carl spacklers hat said:
Not really. Mt Tamboor and Krakatoa blew in the 1800s and earth somehow survived. Too much fear mongering going on. IF Yellowstone blows in the worst case scenarios, it will devastate large parts of the western US and Canada but life will go on. Maybe just not around that area.
Tambora and Karakatoa wouldnt be anywhere near the magnitude of a supervolcano like Yellowstone though.
Tambora is the most powerful eruption we have a witnessed record of, and it was enough to essentially produce a year without a summer because of the amount of material it erupted into the atmosphere - which is estimated to be about 150 km3, which is a whole hell of a lot. But it doesn't even make honorable mention to some of the historical volcanic eruptions the earth has produced.
Supervolcano eruptions are estimated to be orders of magnitude more powerful. The Toba eruption about 75k years ago is estimated to have thrown about 2,800-4,000 km3 of material into the atmosphere - nearly 20x-25x what Tambora did. It kicked off about a 1500 year long cooling period and a lot of information leads to hypothesis that humans and a whole lot of other mammal species had significant declines in populations around this time frame.
While ending life wouldn't be the result most likely, it would absolutely be the definition of a cataclysmic event and would lead to a very significant reduction in the amount of life on the planet for a long, long time.
