Geology, Earthquakes and Volcanos
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Phazael
Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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The biggest issue in a super power nuke exchange is that the radioactivity would be carried by the weather all over the world. Ironically, the sulfur dispersions from recent large volcanic eruptions have given us the best model to support this theory. The current weapons are much more efficient and less "dirty" than the first nukes. The current accepted projections suggest 5ish years of radioactivity and about twice that in weather impact. Very shitty, but survivable. Conversely, the biggest mass extinctions on our world have been due to shifts in climate chemistry (often sulfur from mega eruptions, but sometimes buildups of gasses from life itself), which is why something as large as the YS Caldera popping is much more likely to hit the reset button.
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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That's what happens when scientists become morally bankrupt and start getting political. They've expended any kind of credibility they had.
Don't blame us for their fuckups.
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Burns
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These were some good videos by a geology professor that can actually keep things interesting. In that lecture series, he also has a great video on mega-quakes (9.0+) in the pacific northwest, like the ones in Sumatra and Fukushima. One quake happened 300 some years ago, and would have killed a bunch of local tribes living on the coast, from northern California to southern British Columbia.
As for the Supervolcano eruptions, humans (earliest homo sapien fossil ~300k YO) and our ancestors survived at least 2 of them. Pulled from the video above:
Yellow are normal volcano eruptions, orange are supervolcano eruptions, along with the year (or years ago), and amount of ash produced (in cubic kilometers).
Ash estimates are based on geological evidence of ash layers that have been dug up or found in cores. Ash from the volcano that made Crater Lake was found in sea floor cores when they were researching the Cascadia fault, which produces the megaquakes in the Pacific NW.
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Gavinmad
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The supervolcanic activity that created the Siberian Traps spanned 2 million years.
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Burns
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That's the third column, ash produced, in total, by the volcano. There is no mention of how big the explosion was estimated to be.
Cybsled
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Chuk, the super volcano has erupted multiple times. It’s not a world ender.
And ya, the magmatraps were a sustained event over millions of years, which is worse. It’s the difference between one big eruption that happens and ends vs. something that keeps going and going and going...
And ya, the magmatraps were a sustained event over millions of years, which is worse. It’s the difference between one big eruption that happens and ends vs. something that keeps going and going and going...
Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
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Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
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Wikipedia said it hasnt had a super eruption in the last 600,000 years. Thats what we are talking about. There was an event 13.8k years ago that caused a massive amount of steam to escape yellowstone. That alone caused all ice age megafaunae to die out almost instantly. Including our neanderthal ancestors. A super eruption would fuck the whole planet.
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Phazael
Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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Toba is the most recent and it wiped out all but 6% of human life on the world and pretty much all but a similar amount of any larger land animals. It also kicked off a 1000 year ice age. It literally drove the surviving humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world. And that was slightly stronger than the Caldera's last super eruption. The major eruptions of the Caldera are relatively recent, geologically, and increasing in intensity each time they occur. And Toba is roughly only about 2/3rds as bad as what the next one in the Caldera is supposed to be like.
But this is one of those magnetic pole shift things where we can't really do shit about it and it could be soon or tens of thousands of years from happening.
But this is one of those magnetic pole shift things where we can't really do shit about it and it could be soon or tens of thousands of years from happening.
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Cybsled
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lol wut. Ice Age megafauna (fuck, megafauna in general) was wiped out by humans mostly with advanced hunting techniques. Neanderthals were already on their way out 13k years ago. They also aren’t our ancestors. They were basically our closest living relative. The only ancestor aspect you could claim is interbreeding still detected in modern European DNA, and even then it isn’t a majority of the population.
Did it alter the weather? Sure. But there is no evidence it actually caused massive global extinctions of note like you’re trying to hype it up to be.
H.A. Monkey
Golden Knight of the Realm
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It might kill the entire eastern part of the US within a matter of days, but the rest of the world should be fine in terms of not being totally fucked. The western US should take a couple weeks to feel the full effect. Within three weeks, the entire planet would be getting ash fucked.
Nuclear winter isn’t literally meaning we enter an ice age. It’s literally because it’s snowing nuclear dust. Like you know, how snow falls in the winter. Are you and others this retarded?
Making everything slightly radioactive, all over the entire globe is the problem. All water born creatures will be massively affected. Plants will eventually filter it, but certain areas will never be inhabitable again.
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Cybsled
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Presuming you mean west is fucked, eastern part gets it later. But NA as a whole would be dicked, since Canada and Mexico would feel immediate impacts as well. Plus if you look at historical ash covers, the entire midwest US would potentially get buried in deep ashfall and combined with strong acid raid, which would devastate our food supply.
Nuclear Winter is also coined after global cooling effects resulting from the massive firestorms and high altitude injection of various particles after a sustained nuclear exchange. Falling radioactive particles/debris is just nuclear fallout, which would be a longer term and bigger concern. Although most nuclear weapons are designed to be airburst, so the contamination of ground soil and surrounding areas would be much less overall than a direct ground impact (like a bunker-buster nuke which would presumably be launched at subterranean fortified areas, like a Cheyenne Mountain type facility)
Nuclear Winter is also coined after global cooling effects resulting from the massive firestorms and high altitude injection of various particles after a sustained nuclear exchange. Falling radioactive particles/debris is just nuclear fallout, which would be a longer term and bigger concern. Although most nuclear weapons are designed to be airburst, so the contamination of ground soil and surrounding areas would be much less overall than a direct ground impact (like a bunker-buster nuke which would presumably be launched at subterranean fortified areas, like a Cheyenne Mountain type facility)
Cutlery
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All of that is straight A+ tier disaster porn.
Until you realize that the "experts" predicting it are the same kind who predicted Covid 19 was gonna kill a billion people and that globalhomo warming was gonna kill us all 50 years ago.
So, meh.
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Siddar
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Nuclear winter was found to be over exaggerated. Carl Sagan was the big proponent of it. In the very early 80. It sinked up the global warming theory of the time that said global warming was going to cause a new ice age. Nuclear winter was shown to be exaggerated by tracking volcanic eruption emissions with new technology that wasn't available when the theory was made.
It not viewed as a case of a false claim it viewed as a case where new information has disproven the potential size of nuclear winter. Because if nuclear winter theory were be correct then forty years of more recent of volcanic studies would have to be wrong. In the case here the volcanic studies have hard facts to back them up and nuclear winter only has theory.