toba supervolcano

TOBA SUPERVOLCANO
Today we'll take a break from running around in circles, screaming like little school girls, waiting for the last factory to shut down and the price of milk to hit a million dollars a gallon. Let's talk about supervolcanos. Not necessarily Yellowstone since everyone talks about how Yellowstone is going to blow one day and we will all die. Old hat, been there and done that, yawn. If you were unfortunate enough to have wasted $10 and postage on the book Supervolcano by Savino and Jones the following will be familiar to you. Everyone else, I'll hit all the highlights here and you can save your money. It isn't that it was a total waste of money, the theory was intriguing. But you had to read a hundred and fifty pages of crap pertaining to volcano's before they got to the good stuff. And the writing was hard to slog through. If you know nothing about volcano's, it wasn't too bad. But if you didn't want to know about plate tectonics and various other science fun facts it gets a little much. I had just read two other books on volcano's and I'd already had a bit much about Hawaiian legends and what not. I was in no mood for another book to contain mostly filler.
*
Seventy five thousand years ago the supervolcano ( they spared no detail telling you how a volcano was classified as super, volume of atmospheric particles, blah, blah ) Toba blew in Sumatra Indonesia. An interesting theory that has come out out this event is the Toba Catastrophe Theory. It was believed to cause a bottleneck in human evolution. After the volcano, there was six years of volcanic winter. As you might imagine, six years of little sunlight doesn't grow a lot of vegetation. And then there followed a mini ice age of around a thousand years. In effect, all human species except Neanderthal and homio sapiens were wiped out, being in areas close to the eruption. Neanderthal was better equipped for the cold and HS was in eastern Africa which was little effected.
*
The reason it was believed humans could have been reduced to as few as five thousand population was the very narrow DNA range. Despite different appearances, all humans are virtually identical. The chimps have a wider spread of DNA. So, we are all related to those few survivors from Africa after Toba. Toba supervolcano almost wiped out man. It is believed that to survive, HS was forced through an evolutionary jump in tool use and cultural organization. Before the volcano there was hundreds of thousands of years with little improvement beyond wood tipped spears and hurled rocks. Afterwards the pace of technological advancement accelerated dramatically. Figure out how to attach a sharp stone to a spear and communicate this to your peers, or die.
*
This would also explain how Neanderthals were wiped out about thirty thousand years ago. They had survived the cold and food scarcity, but suddenly ( relatively speaking ) there was a better organized and better equipped enemy forcing them out of their territory. It was on par with machine gun equipped colonialists fighting muscle weapon armed natives. Even if the two did not fight directly, stone tipped spears would kill the areas game much better than fire hardened wood tips. To say nothing of the better communication and organization. Now, this is all very well and good. An interesting theory. It could be disproved later. The important point is the global disaster that reduced the human population. The numbers were arrived at by the possible DNA combinations and it is guessed the females of child bearing age were as low as a thousand to as high as three thousand. So it is guessed that there were around five thousand survivors. It is unknown how many there were before the eruption, but surely the populations had already spread to most of the tropical/sub-tropical areas of the region. Into Asia at least.
*
Supervolcanos are a dim threat. They are like nuclear war. Wait long enough and one is bound to happen. It could be tomorrow or it could be after your great grandchildren are old and feeble. The authors are of the opinion that the Long Valley California area is more likely to erupt than Yellowstone since the seismic activity of San Andreas would be a trigger. And that fault is overdue for a big blow out. It goes, the area around Mono Lake has a super eruption. I should be alright where I am, those of you stuck in California ( I'm being nice and won't poke fun or scream shrilly at you to get out ) will have a super earthquake which will damage all roads leading out, broken water transport systems, millions fighting over the last cups of water, then you'll get buried under a few yards of ash. And the ash is great stuff. If you breath enough in it turns to cement in your lungs. If it gets in your eyes you could go blind or have some vision damage. Little jagged water absorbing bastards ( beware the dry ash on your roof absorbing rain and crashing down on you ).
*
Something fun to think about. How about a one/two punch? Super Depression, then supervolcano.
END