HR: 15:20h
AN: U22B-05    [PDF]
TI: Volcanic Catastrophes
AU: * Eichelberger, J C
EM: eich@gi.alaska.edu
AF: Alaska Volcano Observatory, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775 United States
AB: The big news from 20th century geophysics may not be plate tectonics but rather the surprise return of catastrophism, following its apparent 19th century defeat to uniformitarianism. Divine miracles and plagues had yielded to the logic of integrating observations of everyday change over time. Yet the brilliant interpretation of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary iridium anomaly introduced an empirically based catastrophism. Undoubtedly, decades of contemplating our own nuclear self-destruction played a role in this. Concepts of nuclear winter, volcanic winter, and meteor impact winter are closely allied. And once the veil of threat of all-out nuclear exchange began to lift, we could begin to imagine slower routes to destruction as "global change". As a way to end our world, fire is a good one. Three-dimensional magma chambers do not have as severe a magnitude limitation as essentially two-dimensional faults. Thus, while we have experienced earthquakes that are as big as they get, we have not experienced volcanic eruptions nearly as great as those preserved in the geologic record. The range extends to events almost three orders of magnitude greater than any eruptions of the 20th century. Such a calamity now would at the very least bring society to a temporary halt globally, and cause death and destruction on a continental scale. At maximum, there is the possibility of hindering photosynthesis and threatening life more generally. It has even been speculated that the relative genetic homogeneity of humankind derives from an evolutionary "bottleneck" from near-extinction in a volcanic cataclysm. This is somewhat more palatable to contemplate than a return to a form of Original Sin, in which we arrived at homogeneity by a sort of "ethnic cleansing". Lacking a written record of truly great eruptions, our sense of human impact must necessarily be aided by archeological and anthropological investigations. For example, there is much to be learned about the influence of volcanism on humankind in the North Pacific, where Holocene time saw many caldera-forming eruptions in an area of comparatively intense human activity.
DE: 8400 VOLCANOLOGY
SC: U
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting