Tuesday, September 27, 2011 8:25:09 AM
Farmers Flee as World's Deadliest Volcano Rumbles
When Mount Tambora in Indonesia started being rocked by a steady stream of quakes, villagers fled and were reluctant to return, despite assurances of safety. People near Tambora are jittery because of the mountain's history: the April 1815 eruption left a crater seven miles wide and half a mile deep, spewing 400 million tons of sulfuric gases.
By Nasrullah Roa
September 19, 2011 12:57PM
Bold farmers in Indonesia routinely ignore orders to evacuate the slopes of live volcanoes, but those living on Tambora took no chances when history's deadliest mountain rumbled ominously this month.
Villagers like Hasanuddin Sanusi have heard since they were young how the mountain they call home once blew apart in the largest eruption ever recorded -- an 1815 event widely forgotten outside their region -- killing 90,000 people and blackening skies on the other side of the globe.
So, the 45-year-old farmer didn't wait to hear what experts had to say when Mount Tambora started being rocked by a steady stream of quakes. He grabbed his wife and four young children, packed his belongings and raced down its quivering slopes.
"It was like a horror story, growing up," said Hasanuddin, who joined hundreds of others in refusing to return to their mountainside villages for several days despite assurances they were safe.
"A dragon sleeping inside the crater, that's what we thought. If we made him angry -- were disrespectful to nature, say -- he'd wake up spitting flames, destroying all of mankind."
The April 1815 eruption of Tambora left a crater 11 kilometers (7 miles) wide and 1 kilometer (half a mile) deep, spewing an estimated 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere and leading to "the year without summer" in the U.S. and Europe.
It was 10 times more powerful than Indonesia's much better-known Krakatoa blast of 1883 -- history's second deadliest. But it doesn't share the same international renown, because the only way news spread across the oceans at the time was by slowboat, said Tambora researcher Indyo Pratomo.
In contrast, Krakatoa's eruption occurred just as the telegraph became popular, turning it into the first truly global news event.
The reluctance of Hasanuddin and others to return to villages less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Tambora's crater sounds like simple good sense. But it runs contrary to common practice in the sprawling nation of 240 million -- home to more volcanoes than any other in the world.
Even as Merapi, Kelut and other famously active mountains shoot out towering pillars of hot ash, farmers cling to their fertile slopes, leaving only when soldiers load them into trucks at gunpoint. They return before it's safe to check on their livestock and crops.
Tambora is different.
People here are jittery because of the mountain's history -- and they're not used to feeling the earth move so violently beneath their feet. ...
[...]
© 2011 Associated Press
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=103005RYE4O9 [no comments yet]
===
Future Iceland Eruptions Could Be Deadly for Europe
Laki volcanic region, Iceland.
(R.M.C. Lopes/NASA)
By Sid Perkins, ScienceNOW
September 19, 2011 | 4:16 pm
What if one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recent history happened today? A new study suggests that a blast akin to one that devastated Iceland in the 1780s would waft noxious gases southeastward and kill tens of thousands of people in Europe. And in a modern world that is intimately connected by air traffic and international trade, economic activity across much of Europe, including the production and import of food, could plummet.
From June of 1783 until February of 1784, the Laki volcano in south-central Iceland erupted. Although the event didn’t produce large amounts of volcanic ash, it did spew an estimated 122 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the sky — a volume slightly higher than human industrial activity today produces in the course of a year, says Anja Schmidt, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
Historical records suggest that in the 2 years after the Laki eruption, approximately 10,000 Icelanders died — about one-fifth of the population — along with nearly three-quarters of the island’s livestock. Parish records in England reveal that in the summer of 1783, when the event began, death rates were between 10 percent and 20 percent above normal. The Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy reported episodes of decreased visibility, respiratory difficulties, and increased mortality associated with the eruption. According to one study, an estimated 23,000 people died from exposure to the volcanic aerosols in Britain alone. But elsewhere in Europe, it’s difficult to separate deaths triggered by the air pollution from those caused by starvation or disease, which were prominent causes of death at the time.
To assess how such an eruption might affect the densely populated Europe of today, Schmidt and her colleagues plugged a few numbers into a computer simulation. They used weather models to estimate where sulfur dioxide emissions from an 8-month-long eruption that commenced in June would end up. They also estimated the resulting increases in the concentrations of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers across, the size of aerosols that are most easily drawn into human lungs and that cause cardiopulmonary distress. Then, they used modern medical data to estimate how many people those aerosols would kill.
In the first 3 months after the hypothetical eruption began, the average aerosol concentration over Europe would increase by 120 percent, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number of days during the eruption in which aerosol concentrations exceed air-quality standards would rise to 74, when a normal period that length typically includes only 38. Not surprisingly, the air would become thickest with dangerous particles in areas downwind of the eruption, such as Iceland and northwestern Europe, where aerosol concentrations would more than triple. But aerosol concentrations in southern Europe would also increase dramatically, rising by 60 percent.
In the year after the hypothetical eruption commences, the increased air pollution swept from Iceland to Europe would cause massive amounts of heart and lung disease, killing an estimated 142,000 people. Fewer than half that number of Europeans die from seasonal flu each year.
At least four Laki-sized eruptions have occurred in Iceland in the past 1,150 years, Schmidt and her colleagues say. So the new figures are cause for concern.
The team “has done a good job of showing where volcanic aerosols would end up, and the human health response to such aerosols is well understood,” says Brian Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “This is all very solid science.”
Icelandic volcanoes shut down European air traffic for more than a week in April 2010 and for several days in May of this year. But those eruptions are tiny compared with a Laki-sized eruption, which could ground airplanes for 6 months or more, says Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Such an event would have a huge impact on crop yields and, by affecting shipping and air traffic, would also affect Europeans’ ability to import food, he notes. It could even have a dramatic effect on daily life, he says. “If there are sulfur dioxide clouds over Europe, people with respiratory problems can’t do much about it except stay indoors.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
© 2011 ScienceNOW
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/laki-volcano-iceland-eruption-model/ [with embedded links, and comments]
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When Mount Tambora in Indonesia started being rocked by a steady stream of quakes, villagers fled and were reluctant to return, despite assurances of safety. People near Tambora are jittery because of the mountain's history: the April 1815 eruption left a crater seven miles wide and half a mile deep, spewing 400 million tons of sulfuric gases.
By Nasrullah Roa
September 19, 2011 12:57PM
Bold farmers in Indonesia routinely ignore orders to evacuate the slopes of live volcanoes, but those living on Tambora took no chances when history's deadliest mountain rumbled ominously this month.
Villagers like Hasanuddin Sanusi have heard since they were young how the mountain they call home once blew apart in the largest eruption ever recorded -- an 1815 event widely forgotten outside their region -- killing 90,000 people and blackening skies on the other side of the globe.
So, the 45-year-old farmer didn't wait to hear what experts had to say when Mount Tambora started being rocked by a steady stream of quakes. He grabbed his wife and four young children, packed his belongings and raced down its quivering slopes.
"It was like a horror story, growing up," said Hasanuddin, who joined hundreds of others in refusing to return to their mountainside villages for several days despite assurances they were safe.
"A dragon sleeping inside the crater, that's what we thought. If we made him angry -- were disrespectful to nature, say -- he'd wake up spitting flames, destroying all of mankind."
The April 1815 eruption of Tambora left a crater 11 kilometers (7 miles) wide and 1 kilometer (half a mile) deep, spewing an estimated 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere and leading to "the year without summer" in the U.S. and Europe.
It was 10 times more powerful than Indonesia's much better-known Krakatoa blast of 1883 -- history's second deadliest. But it doesn't share the same international renown, because the only way news spread across the oceans at the time was by slowboat, said Tambora researcher Indyo Pratomo.
In contrast, Krakatoa's eruption occurred just as the telegraph became popular, turning it into the first truly global news event.
The reluctance of Hasanuddin and others to return to villages less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Tambora's crater sounds like simple good sense. But it runs contrary to common practice in the sprawling nation of 240 million -- home to more volcanoes than any other in the world.
Even as Merapi, Kelut and other famously active mountains shoot out towering pillars of hot ash, farmers cling to their fertile slopes, leaving only when soldiers load them into trucks at gunpoint. They return before it's safe to check on their livestock and crops.
Tambora is different.
People here are jittery because of the mountain's history -- and they're not used to feeling the earth move so violently beneath their feet. ...
[...]
© 2011 Associated Press
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=103005RYE4O9 [no comments yet]
===
Future Iceland Eruptions Could Be Deadly for Europe
Laki volcanic region, Iceland.
(R.M.C. Lopes/NASA)
By Sid Perkins, ScienceNOW
September 19, 2011 | 4:16 pm
What if one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recent history happened today? A new study suggests that a blast akin to one that devastated Iceland in the 1780s would waft noxious gases southeastward and kill tens of thousands of people in Europe. And in a modern world that is intimately connected by air traffic and international trade, economic activity across much of Europe, including the production and import of food, could plummet.
From June of 1783 until February of 1784, the Laki volcano in south-central Iceland erupted. Although the event didn’t produce large amounts of volcanic ash, it did spew an estimated 122 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the sky — a volume slightly higher than human industrial activity today produces in the course of a year, says Anja Schmidt, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
Historical records suggest that in the 2 years after the Laki eruption, approximately 10,000 Icelanders died — about one-fifth of the population — along with nearly three-quarters of the island’s livestock. Parish records in England reveal that in the summer of 1783, when the event began, death rates were between 10 percent and 20 percent above normal. The Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy reported episodes of decreased visibility, respiratory difficulties, and increased mortality associated with the eruption. According to one study, an estimated 23,000 people died from exposure to the volcanic aerosols in Britain alone. But elsewhere in Europe, it’s difficult to separate deaths triggered by the air pollution from those caused by starvation or disease, which were prominent causes of death at the time.
To assess how such an eruption might affect the densely populated Europe of today, Schmidt and her colleagues plugged a few numbers into a computer simulation. They used weather models to estimate where sulfur dioxide emissions from an 8-month-long eruption that commenced in June would end up. They also estimated the resulting increases in the concentrations of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers across, the size of aerosols that are most easily drawn into human lungs and that cause cardiopulmonary distress. Then, they used modern medical data to estimate how many people those aerosols would kill.
In the first 3 months after the hypothetical eruption began, the average aerosol concentration over Europe would increase by 120 percent, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number of days during the eruption in which aerosol concentrations exceed air-quality standards would rise to 74, when a normal period that length typically includes only 38. Not surprisingly, the air would become thickest with dangerous particles in areas downwind of the eruption, such as Iceland and northwestern Europe, where aerosol concentrations would more than triple. But aerosol concentrations in southern Europe would also increase dramatically, rising by 60 percent.
In the year after the hypothetical eruption commences, the increased air pollution swept from Iceland to Europe would cause massive amounts of heart and lung disease, killing an estimated 142,000 people. Fewer than half that number of Europeans die from seasonal flu each year.
At least four Laki-sized eruptions have occurred in Iceland in the past 1,150 years, Schmidt and her colleagues say. So the new figures are cause for concern.
The team “has done a good job of showing where volcanic aerosols would end up, and the human health response to such aerosols is well understood,” says Brian Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “This is all very solid science.”
Icelandic volcanoes shut down European air traffic for more than a week in April 2010 and for several days in May of this year. But those eruptions are tiny compared with a Laki-sized eruption, which could ground airplanes for 6 months or more, says Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Such an event would have a huge impact on crop yields and, by affecting shipping and air traffic, would also affect Europeans’ ability to import food, he notes. It could even have a dramatic effect on daily life, he says. “If there are sulfur dioxide clouds over Europe, people with respiratory problems can’t do much about it except stay indoors.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
© 2011 ScienceNOW
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/laki-volcano-iceland-eruption-model/ [with embedded links, and comments]
===
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