We've been having some very interesting weather lately. Earler this year, we were rocked with several fairly large earthquakes. We all remember the Haiti earthquake and the outpouring of charity that came with it, shortly after we had the quake in Chili, and it seemed that every week or so there was another massive earthquake.
Sunday we had another major event. Mount Sinabung erupted after being largely dormant for over 400 years. The volcano, which last stirred almost a hundred years ago in 1912, had not erupted since the year 1600. No one expected the eruption, and since the volcano had been classified as dormant, no one even thought to look for any signs of an eruption, even if they did, it had been so long since there was any activity, that volcanologists probably wouldn't have been able to identify the unique signatures that each volcano has indicating it was time to blow it's top.
Now, you may be wondering what a volcano on the other side of the world would have to do with you. Well volcanoes, unlike earthquakes become global events. The ash and gases spewed out spread out all over the world. You may remember the ash cloud that grounded a large percentage of the flights across Europe? Same idea. Ash clouds spread out and can wreak havoc with sensitive mechanical equipment. It gets worse though! The gases and ash that are floating around in the atmosphere mess with sunlight. The high floating ash can block the sunlight from reaching us and cooling our planet. This happened in the nineteenth century and created what was widely known as the Year Without a Summer.
So, we have a cold summer; with the threat of Global Warming looming, maybe we could stand to cool off some. Unfortunately it's not that easy. Those gases released by the eruptions are the very same gases that contribute to the Greenhouse Effect. So once we start to warm back up with the solar rays bearing back down, we go too far in the other direction and start heating out of control. It's a very unhappy scenario.
The most interesting part about the recent eruption? It's just north west of Lake Toba. Never heard of Lake Toba? That's not really a problem, not a lot of people have. But it has probably had a dramatic effect on who you are. Turns out 70,000 years ago Lake Toba was a volcano that exploded so hard it killed most of the life on earth. The Toba Catastrophe left us with only a handful of people left on Earth, those people were our ancestors, the survivors of the largest volcanic event in the last 25 million years.
While this likely isn't a precursor to the next major global cataclysm, it's interesting to think how close we could be to extinction. Just 70,000 years ago we could have been wiped out entirely, we only barely survived and pulled through to become who we are now. There are dozens of places around the world that could suddenly crack and wipe us all out.
It makes you really consider how fragile our stay here really is.
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