments of 3,000 people in the human genome after the eruption of Theoba Volcano, which is why the genetic similarity of various human groups today, although their appearance and skin color are different, are more than 99.9%.
According to the research of modern biologists, this supervolcano eruption that occurred 74,000 years ago can be called the darkest moment of the entire human civilization, because if the number of human beings who survived at that time was smaller, such as only 1,000 or 500 people, then human civilization would never be able to reproduce hundreds of thousands of people on these 500 people, because genes were simply not enough to be fully combined and continued within 500 people.
In addition to the number of people who survived, the ratio of men to women was also a big problem, according to biologists, at that time, women accounted for a large proportion of the remaining more than 3,000 people on the earth, but if it was a higher proportion of men at that time, human civilization would be completely finished.
Overall
Volcanic eruptions, as the most significant impact on the Earth's climate of all natural disasters, have always been a great threat to human civilization, so which volcano is the most threatening now?
The answer is The Yellowstone volcano in the United States
If this supervolcano hidden in Yellowstone National Park begins to erupt, the entire United States and even the entire North America will be overturned, and the volcanic ash from the eruption will envelop the entire United States and gradually spread to Eurasia as the atmospheric circulation gradually spreads, eventually forming a Xiaoice similar to the eruption of Lake Toba 74,000 years ago.
Thankfully, the current population and technological level of human civilization are far more than 74,000 years ago, so even if the Yellowstone Volcano did erupt, the resulting Xiaoice period would not be as good as it was then, leaving only more than 3,000 people on the earth.