.. here's an event shows just how precarious life on our planet is for all of us..
..in the lands of the 'Ring of Fire'.. the line of frequent earthquakes & volcanic eruptions that circles virtually the entire Pacific rim.
..in this instance today, hundreds will have been killed..
..and just this past September, more than 1400 people died when a powerful earthquake struck just off the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi, setting off a tsunami that engulfed the coastal city of Palu.
..one of the worst events occurred on 26 December 2004, when a series of huge waves triggered by a powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean killed almost a quarter million people in 14 countries, mostly in Indonesia.
Anak Krakatau (Child of Krakatau) is a new island that emerged in 1927 from the Krakatoa volcano.
.. in August 1883, Krakatoa underwent one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in recorded history..
..massive tsunamis with waves up to 135ft killed more than 36,000 people.. thousands more were killed by hot ash
..the eruptions were equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT - about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945
.. these eruptions were heard thousands of kilometers away.. world temperatures dropped by more than 1C the following year.. the volcanic island virtually disappeared
.. justifiably rated as one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions of modern times, Krakatoa was not the largest eruption in the recent history of Indonesia....
.. the eruption of Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815 was immense.... it was the only eruption in modern history to rate a VEI of 7. .. even in the U.S., 1816 was known as the "year without a summer."
.. global temperatures were an average 5 degrees cooler because of this eruption..
.. crops failed worldwide.. in Europe & the U.S. an unexpected outcome was the invention of the bicycle, as horses became too expensive to feed.
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..we pay little attention to these 'natural-time-bombs' ticking all over our 'active' planet..
..ask the average person, might they know what is a 'caldera'..
..you'll probably get some unexpected & very interesting answers..
.. unbeknownst to most, Yellowstone National Park sits on a subterranean chamber of molten rock and gasses so vast that it is arguably one of the largest active super-volcanoes (calderas) in the world...
.. a magma chamber not far below the surface fuels all the volcanic attractions that Yellowstone is famous for...
.. the last major eruption at Yellowstone, some 640,000 years ago, ejected 8,000 times the ash & lava of the Mount St. Helens eruption on May 18th, 1980 .
.. it is alive and well today.. tens of thousands of years past its next approximate eruption date.. (geologic time is a bitch for humans)
.. so it could blow tomorrow.. or a 1,000 or 100,000 years from now..
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