Welcome to possibly the next ice age!

Has anyone been able to find estimations about how much ejecta this eruption has created, so far? My sense is that it's still kind of small in size, just in a horribly inconvenient location for Europe. (Been trying to find the estimated size online, but haven't found it yet.)

I found a nice little list here of the sizes of various volcanic eruptions based on the amount of ejecta they created. For instance, Mt. St. Helens was pretty small, only creating about 1 cubic KM of ejecta. Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 was 10 times as big, but still a piker compared to the really huge volcanoes that actually did affect global weather patterns. The 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption was 10 times bigger than Pinatubo and probably the largest such event in recorded human history.

My point is, that unless this event is actually really, really big (seen nothing to say that yet), or keeps spewing for a long while and eventually becomes that big, it's not likely to cause a significant change in the weather. It's really messing things up in Europe for air travel, for certain, but I don't see anywhere any evidence yet that it's enough to put us into a new Ice Age.

[edit on 4/19/2010 by LifeInDeath]

reply to post by mclinking


Hi mclinking.

Nice site. I took a quick peak. Most of the info. I'm familiar with.
Yet your brown dwarf... Isn't really convincing me .



Although with some events going on right now it gets a little bit more credit.
Like a bunch of big shout scientists that are spending prescious telescope time hunting planet X. I posted it in a thread a few months ago.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by LifeInDeath


It's not going to effect the weather because it's effecting airplane travel.

The ash is not high enough for it to effect the weather.
If it was high enough you would see the ash cloud floating to America.

The minute the jetstream gets a hold of it. Poof ! Of it goes to the west instead of the east.

reply to post by unityemissions


Well the ash will only effect crops if it would cover it completely or effect the weather.

Volcanic ash makes the land actualy extremely furtile do to all the minerals and stuff.

1816 - The year without a Summer.

it doesn't take a Mini-Ice Age to cause major problems. The year without a Summer caused thousands of deaths and only lasted a couple of years....

From the Wiki article:

Most consider the climate anomaly to have been caused by a combination of an historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years.

Wikipedia - The Year without a Summer

Stock up!

reply to post by Anamnesis


If I remember correct. somewhere in the 18th century an iceland volcano caused a similar event. But I think there was no eruption but a flood basalt.
( A giant plume of magma rises up in a column to flow from the Earth in a wide spread area.) Ironicly it was the gas released what made it so deadly.
Similar flood basalts were also responsible for the siberian traps.
This event is held resposible to have caused the biggest mass extinction in Earths history. Where there was so much gas released in the atmosphere that the air was toxic and the oceans died out because they became to acidic. 95 % of all land and sea organisms were wiped out.

The event did lasted a few million years or so.

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


That makes sense it would make it more fertile, but I was referring to the possibility of a mini-ice age. Guess if that did happen, it would most likely still be some months before it really started...but then again, who really knows?

reply to post by unityemissions


Well... If you take in consideration that a hailstorm can destroy a crops in no time.

But serieusly. If there are not enough sunny days crops can fail. To much rain crops can fail.

I can assure you that a day or more tempratures are below zero degrees celcius they will fail.
Famine will cause a lot of death.
Ironicly this will now probably be at places where the crops didn't fail but are taken to the west to feed the hungry there.

edit.
From seeding a field to harvesting it also takes months.

[edit on -05:001658 April363 by Sinter Klaas]

We have everything in place now for a year without a summer or a mini-ice age.

The Sun has been almost totally absent of sunspots since early 2008. The solar disk at this moment is totally blank of spots. This results in a cooling effect on Earth.

The increase in volcanic activity combined with the absence of sunspots is the perfect setup for rapid cooling.

I think we are nearing a tipping point that could bring a very rapid change to much a much colder climate. Previously huge changes have occurred over a period of only 2 or 3 years.

reply to post by expat2368


These previous changes. What is the time frame of there occurence ?

Originally posted by Xtrozero

It can even be argued that with the last time this happened in the early 1800s we were more capable to handle it than we are today.

That's very true and many people forget this. Much of the entire way we live now depends on the climate and electricity. Without either, we sink.

Our entire infrastructure and global relations depend on our ability to travel and fly freely. We do not have the necessary railways in place to replace or even supplement a lack of air travel for any lengthy period of time.

Not to mention that much of the "wisdom of old" has been lost. There are many, many people in this world that would not know what to do if they went to their local Mickey D's and couldn't get a burger. And since the majority of food today is shipped around the world, and most countries only produce a handful of crops, without being able to ship it in a timely manner.....there could easily be some very hungry people with no clue what to do.

500 years is no walk in the park. And if you think life as you now know it will simply continue uninterrupted during a "mini-ice age", you should realize that it's not the same as just a "long winter".

Ocean life will be affected, plant and animal life will be dramatically changed, weather patterns change around the world....

Basically it screws everything up!

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
reply to post by Anamnesis

 

If I remember correct. somewhere in the 18th century an iceland volcano caused a similar event. But I think there was no eruption but a flood basalt.
( A giant plume of magma rises up in a column to flow from the Earth in a wide spread area.) Ironicly it was the gas released what made it so deadly.
Similar flood basalts were also responsible for the siberian traps.
This event is held resposible to have caused the biggest mass extinction in Earths history. Where there was so much gas released in the atmosphere that the air was toxic and the oceans died out because they became to acidic. 95 % of all land and sea organisms were wiped out.

The event did lasted a few million years or so.

Yessir... I'm familiar w/the theory about the Siberian Steppes but the last I heard was that the Steppe eruption alone could not account for the rapid extinction events that occured after. I just watched a documentary that disscused the possibilty that a meteor impact caused that extinction event, although no crater large enough has been found dating back to the Permian-Triassic (P-TR) periods.

From Wikipedia:

Reported evidence for an impact event from the P–Tr boundary level includes rare grains of shocked quartz in Australia and Antarctica;[69][70] fullerenes trapping extraterrestrial noble gases;[71] meteorite fragments in Antarctica;[72] and grains rich in iron, nickel and silicon, which may have been created by an impact.[73] However, the veracity of most of these claims has been challenged.[74][75][76][77] The shocked quartz from Graphite Peak in Antarctica has recently been reexamined by optical and transmission electron microscopy. It was concluded that the observed features were not due to shock, but rather to plastic deformation, consistent with formation in a tectonic environment such as volcanism.[78]

Full Wiki Article:

The theory suggests that the meteor was so large that the crater actually back filled with molten lava from the Mantle!! Computer models have confirmed the possibilty that a large enough meteor could indeed "puncture" the Crust... That a big meteor!

reply to post by lpowell0627


You say ocean life will be effected.

That is one of the reasons that convinces me man made global warming is a hoax.

Because how ironcly it sounds 500 years are not even close to the time what will be needed to have a serieus effect on ocean tempratures. And even then we're talking about a few degrees.

Sea life would flourish by the way. Most ocean life can be found in the colder parts of the see or where cold see currents enter warmer waters.

I believe it's because colder water hold way more nutricious stuff.

reply to post by Anamnesis


Yes I'm aware.

I understood the Siberian steps, a gamma ray burst, meteor impact, our place in the universe ( more radiation ) and our elliptical orbit which was at it's biggest distance from the sun all could play a part.

It's save to say that an unfortunate following of catastrophic events were all combined responsible.

I like the traps story best

[edit on -05:001658 April363 by Sinter Klaas]

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
It's not going to effect the weather because it's effecting airplane travel.

Obviously there's no cause and effect there, that wasn't what I said. My point was that I think a lot of people think this is a far worse eruption than it maybe really is because of the effect it's having on air travel. My entire post was about the volume of ejecta that the volcano is spewing out. I was asking if anyone had found estimates on how much that is? The amount of ash that goes into the air is a big factor in all of this. Mt. St. Helens was negligible. Tambora in 1815 was 100 times as big, and though in the Southern Hemisphere seems to have affected the climate world-wide.

The ash is not high enough for it to effect the weather.
If it was high enough you would see the ash cloud floating to America.

Actually, it has floated to America, according to this Reuters article.

The minute the jetstream gets a hold of it. Poof ! Of it goes to the west instead of the east.

The Jet Stream moves West-to-East, and pushes everything eastward. If it gets into the Jet Stream, it will quickly circle the Earth in that direction, it won't go backwards on the Stream. The problem with the Jet Stream is that planes like to hitch a ride on it when going from west to east, so when ash gets up in there, it means the planes can't use that to save lots on flight time and fuel.

[edit on 4/19/2010 by LifeInDeath]

reply to post by LifeInDeath

I was asking if anyone had found estimates on how much that is?

Yes, I'll answer your question. The current estimate is that the current eruption has a VEI index of between 2 and 3, a relatively small index compared to most eruptions.As a comparison, the Tambora eruption of 1815, considered the largest in modern times, had a VEI of 7. Krakatoa had a VEI of 6.

Originally posted by Anamnesis
1816 - The year without a Summer.

it doesn't take a Mini-Ice Age to cause major problems. The year without a Summer caused thousands of deaths and only lasted a couple of years....

From the Wiki article:

Most consider the climate anomaly to have been caused by a combination of an historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years.

Wikipedia - The Year without a Summer

Stock up!

Yes, we do not need a brown dwarf to change things extremely quick...

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
reply to post by LifeInDeath

 

I was asking if anyone had found estimates on how much that is?

Yes, I'll answer your question. The current estimate is that the current eruption has a VEI index of between 2 and 3, a relatively small index compared to most eruptions.As a comparison, the Tambora eruption of 1815, considered the largest in modern times, had a VEI of 7. Krakatoa had a VEI of 6.

One thing interesting with this one though is it has the capabilities to pump out stuff for a very long time, and that could be what makes it a somewhat nasty one.

[edit on 19-4-2010 by Xtrozero]

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
Yes, I'll answer your question. The current estimate is that the current eruption has a VEI index of between 2 and 3, a relatively small index compared to most eruptions.As a comparison, the Tambora eruption of 1815, considered the largest in modern times, had a VEI of 7. Krakatoa had a VEI of 6.

Thank you, very helpful. That's about 1/10th the size of Mt. St. Helens and 1/100th the size of Pinatubo according to the scale I found at wikepedia.

It seems to be kind of like the Richter Scale. Each grade up is an order of magnitude bigger than the last.

Originally posted by lpowell0627


That's very true and many people forget this. Much of the entire way we live now depends on the climate and electricity. Without either, we sink.

Just think of the supply chain getting disrupted that we see all over empty shelves at the supermarkets and water/electric/gas gets interrupted for even a few short weeks.

To be honest I think if a family doesn't keep at least 60 days of supplies/water at all times they could be in deep deep trouble, and those in big cities are basically goners.

[edit on 19-4-2010 by Xtrozero]