When Humans Nearly Vanished By Donald R. Prothero

When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano by Donald R. Prothero

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Overview:  The fascinating true story of the explosion of the Mount Toba supervolcano–the Earth's largest eruption in the past 28 million years–and its lasting impact on Earth and human evolution
Some 73,000 years ago, the huge dome of Mount Toba, in today's Sumatra, Indonesia, began to rumble. A deep vibration shook the entire island. Jets of steam and ash emanated from the summit, followed by an explosion louder than any sound heard by Homo sapiens since our species evolved on Earth. The eruption of the Toba supervolcano released the energy of a million tons of explosives; seven hundred cubic miles of magma spewed outward in an explosion forty times larger than the largest hydrogen bomb and more than a thousand times as powerful as the Krakatau eruption in 1883. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop by five to nine degrees. It took a full decade for Earth to recover to its pre-eruption temperatures.

Genre:  Non-Fiction > General