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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Man. This has got to count as the largest explosion on earth within any of our lifetimes. Anyone got a figure on how much pulverized rock would have been displaced into the atmosphere had this taken place on dry land? How long a nuclear winter we'd be in for? Or how this compares to Krakatoa? From the imagery it seems orders of magnitude larger as a single explosion than all the nuclear weapons we ever detonated combined. That shock wave goes over Tonga within the first couple frames.

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It still remains to be seen exactly how big it is. My feel is it’s slightly smaller than Mount Pinatubo in 1991 (in my lifetime) which significantly reduced global temperatures for a bit. Folks have suggested maybe 0.1 to 0.5C (0.2 to 1 degree F) temporary temperature reduction.

Probably 4-6 on the VEI scale. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_Explosivity_Index

I wonder if the debris this puts up into the atmosphere will help slow the effects of climate change

its theorized massive amounts or co2 wouod be released from yellowstone.

more realistically, this would just cool for a few years, make climate denial easier to believe, then signficantlymrebound in amcoupke of years

Probably not. Way to small for that, and even the early large eruptions only affect the atmosphere noticably for a year or two (unless it's a really really really crazy large eruption that makes Tambora look like tiny)

They won't slow it, but pause effects for a short while. The CO2 would still be there afterwards and all the while increasing, the oceans will still be acidifying, etc.

The next years after would still be as bad as predicted

Possibly, but only briefly, highly dependent on the composition. Previous large explosions had measurable cooling effects for a year or two.

It would... if it weren't underwater.

The cloud you see in the satellite image is in the atmosphere.

Since the dec 20 2021 eruption it's been an island.

But did it just blow the top off of that island to put it back underwater?

I think it has increased in size a lot. But i need to see the latest footage.

Ah I didn’t realise that. Thanks for clarifying.

That's a pretty awful hot take.

Unless this is some terribly poor trolling, in which case I've taken your bait...

Volcanic winter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

The Year Without Summer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Not sure what a hot take is. It was a a genuine question - volcanic eruptions have well documented climatic effects.

It's kind of a compliment. "Hot take" is becoming common parlance, but a hot take as defined by Blind Boy Boathouse would be a connection you notice between two seemingly unrelated things, and then dive into to arrive at a smashing observation about, where you link those things by obsessively researching the connections between them, to reveal a hot take on events that no one has quite heard of, or had the same take on before.

Check out this, maybe the great hot take of all time. https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/pooanon

It's kind of a compliment

I'm not so sure it is a compliment.

I've heard advertisements on the radio recently for financial and sports programs and web sites where they promise "No hot takes — only real information."

Yeah, I think "hot take" [1] is the analytic analogue to expressions like "by the seat of the pants," [2] meaning something like: A rushed, likely emotional, reaction to something with no or minimal follow-up research or analysis.

  1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_take
  2: https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants

Not precisely. What makes a "take" hot is its provocative or controversial nature. It's not quite flamebait -- that implies more of a deliberate attempt to sow discord -- but it's along the same lines.

Eh, that's what I was thinking too (except it's underwater). One good belch like this from Yellowstone and we'd be back in an ice age.

Aren't we still sort of in an ice age, in relative geologic terms?

Okay, yes we are, with the popular usage of ice age referring to the last period when glaciers were much more dominant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation

A definition of an ice age that I read somewhere is when there are permanent ice sheets at the poles.

What length of time are these satellite videos taken? I think it might make the explosion look larger than it really is. What we are seeing is the billowing flat top of the debris cloud.

Unlikely to be that big. More like a once per year to once per decade eruption.

If this is indeed a VEI4, Krakatoa would have been 100x bigger.

And fertilizer prices are already extremely high due to Nat gas shortages. Crop yeilds are going to be bad.

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