This giant volcano could extinguish all humanity

How something so beautiful can be something so dangerous. The Yellowstone volcano and other supervolcans are suffering the consequences of climate change, which could cause them to erupt and, if that happened, it would be a disaster for humanity.

The inhabitants of planet Earth are facing greater existential dangers than ever before.

The Yellowstone Supervisolcan (grade 8 volcano on the Volcanic Explosive Index 8) hatched three times in the past 2.1 million years; His most recent eruption occurred 640,000 years ago. An eruption in Yellowstone would look nothing like what humanity has seen before, they explain in the New York Times.

First, more and more intense earthquakes would occur, a sign that the magma beneath Yellowstone is rushing to the surface. Then the magma would be thrown from the ground in a titanic eruption, it would discharge toxic gases from the bowels of the earth into the air. This would continue for days and Yellowstone would be buried in lava within a radius of more than 60 kilometers.

However, the damage done to Yellowstone would only be the beginning. Volcanologists believe that a supereruption of the Yellowstone volcano would bury large tracts of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah under a depth of up to 90 centimeters of toxic volcanic ash.

Depending on weather conditions, much of the Midwest would also drop a few inches of ash, which would plunge the region into darkness.

It is even likely that the dust reaches the shores, where most Americans live, as the cloud of ash spreads. Harvests would be lost; the grbadlands would be contaminated; High voltage cables and electrical transformers would be unusable, which could affect a large part of the power grid.

It would only be in the United States. Models of meteorologists have revealed that aerosols released into the air could spread globally if the eruption occurred during the summer.

In the short term, the toxic cloud blocking sunlight, average global temperatures could drop significantly and not return to normal for several years. The rain would be greatly reduced. This could be enough to trigger the end of tropical forests.

Agriculture would collapse, starting with the Midwest. While a group of researchers was writing to the European Science Foundation in a 2015 report on extreme geographical hazards, it would be "the biggest disaster since the dawn of civilization".

Supervolcans such as Yellowstone represent so-called existential risks: ultra-disasters that could cause global devastation and even the extinction of the human race. They can be natural, such as boosts or the impact of a large asteroid of the same size that helped eliminate the dinosaurs, or be caused by humans, such as a nuclear war or a designed virus.

By definition, they are worse than all the worst situations in humanity, but they are not common and it is a challenge, both psychologically and politically.

Although asteroids are usually in the headlines of Michael Bay's newspapers and films, existential risk experts generally agree that the supervolcans (there are twenty of them on the entire planet) are the threat natural that the greatest probability of extinction of the human being.

However, this does not mean that the probability is high, as the probability of a Yellowstone overturn occurring in a given year is one in 730,000.

However, extremely improbable does not mean impossible even when human nature mixes the two terms. What distinguishes existential risks from the dangers of everyday life is not the probability that they will occur, but their consequences.

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