NEW YORK (Nature) - The world needs to do more to prepare for the next huge volcanic eruption, a team of leading scientists says.
The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the T?hoku earthquake in Japan in 2011 highlighted some of the worst-case scenarios for natural disasters. But humanity has not had to deal with a cataclysmic volcanic disaster since at least 1815, when the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia killed tens of thousands of people and led to a ‘year without a summer’ in Europe and North America. Such world-altering blasts rank at 7 or more on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) scale of eruptions, which goes to 8.
"The next VEI-7 eruption could occur within our lifetimes, or it could be hundreds of years down the road,” says Chris Newhall, a volcanologist with the Mirisbiris Garden and Nature Center in Santo Domingo, Philippines. But the time to have this discussion is now, he says, so that researchers and government officials can plan and prepare before an emergency strikes.
Those events killed dozens to hundreds of people and disrupted entire regions. Pinatubo even spewed enough sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cause global cooling. But a VEI-7 eruption would be of an entirely different scale. In 1257, a VEI-7 eruption in what is now Indonesia probably cooled the planet down enough to kick off a centuries-long cold snap called the Little Ice Age, Robock says. "These things are hugely important for the planet, but the next one will take place in quite a different environment,” he adds.
Agriculture, health care, financial systems and other aspects of modern life are much more globally interconnected than they were just a few decades ago, the scientists say. Eight years ago, an eruption that ranked at just VEI 3 — Eyjafjallajِkull, in Iceland — grounded European air traffic for days because of the danger of flying through volcanic ash. The event caused an estimated US$5 billion in economic losses.
Preparing for rare but deadly eruptions is as important as dealing with smaller, more-frequent ones, says Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at Concord University in Athens, West Virginia. "Even with the lower probability of these larger events, when they do occur people will look to scientists, emergency managers, governments and other entities and expect them to be prepared,” she says. "We owe it to our communities to be researching potentially devastating eruptions, so we can guide people on what to do.”