Question: Is it known which was the biggest eruption on Earth?How did it affect the environment that time?

Asked by hatsuneirina to Alice, Andi, Bas, Daniel, Rhian on 17 Mar 2015.

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  1. Photo: Rhian MearaRhian Meara
    answered on 17 Mar 2015:

    The biggest eruption known to have happened is the Toba eruption which happened about 77,000 years ago! It was enourmous!! there is ash from the eruption almost all the way around the world. The eruption changed the climate of the whole earth and killed almost all life… only 3,000 – 10,000 humans survived the eruption across the world… so we must all be decended from those humans that survived! 🙂

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  2. Photo: Alice MarzocchiAlice Marzocchi
    answered on 17 Mar 2015:

    Hi!
    I think the biggest eruption on Earth was the one of the Siberian Trap supervolcano, which erupted a very long time ago, at the end of the Permian era (250 million years ago).
    In any case this was the most catastrophic one ever, because about 90 percent of all life on the planet was destroyed. And it actually took several millions of years to the Earth to recover. It must have been a very dark place back then…

    Another really big eruption was the one of another supervolcano, the Yellowstone, and that was also quite a long time ago (around 2 million years ago). In that case a huge amount of volcanic ash was produced and this must have impacted the atmosphere (and the ozone layer) a lot.

    It looks like me and Rhian were answering at the same time and I love to see how we think on very different time scales 😀
    I always think about the very far away past!
    So yes, especially for my first example there were definitely no humans around! Luckily, I guess…

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Comments

  1. Photo: hatsuneirinahatsuneirina
    commented on 17 Mar 2015:

    I appreciate the both answers.Thank you 🙂

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