Have you heard about the upcoming eruption of magma under the Pacific Ocean floor that will soon take place off Vancouver Island?
Apparently, scientists with Ocean Networks Canada are predicting an eruption somewhere off of Tofino is coming anywhere from a few weeks to a few years from now after they detected up to 200 small earthquakes per hour in the area last week.
Ocean Networks Canada say they have seen increased earthquake activity in the area known as the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge for years, but that peaked on March 6 when it recorded the highest level of earthquake activity in nearly two decades.
The scientists are saying, however, that we have nothing to fear from the volcanic event and, in fact, the eruption will give them a chance to learn more about how Earth’s crust is formed.
I hope they’re right, but it’s a fact that the earth under our feet is very volatile.
We fret over how much damage humans are doing to Earth through climate change and overuse of its resources, not to mention the horrific consequences if a nuclear war should ever break out, but it’s a fact that the planet could pull the carpet out from under us at any time all on its own.
I tend to watch a lot of documentaries and I saw one recently about mass extinctions in the past.
One of those was when most of the life on Earth perished in a brief moment of geologic time roughly 250 million years ago in an event called the “Great Dying.”
The scientific consensus is that the main cause of extinction in that event was massive volcano activity in the area of Siberia, which covered tens of thousands of miles over many thousands of years, that released fatal amounts of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, elevated global temperatures, and acidified the oceans which had a devastating effect on most living things on Earth, killing more than 90 per cent of all the species at the time.
It has also been well established that a large asteroid that impacted Earth in what is now the Chicxulub region of the Gulf of Mexico approximately 66 million years ago was the major cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, but new research indicates that massive volcanic activity related to the subcontinent India smashing into Asia (which incidentally caused the rise of the Himalayan Mountains) that again filled the atmosphere with toxic gases at about that same time also likely played a part.
In fact, the fossil record indicates that there have been five major mass extinctions during Earth’s long history, and it appears that massive volcanic activity likely played at least a part in all of them.
So I get concerned when I learn that a volcano is about to erupt very close to us, even if the scientists are saying not to worry about it.
It’s a fact that we live short lives, with very few people lucky enough to make it to 90 years old, so it’s hard for us to get our minds around things that happened a long time ago, or may happen sometime in the future.
We tend to live in the present with the belief that we’ll never have to witness such events, and there’s a very good chance that we won’t considering what a short time we each get to walk on the planet.
But periods of calm on Earth inevitably end, and it’s likely our descendants will have to face and deal with a more hostile planet than us.
You don’t have to look much further than Yellowstone National Park, located just a short distance away from Vancouver Island in the western United States, to see the potential dangers ahead.
The park sits on top of a massive volcano that has had three super eruptions that occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and approximately 640,000 years ago and when it erupts again, it’s expected that it will spread deadly ash for thousands of miles, killing plant life and affecting humans in its path, and we’d be right here in its way on Vancouver Island if the wind was blowing northwest.
While it’s likely Yellowstone’s next eruption won’t happen anytime soon, it does give us a sense of what our successors will have to face.
I guarantee that high property taxes and a housing crisis will seem of little importance when that happens.
It’s all a matter of perspective.