What would happen if all the volcanoes of the world erupted at the same time? Although very unlikely to happen, this is a theoretical experiment - and theoretical experiments are the foundation of the scientific process.
Jessica Ball, a geophysicist and volcanologist from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), pondered much about a volcano-induced end of the world. Recently, she told Flash Forward about how she predicted the occurrence of a volcanic catastrophe, noting that some volcanoes would be far more dangerous than others, and that the world's climate would change, perhaps irreparably. However, it is possible that things would be even more severe than the vulcanologist suggests.
Initially, there would be mass panic as they watched all the volcanoes explode. Volcanoes known for their slower, calmer eruptions - such as the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii or the Erta Ale in Ethiopia - would only pour hot, liquid lava on themselves, which would be inconvenient for those who live nearby. However, the lava moves so slowly upon leaving these volcanoes that people could flee and save themselves.
However, higher stratovolcanoes, such as Mount Fuji, and eruptions in cracks under water or ice, such as those in Iceland, would cause more problems. Both would produce so many ashes that the sky would be covered and the world would become darker, plunging it into a freezing volcanic winter, initially. Without sunlight, agriculture would collapse, as would the larger food chain.
People would die of starvation, and anyone who breathed that gray would suffer slow, agonizing breathing stops. Those hiding in buildings would be vulnerable to infrastructural collapses, as most of the ashes are five times denser than water, and most structures are not designed to handle tons of ash falling on them.
In Fujis terms of the world, lava and lava bombs capable of crushing a person would be the least of our concerns. A large and catastrophic pyroclastic stream would descend volcanoes at thunderous speeds and would almost instantly kill anyone in their path. Those who were trying to escape on an airplane would find that the engines were melting, as the ashes would enter it and begin to melt again, returning to the lava.
As Ball points out, the worst part would come from the consequences that such large volcanic eruptions would bring to the climate. As mentioned earlier, the world would be engulfed by a volcanic winter, and the concept of seasons would disappear, as was already observed after the famous eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. The year after the disaster became known in the northern hemisphere as "the year Without summer ".
Volcanoes have rid the world of the clutches of the ice age in the past. In this case, "ice age" refers to one of the probable five periods in Earth's history where the world was extremely frigid and where glaciers prevailed. But this does not refer to a glacial maximum, where the oscillation of the axis of the Earth causes it to move farther and farther away from the sun, enough for the glaciers to invade even the lower latitudes.
During periods of continental breakup, when supercontinents such as Pangea or Rodina have separated, volcanism comes into play and huge amounts of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. This warms the world fast, and the ice sheet retracts toward the poles.
Even with global cooling initially, when large amounts of sulfur capable of reflecting sunlight are released into the sky, the release of carbon dioxide would overcome this long-term effect - something that was immediately observed following the mass extinction of the permian age To 252 million years, when more than 90% of life on Earth died. A similar trend was seen when the great extinction occurred in the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs die.
If all the volcanoes of the world erupted all at once, that would certainly be what would happen in the long run, but much more severely than terrestrial life has ever experienced before. Not only that, but huge, unstable reservoirs of methane - a very potent but short-lived greenhouse gas - would also be released from their frozen prisons on the Arctic soil.
This would accelerate global warming, thereby causing more methane to escape from the ice into the atmosphere, creating a deadly cycle. Warmer oceans also hold less carbon dioxide, so large amounts of it would also escape into the sky.
An unstable, post-apocalyptic world.
All in all, our planet would be undergoing an inexorable cycle of global warming. If he warmed to the point where plants and trees could not survive, a large store of carbon dioxide would die with them. And if the heat reached a point where all the water evaporated, the carbon dioxide deposit in the ocean would also be over.
In the end, we might end up looking like Venus, whose atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide, and where water is completely absent from the surface. As you can imagine this scenario is far from ideal, but the conviction may not end there.
About 3.5 billion years ago, Mars experienced such a long volcanic eruption that it ripped off its own mantle, the partially melted layer beneath the crust, and deposited it on its surface. This massive mass unbalance caused the temperature of the red planet to "plummet" by 20 ° C, causing a change in the parameters of its orbit. That would be as if Paris were suddenly in the place of the North Pole.
If all of Earth's volcanoes erupted, and most of the magma was expelled on the surface of places closest to volcanoes, such as Hawaii and Yellowstone, the Earth would probably also incline.
As a conclusion to this obscure and destructive tale, we would be left with a burnt, desolate, stifling, unstable, lifeless planet.