Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat's the most powerful volcano in the Solar System?
Daniel and Jorge break down how volcanos work and blow up your idea of what makes a powerful volcano blow.
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Hey, Jorge, have you ever seen hot lava in real life?
I've been to see the volcanos in Hawaii?
Yeah. How close did you get to the actual lava?
Pretty close? Like, you know, a few feet? I touched it with a stick.
You actually touched the lava with a stick?
Yeah?
And did you LoVa it?
I did, although I'm not in.
Lava with it, Thank goodness for that.
It is pretty hot stuff though.
Hi.
I am orham and cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm the co author of the book We Have No Idea, And I'm a big fan of chocolate lava cakes.
Well, so much information there. First of all, you wrote a book.
I did. I wrote a book with this friend of mine. You should check it out. It's pretty funny.
What's the call again? And where can I purchase it?
It's called We Have No Idea. It's about all the grand mysteries of the universe. Everything we don't know about science and physics and the universe, everything that we love talking about on the podcast, and I wrote it with you, and it's filled with a fantastic, hilarious little doodles and cartoons that explain the physics and also make you laugh, just like this podcast.
Oh well, cartoons and comics. Sign you up. And also you like chocolate lava cake? What it's that chocolate meat out of lava or is it lava made out of chocolate?
It's lava made out of chocolate. I guess you know. It's a cake that you bite into and this molten chocolate flows out burns your tongue, but it's so delicious you don't mind. Basically, just undercook chocolate cake.
Yeah, those were super popular while neck I guess they're still popular with me.
They still are.
But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio.
In which we take a big bite of the lava filled deliciousness of the universe and try to explain all of it to you. We think about all the crazy stuff that's out there. We zoom down to the tiniest little particles that are jiggling and wiggling and made out of strings. We talk about the whole shape of the universe and its future and what might happen to it and to you. And we do all that while making some banana jokes.
Yeah, and hopefully without burning your tongue, Because physics is pretty hot. Understanding the universe, learning about it. It's all pretty amazing and hot stuff.
It is hot stuff, and we like to see it explode out of your mind and flow out through your life. And I love hearing from listeners that they have had their excitement for a physics tickled by listening to the podcast.
Yeah, we like to talk about all of the small stuff out there in the universe and all of the huge stuff out there that you can find and you can discover, and especially we like to talk about extreme things in the universe.
We definitely do, because we love to ask questions about like how hot can something get, or how big can something be, or how small can we see things? These extremes of the universe are what tells us what's possible. There are the places where the actual rules of the universe might be revealed, and so we love to explore these crazy extremes.
Yeah, we have a whole series of extreme podcast episodes and that's where you que the heavy metal guitar music, Extreme Universe.
Titching sponsorship from Mountain Dew right there.
I wish, But yeah, we have episodes about the coldest thing in the universe, the biggest thing, the shiniest thing, all kinds of the biggest, most extreme things.
I don't think we've done the shiniest thing yet. That's a great idea.
Well, I guess we have the brightest.
We do have the brightest, and we have the fastest spinning thing, and the hottest thing, and the coldest thing, and the emptiest thing, and the densest thing and all the thingiest things out there in the universe.
Right, we still haven't done the silliest thing in the universe.
Thing in the universe. I'm not sure that's a physics podcast topic.
Isn't it. What if you define silliness in physics terms?
You know what, Probably there is some concept and physics that has nothing to do with silliness, but it's called silliness anyway.
It's like another quark charge or something, silliness, silliness and boringness.
This one has two sillies, and that one has negative one and a half borings.
And there's the white sun rule, which says that no two nerds should have a silly podcast at the same time.
We're breaking that rule right now.
That's what it's all about. So, yeah, we like to talk about extreme things, and so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question what's the most powerful volcano in the Solar System? Now, Daniel, powerful doesn't end with an est.
Yeah, that's true, the most dramaticist volcano in the Solar system.
Most powerfulest, powerless.
Well, you know that's a linguistic problem. You know, some of these adjectives you can't add est to them, but you're still extreme because you're still.
The most something. I guess adding the most helps mm grammatically speaking. All right, So the question is what's the most powerful volcano in the Solar System? Now, Daniel, I think you picked this word very carefully because you didn't say what's the hottest volcano or largest volcano? You said the most powerful volcano?
I did. I thought about powerful volcano because there's lots of different ways to describe volcanoes, right, you know, and I'm not that interested in like the biggest volcano. If it's like inert and not doing anything anymore. It's basically just like a dead volcano. So I wanted to know about like the most dramatic, the one that's going to explode the most, the one that's like really going to blow up in your mind. So I thought about most powerful volcano, the burpiest, Yeah, exactly, the one with the worst indigestion.
The gassest, exactly, the rudest. All right, Well, it's a pretty big solar system. I imagine there are a lot of volcanoes in it, and so we'll talk about all of the ones here on Earth, all the ones in the Solar system. But as usual, we were wondering how many people out there maybe had an answer to this question.
So thank you to everybody who volunteers to answer these random physics questions from me with no preparation. Really appreciate it, And if you would like to participate, don't be shy. I promise it's fun. Write to me two questions at Danielanjorge dot com and you'll hear your guesses on the podcast.
What could be more fun than getting out of difficult physics questions in front of thousands of people.
You know, you'd be surprised when I used to walk around campus and ask people it was almost never people said no, like everybody was up for it. They're like, sure, whatever.
I wonder how they would feel if you told them how many people listen to this podcast, and whether or not that number would impress them or make them feel bad for us.
There's definitely a reason why I try not to look like a famous podcaster when I walk around campus.
Yeah, well, I see that's some purpose.
It's just my natural look.
Anyway, Is there a look for successful podcasters?
Like?
What are we supposed to look like?
I don't know, but this definitely isn't it that?
You know? Or maybe the more successful you are, the less you know, dressy you have to look, right? I mean I feel like in La that's true, Like the more successful you are, the more like you don't care how you dress.
Maybe I dressed like Seth Rogan, right, so I might as well be Seth Rogan. But you know, we have one listener, Mark Fearing, who's also a cartoonist, and he once drew our portraits just based on hearing our voices, Like what his mental image was of us?
Wow?
And what did we look like?
Well? I looked like this big barrel chested guy wearing like a tweed vest and pontificating with a big pipe coming out of my mouth. So I look pretty pretentious.
And how did he get it right for me?
I think he didn't know that you have a Chinese background.
Didn't somebody want to say that we looked like the guys from what is that show, Flight of the Concords, Flight of the Concords.
Yeah, well that show is hilarious, so I would be glad to be compared with that show at any level.
But anyways, we're talking about volcanoes, and we were going to ask people on the street while they thought was the most powerful volcano in this Solar system. Here's what they had to say.
I don't know, but I'll just give that it's on Taytom.
The most powerful volcano in the Solar system is actually me after a night of binging on Taco Bell.
No, I'm kidding.
Actually, I think it's on a moon, one of the icy moons that's got a bunch of heat generated by gravity from Jupiter Saturn and something like that.
That is a good one.
I don't know about specific volcano, but I have a hunch it would be on Jupiter's moon aisle.
So we're not talking about the highest volcano, Olympus Monds on Mars, is extinct, so I'm thinking that gravitational tides on a moon of a gas giant would drive tremendous eruptions, maybe a water volcano on Europa or a methane volcano on Titan.
I'd say the most powerful volcano in the Solar System would be the volcanoes on Io because when they go off, they shoot debris clear out into space that then gets sucked up to form a ring around Jupiter. So I would say the most powerful volcanoes are the ones on Io.
I would guess that that would probably be on Venus, but I don't know.
What the name of it is.
I know that the moons of Jupiter have pretty strong volcanoes an active, but I also know that Mars has one big volcano with that one is not active.
It is probably in the Sun.
There's the dead one on Mars, Olympus Monds, and then around Saturn there's the moon Enceladus, which is ejecting like ice and stuff into the space, and that's kind of like a volcano.
All right. I like person who said that they're the most powerful volcano in the Solar system.
That person needs to find a new Taco truck.
Don't want to be around that person.
That is not a good sign, my friend. But nobody said any volcanoes on Earth. People just like assumed that the biggest, craziest, most powerful volcanoes are somewhere else.
I guess I think you said in the Solar System. So that kind of tips you off that, you know, to get to the extreme stuff you have to go outside of the planet.
Well, I'd like to know what's the most powerful volcano in the universe, but we have no idea what's out here beyond the Solar System. So that's sort of just like the limits of what we could probe right in the universe. Huh. I mean there must be a more powerful volcano somewhere else, just because there are so many planets.
Is there a theoretical limit to the biggest volcano? Do you know what I mean? Like, at some point, wouldn't it collapse into a star or something?
Theoretical limit could like a whole planet be a volcano. You know, that's pretty cool.
And if so, then what's the biggest volcano planet you could have?
Dun dundun new podcast episode idea.
I guess I'm getting ahead of ourselves. But yeah, so let's tackle this question, Daniel, and I guess the first question is about the terminology. So you said you post the question as the most powerful volcano and not the hottest, not the burpis So what does that actually mean?
Well, when I was first thinking about this, I was imagining dramatic explosions, right. We all know about like Mount Saint Helens or other big explosions in history that have killed lots of people and been very dramatic and pumped a bunch of stuff into the atmosphere. So that's sort of what I had in mind at first. But it turns out there's two very different kinds of volcanoes. There's the ones that like explode and blow their top like we were talking about, and they have like one really big eruption. But then there's sort of the slow and steady kind of volcano that sort of leaks lava continuously over many many years, like the one you visited in Hawaii, and those could actually be much more dramatic and influential onl like climate. So there are two types, yeah, exactly. So the kind in Hawaii, for example, is called a shield volcano. This is the kind of volcano that sort of slowly leaks lava like the volcanoes, and why don't just explode and then stop. There's a continuous flow of lava and that's because this lava doesn't have a lot of silica in it, so it's very fluid, so it doesn't like build up and then explode. And what you get then is this it's called a shield volcano because it basically just sort of like flows downhill and spreads out. You get this very flat sort of volcano shape, not your like typical cone volcano. It's very broad and flat, so it's sort of like a shield laying on the ground.
But it's still unpredictable, right, Like you can build up pressure in them, and sometimes you know, the top collapses, like I've been up there to the top of some of the ones in Hawaii, and you know, the things change, Like one year I went and there was this whole landscape, and then the next year I went and the landscape was gone.
Yeah.
Absolutely, and they're constantly producing more landscape.
Right.
It's like a continuous flow, but you're right, it's variable. It's not like exactly continuous, you know, And these things definitely have cycles where they're more active and less active. The one kiloeo in Hawaii, it produces like two point seven cubic kilometers of lava which spread out covering like one hundred square kilometers over about a thirty year period. But it has ups and downs and times right when it's producing more in times when it's producing less. But they're not like really the dramatic explosions that you're used to seeing, like in cartoons, for example.
You don't like the giant sprays of lava. That's not this kind.
Yeah, exactly. So shield volcanoes put out a lot of lava, but sort of like in a more continuous, slow flow because of the kind of lava they are, and you know, in history they've been very important, like there's one in Siberia that probably caused like the Permian extinction, an event that killed like seventy percent of all species on land and spread its lava across like an enormous area of the earth. So I don't mean to put down shield volcanoes like they're very powerful, they're very important, but they don't have like this sort of momentary, dramatic explosion the way the other kind of volcanoes that we call like stratovolcanoes.
Are wait, so that one in Siberia. How did it kill so many species?
Well, just spread lava across like a huge.
Plain where seventy percent of the species were.
It wasn't just the lava. It also released a lot of mercury into the atmosphere and raised the temperature of the Earth by like ten degrees, which can upset a lot of egosystems. But it definitely can affect, like, you know, the course of life on Earth, all right.
So then the other kind is it called a sword volcano.
The other kind it's called a stratovolcano strato because there's like lots of layers in it. There's like layers of magma and then other kinds of rock and sort of builds up slowly. And this kind of volcano is much more eruptive because it has a different kind of lava. The lava has more silica in it and more dissolved gas, and so it's sort of like stickier, it's gooier, and so it doesn't like flow out of the crack and the earth as easily. It tends to more like build up, and then when the pressure builds up underneath it and then it blows, and so this sort of goo leads to like a much more dramatic explosion.
Right, and it's gassier too, right.
Yeah, exactly. It releases enormous quantities of rock and lava and also gas and smoke, and they can also have big effects on climate. And we'll talk about a few exams amples later on.
All right, so those are the two kinds here on Earth or anywhere. Does that apply to all other planets too?
Those are the ones that we have studied best on Earth. And we'll talk about the ones and other bodies in the Solar System, and you'll see that they're not really a fair classification for talking about what's happening on other planets because the process is really very very different. You're not even always talking about lava. Sometimes you have very low gravity environments and so it doesn't like build up the same way it does here on Earth. So volcanoes on Earth are pretty different than volcanoes on Io or on Titan or on other places.
I see, they're more alien.
But the way that geologists sort of rank volcanoes or talk about volcanoes power, they use this metric they measure like how much stuff comes out of the volcano, like what volume of stuff has it emitted.
At a single time or over time. Because you just said that there are kind of two kinds, like one that's steady and flowing and the other kind that it's more explosive.
Yeah, so it's sort of a judgment call, but you integrate over the eruption. And if it's a shieldolcano and the eruption is sort of continuous, then you can measure its power just by the volume of lava produced. If it's an erupting stratovolcano, then you can measure its power by the volume of stuff produced in that eruption. And then you know it goes quiet for a while, and so you sort of know when the eruption ends.
But I guess even if it's the erupting kind, the stratovolcano is one. The fact that it's not erupting is not because there's no lava sort of coming up from the ground. There is. It's just building up right, Exactly. Both kinds have sort of a steady flow.
Of lava exactly. Both of them are places where there's like a big pool I think actually it's called magma before it comes out of the ground. And then it's called lava. But they have this pool of magma underneath where there's like a crack in the crust and it's sort of getting closer to the surface, and that pressure can build up. And that's one problem with this metric of measuring a powerful volcano basically by the volume of its greatest explosion. There could be a volcano out there that's like about ready to go and it's much more powerful than any volcano on Earth. It just has never blown up, and so we don't know that it's there.
And I guess, you know, maybe just to take a step back, or where's all this lava coming from? It just the molten center of the earth or is it a particular layer And why does it come up? Doesn't gravity pull it down?
Yeah?
Well, you know, the Earth is many, many layers, and you have the crust and then underneath that you have the mantle. But the crust is not of uniform thickness, right, and so there are places, for example, when the tectonic plates meet, where there are gaps and it's easier for things that are molten inside the Earth to come up. For example, a lot of the volcanoes on Earth are actually underwater, and they exist where these tectonic plates meet in the ocean, and so you can get a lot of volcanoes there. So typically there are just places in the Earth where there's sort of the Earth's crust is thinner, and this molten magma can bubble up.
I guess all that stuff is under pressure, right, because on top of all that lava molten center of the Earth, there's a bunch of tectonic plates pressing down at it, and so if you have a crack, then it's going to leak out some of that lava being squeezed underneath.
Yeah, the reason that it's liquid is because because of the pressure. When you have some heat from like radioactive decays of isotopes from the inside of the Earth, but mostly it's gravitational pressure. I think about why is the Sun hot. The Sun is hot because it's being squeezed, and then that squeezing creates fusion. The Earth doesn't have fusion, but it's still being squeezed and that creates an enormous amount of pressure, and that pressure can create friction, and that's why you have liquid inside the Earth.
All right, Well, let's get into what are the most powerful volcanos not is here on Earth, but in the Solar system. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Or how we're talking about the hottest volcanoes in the Solar system Daniel the most powerful volcanoes? About power, who has the most influence on the course of history?
Yeah, or who can just blow the most stuff into the atmosphere, Because that's really how they measure it. They're not like how many people did you kill or how many square kilometers did you cover with your lava, and just like what's the volume of stuff that you blew up out of the top of the mountain.
But you just told me a little earlier that powerful is measured by the amount of lava flow, which could be like steady and not that exciting.
It could be, but you're measured by the volume of lava.
But I guess what I mean is you could have a really powerful volcano but it's just oozing kind of constantly. It's never exploding or throwing things up into the atmosphere, but it could still be the most powerful one.
Yeah, if it's producing a lot of lava, then by this definition, it would be the most powerful. It wouldn't be very dramatic and it wouldn't be exploding, but it still would be the most powerful.
Or do you mean, like, are we sort of adding an element of drama to the word powerful, like the most lava in the shortest amount of time. No.
I think, as we said earlier, you just measure how much stuff has been produced, and so Kilauea, for example, has been producing stuff for a long time, so it racks up like a good amount of lava, like three cubic kilometers, which sounds like a lot, right, But it turns out that even these shield volcanoes that are constantly leaking, what seems like an impressive amount of lava. Don't hold a candle to these stratovolcanoes which can release just so much more stuff in a short amount of time.
All right, Well, let's get into what have been some of the most powerful volcanoes in our history here on Earth, and I guess Mount Saint Helens is kind of at the top of the list, at least in terms of the consciousness of the population.
Yeah, it's one that people can talk about and think about because it happens sort of in recent history. We have like television footage and pictures and all sorts of stuff, so people sort of connect with it. It's a pretty small event on sort of like the top list of volcanic eruptions in Earth history. However, so it's the deadliest and most economically destructive in US history, but it's not actually that impressive. Only three cubic kilometers of stuff was blown off the top of the mountain.
I guess the US is not that old. I mean, it's like two hundred years old compared to the age of the Earth. And so to say that the most it's the biggest one in US history doesn't go back a lot pretty.
Far no, it's just a blink. I mean, that's very impressive. Like imagine three cubic kilometers of lava. It's a lot of stuff, right. It blew off the whole top of the mountain. The top of the mountain is now like a one mile wide crater. So this is nothing to sneeze at. It's just not that big compared to other crazier events in Earth's history.
And Mountain Helens was a stratovolcano that kind of builds up and then explodes.
Yeah, and there were some hints that it was going to explode. There was like an earthquake a couple months before four and that cracked the volcano and there was like steam coming out and people could see the top of the mountain changing shape. It was like bulging. So people were pretty well clued in that something was going to happen, and there were a lot of like volcanologists that were around watching it. Unfortunately, a lot of them underestimated the power of it. Some of them tragically died in the lava flow because they were too close.
Oh no, they didn't live long and prosper.
They did not exactly. No, So it killed like almost sixty people and it destroyed a bunch of homes.
And I guess maybe people didn't think that it was going to blow up, or you know, were they just sort of like, oh, look it's blowing out smoke and it looks swollen. Let's take more pictures.
Yeah, they thought it was going to blow but just not that bad. You know, they didn't expect it to be as dramatic as it was. They underestimated its power. Classic mistake.
All right, So that's Mount Saint Helen's in nineteen eighty. What else do we have in our history?
Well, the most powerful record of volcano in all of human history, right, which is you know, not that long. We're talking maybe ten thousand years, is only a couple hundred years ago. In Indonesia, they this volcano, Mount Timbora, which blew up in eighteen fifteen, and it's famous because it deleted a whole summer. It's called the Year without a Summer.
What I can relate to that experience this past summer, This past year feels like it was erased.
It blew up so much material into the sky when all around the world that it basically caused a volcanic winter. This happened in April, and so basically summer just never came because the sun was blocked.
You had like winter spring, uh up back to winter, and then roll right into fall.
We had like snow in New York in June. The whole temperature of the Earth dipped a measurable amount because of this one volcano. Huh.
So when they say like when it snows in July as a saying, it could happen, and it has happened.
Exactly, and it affected you know, crops, and hundreds of thousands of people died as a consequence of this volcano. People like died of starvation. A lot of people died in the immediate aftermath because it was very dramatic. You know, Mount Saint Helens blew three cubic kilometers of debris. This one blew two hundred cubic kilometers of debris up into the air.
I guess that's kind of what happens, right when you block the sun, things get cold.
Yeah, you basically put a shroud. The whole earth basically got a big shroud and we couldn't get sun, so we couldn't have summer. It was a pretty crazy event. It blew off the whole top of the mountain. It lost like almost five thousand feet in height, and it like dropped stones that are twenty centimeters wide on the nearby villages. So it was pretty insane. You could hear it happening like one thousand miles away. That's pretty powerful stuff exactly. So that puts Mount Saint Helens really to.
Shame, all right. So then what else is on our list of most notorious explosions on Earth?
So that's as far back as we can look sort of in recorded history, but we can look back in the geological record and see evidence of more powerful volcanoes. So there was this event seventy five thousand years ago again in Indonesia, and geologists think this was the most powerful volcanic blast in the last million years. Mount Saint Helens blew three cubic kilometers Mount Timbora in eighteen fifteen blue two hundred cubic kilometers. This one, we think blew almost three thousand cubic kilometers of stuff into the air, causing a volcanic winter about ten years long.
Ten years like no summer for ten years.
No summer for ten years, and it cooled the whole earth and its impact lasted almost one thousand years.
Is that sort of related to the Ice Age?
The Icy Age, I think is a separate event. But this definitely contributed to the cooling of the Earth, and we think it kills a lot of humans. There's also separately this evidence that humans had a genetic bottlenecks seventy thousand years ago. If you look at everybody's DNA who's alive now and try to reconstruct where they came from, it turns out that it looks like the whole human population comes from a very small group of people around seventy thousand years ago. They call this like atic bottleneck. We all have like the same ancestors, a group of about like maybe five to ten thousand people that lived about seventy thousand years ago, and so like there's a lot of debate and discussion in the field about whether one thing caused the other. But it might be that this eruption killed a lot of the extent humans, only leaving a small population which then were the ancestors for everybody who's alive today.
So we come from survivors of this volcanic explosion.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, by definition, we all come from survivors. But this almost wiped us out right. It could have been the end of humanity.
Yeah, I mean it killed everyone except like three to ten thousand people. That's not a lot of people. That's like a small town left to repopulate the entire earth.
Yeah, exactly. And they got busy doing it, and it took seventy thousand years. But hey, they did their duty.
They got busy, wink wink.
It's a big job, but somebody's got to do it.
Yeah. And so what's this volcano call.
It's called Lake Toba and it's in Sumatra, Indonesia. And that's the most powerful eruption we think in the last million years.
From like the geological record that we can study, but that we can see too, right, but there'd be things hidden underneath in jungles or the ocean floor.
Yeah. That's how they find this stuff is they dig down through layers of sediment and they see like ash laid down and you can tell like exactly how much was deposited because it's like still there. You see these dark layers in this sedimentary rock, and you can tell what happened. And they also they can look down at you know, ice in Antarctica and stuff and they can measure the global temperatures, the amount of snowfall and stuff like that. That's how they know what the temperature was, you know, seventy five thousand years ago, all.
Right, So what else is on the list?
Another really powerful set of eruptions happened right here in the United States about two million years ago in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is famous, of course for these guys. There's Old Faithful and all sorts of stuff. So you know, there's like a lot of heat going on underneath. But it turns out that Yellowstone lies over like a hot spot. It's like a thin spot in the crust, and there's all this hot magma that rises up from the mantle very near the surface and sort of heats everything up.
Are you saying Yellowstone is a volcano or was a volcano?
Yellowstone is a volcano. It's like could blow at any time. And in the last twenty or so years, people have been like measuring the level of this magma and it's been rising and rising and rising. And some people saying, oh, Yellowstone is like doe for an eruption. That's hogwash. We don't really know when Yellowstone will erupt again. The last time it interrupted was about six hundred and forty thousand years ago and a pretty mammoth eruption that released like a thousand cubic kilometers. But over the last two million years it's erupted several times, many of those times just as large as Lake Toba or even larger.
Wow, So that could have also maybe taken out our species.
Yeah, but I don't know what humans looked like, you know, two million years ago what the evolutionary tree was, and it's harder for us to predict that and then to calculate that. But yeah, absolutely, it definitely affected anybody who's living anywhere nearby. These eruptions produced enough ash and lava to fill the Grand Canyon. Like these are mammoth events sort of in world history.
Kind of makes you wonder what might have been you know, what could humans have looked like if those other humans that survived, you know, it could have been taller or better looking, or smarter, or more susceptible to a volcanic eruption.
Yeah, it's cool to think about how like random moments that could have been different really shaped the path of life on Earth. You know, the asteroid hits the Earth then kills the dinosaurs, and all those kinds of events, including volcanic eruptions, have really shaped where we are. And we don't know right now if where we are is sort of like what would have happened in most circumstances, or if it's just like a totally rare and random occurrence. So it's fascinating to think about all these things and to look at volcanic activity on other bodies to understand like, are we lucky or unlucky? Do we need this kind of volcanoes to sort of like keep evolution fresh? Or has all this volcanic activity prevented things from progressing more quickly right orchie.
We invests in that giant volcanic plug idea.
You plug up a volcano, you end up just putting it off, and it's a bigger explosion when it happens.
Not to be plugged.
Really good, Daniel, But maybe the biggest eruption in the history of the Earth that we know of happened even further back in history. There's this eruption one hundred and thirty two million years ago, what yeah, down in what's now South America. But this is before South America split off from Africa. This is back when there was like a different set of continents, this continent called Gondwana, which is you know how sort of South America tucks into the little armpit of Africa there, yep, yep. Yeah, So it used to be a single continent and it was split apart by tectonic activity, and they think that about one hundred and thirty two million years ago as sort of part of that splits. Connected to when that split happened, there was this enormous set of volcanic eruptions right around there. And if you've ever been to like Iguazu Falls in Paraguay, it's very close to right around there, and so this was a huge event. It probably put out like almost nine thousand cubic kilometers of lava.
Guess you. You know, these continent shifts and these motions and splitting of continents, they all happen because of volcanic activity, right. It's all sort of like magma and you know, Earth churning down there and moving things around exactly.
So this volcanic activity is very closely connected to these cracks in the Earth's crust, these intersections between the plates. That's why we think, for example, there's probably like a million submarine volcanoes on the ocean floor, putting out lava constantly, all these little cracks where these things are happening.
And I guess thankfully they're under water.
Right, they are underwater, But they actually make a really weird kind of lava because they come out and they cool really quickly when they hit the water. They make these weird blobs and they're called pillow lava.
Right. They look kind of like, you know, bubbly.
Yeah, they look a little bubbly. And so what the lava looks like depends a lot on what happens when it comes out. Does it like dribble down the side of the mountain and make a bigger Hawaiian island, or does it make a you know, fluffy pillow under water, or does it get like shot out into space. Because it's at the top of a really tall volcano, all.
Right, So that's the biggest one. And what's the name of these volcano Of all volcanoes.
It's a whole region down there, and it's called the Piranha and Etandeca Traps, and it's down there still in South America. There's a lot of volcanic activity sort of under Iguazoo Falls and that whole area.
This one was like a huge explosion. Are you saying it was like a network of explosions or was it just one ginormous explosion.
There's a lot of discussion about that, as you might be able to guess. It's hard to tell exactly what happened one hundred and thirty two million years ago, so the evidence isn't conclusive, and some people think, oh, this was like a network of volcanoes. Some people think it was one mega explosion. Geologists still argue about it conferences.
But I guess it didn't extinguish life on Earth because we're still here.
Yeah, it didn't. And interestingly, it doesn't seem to coincide with like a mass extinction. So even though it produced a huge amount of lava and probably put a bunch of stuff out into the atmosphere, it didn't kill off a bunch of critters.
That we know of What if there are you know, species that we had no idea about it could be.
But you know, they look at the fossil records sort of before and after, and you can line up like extinction events with volcanic events sometimes and sometimes there are volcanic events with no extinction events where you see like the same kind of craters alive before and after the eruption.
All right, well, if that's volcanos on planet Earth, let's get into what are some of the most powerful volcanos in the Solar System and see if we can beat some of the ones here on Earth. But first, let's take another quick break.
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It all right, Danil, We're talking about giant, powerful volcanoes, and they don't just happen here on Earth. They happen on other planets and even in other moons.
Yeah, exactly, And our Solar System, it turns out, used to have a lot of volcanic activity. We think the Moon might have had volcanoes, We think Venus might have had volcanoes. We know that Mars used to have volcanoes. In fact, one of the largest mountains in the Solar System is on Mars Olympus Monds, and it's a shield volcano. But it's dead. And most of these things, the Moon, Venus and Mars no longer have any volcanic activity.
I guess, you know, it's a natural part of just being a planet, you know, like having you know, pimples as a teenager, Like it's a right of passage almost for all planet because there all planets start off is molten, and then they get crusty and cool on the outside, and you know that exerts pressure and so inevitably, you know, all planets I would imagine get volcanoes.
Yeah, I think that's probably true. They're all molten at some point.
I guess rocky one. Sorry, I guess you need to be a rocky planet to have volcanoes.
You need to be a rocky planet. It also requires a special configuration. You have to have like this crust which holds the magma in but is thin enough that it can like crack and it can bulge. And you also have to have like a liquid core. And so Mars, for example, we don't think it has any more of a volcanoes, but we don't actually know whether it still has a liquid core. Some people think it's totally cooled, and some people think there's still like magma underneath dying to get out. But the outside trust is too solid to let any volcanoes bubble up anymore.
I see, or too thick, maybe, like it could just be too dense or something. All right, Well, take us through a tour of volcanoes in the Solar System.
Well, it's really exciting that there are volcanoes in the Solar System because it means that some of these other bodies are not dead. They're not just like cold places. Volcanoes are a sign of activity, and activity means heat, and the heat maybe means life. It's exciting to see other places in the Solar system where stuff is still happening. And so currently in the Solar system, of course, we have volcanoes on Earth. And then there's three other places where we've seen this kind of activity, and they're all moons. There's a moon of Neptune which is called Triton. There's Ensoladas, which sounds like a salad, but it's actually the sixth largest moon of Saturn. And then of course there's Io.
Did you just call it ensulata because that is the Spanish word for salad.
I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce it. I think it's ensuladus, isn't it? Is it any enceladus enceladus insulatus. Well, I think I'd like a Caesar insuladus. Please.
Well we'll get that to you straight from Saturn. Wait, so most of the volcanoes we know about that are active now, are in moons. There aren't any in like you know, Venus or Mars or Mercury.
None of those places have active volcanoes. Mars we think has some activity going on, like there are Mars quakes, but there are no volcanoes left on Mars. And of course there's this fossil of a volcano Olympus Mons it's the largest mountain in the Solar System, but it's not currently any more volcano. There's nothing happening there.
I guess what makes us special then here on Earth? What is it about Earth that let's us still have volcanoes.
That's not something we really understand, Like we don't understand the inside of Venus and Mars or Mercury. It's something we're still studying. It's a difficult thing to do, and in fact, we're gonna have a whole podcast about like whether Mars and Vaniness still have liquid cores and what's going on with them. But it's not something that's easy to understand. There's a lot of discussion and debate.
Really we don't know. Could it just be luck or is it something about our crust, you know, like our composition of the rock or our atmosphere.
It's something to do with the size, right. The size of a planet determines like how hot it gets, how much gravity there is, and also how long it takes to cool. So, for example, Mars is much smaller than Earth, which is probably why it's cooled faster, and the outer crust has formed and been so thick and choked off all of those volcanoes. But also you're right, volcanoes are important. They're a big part of like why we have our atmosphere, and so it's interesting to learn all about this because it helps us understand like for other planets and other solar systems, are they likely to have volcanic activity which could produce the atmosphere they need to eventually seed life.
Oh, you need volcanos to make an atmosphere, right, You don't just get it for free.
You don't just get it for free. Like if there was gas around when the Earth formed and mostly got blown off because you didn't have like the steady currents you need to have a magnetic field is early on, So by the time things settled down and cooled off and you had like a nice magnetic field to protect your atmosphere, then you need to sort of replenish it the same way like Earth once had water when it was very very young in the formation, but most of that boiled off in this space and it needed to be replenished mostly by comets and other things. In the same way we needed to replenish our atmosphere, and that mostly came I think from volcanoes.
I see, and I guess gas planets can have volcanoes, which is or ice planets, Right, they're too cold.
You can't actually have volcanoes on ice planets.
What like ice lava?
Yeah, but they are cryo volcanoes. They do not blow out like molten rock. And that's what we think is going on. For example, on Triton, we think solar radiation penetrates the surface and heats up some layers that are below that are darker, so they absorb more of this energy and they get hot and then they blow out through the surface.
Well what do they blow if not lava.
It's mostly like nitrogen gas or some water vapor or methane or co two. Some of these things are called cryovolcanoes because they're still really cold.
But it's still like pressurized gas, so it might still be hot.
No, it's pressurized gas, but it's like, you know, liquid nitrogen is still really cold, and so if you're blowing out liquid nitrogen into space and it's not going to warm you up, Oh my god.
A liquid nitrogen volcano, like a volcano that's not red but like blue or white.
Right, yeah, absolutely. This is a pretty exciting moment when they found it. Like Voyager two saw this on Trident in nineteen eighty nine. Pretty exciting moment to like see this and it rises up like five miles into space because this thing has very light gravity and so you don't get like, you know, bubbling up a volcano like you do on Earth. These geysers just like shoot out into space.
Well, it was so exciting the astrophysicists cry, and that's why they called it a cryovolcano. That joke makes me cry. That's what I'm here for. So I feel like, you can't call it a volcano if it's it's not lava. Shouldn't there be another name?
Yeah, well they do have another name. They call it a cry volcano. It's a cold volcano. It's a frozen volcano.
Oh, I see, they get a derivative name.
Yeah, sort of. And this thing happens in other places, so like Insulatus or Ensaladus, the Moon of Salads as the same kind of thing. It shoots up icy particles. And Cassini in two thousand and five went by and it took pictures and it actually flew through some of these jets because they come from the poles and so they're pretty reliable, you know where they are, and it measured. It has water, vapor and nitrogen and methane and carbon dioxide and stuff like that.
That's a pricing amount of ranch dressing, which is weird.
Too much ranch dressing. Everybody always overdoes the ranch dressing. More croutons, less dressing. And we talked once about the moon Europa, which is a cool place that has like an icy crust, probably with water underneath, like a big water ocean, and sometimes that cracks and you get these geysers of frozen water vapor plumes that come out, you know that might for example, have little microbes in them. So we're sending a mission to Europa to sample these geysers. And you know, can you call them geysers? Can you call them volcanoes? You know, I don't know cryogeysers cryo geysers. Yeah, exactly. But there is one that you could definitely call a volcano and is very impressive. And this is a volcano that's on the moon Io.
That's the moon of Jupiter.
Oh yeah, Io is the moon of Jupiter. It's the innermost moon of Jupiter.
Okay, so this one actually has like lov on it.
Yes, this is the most volcanically active body in the entire Solar system. They've seen like one hundred and fifty different volcanoes. They think there's even more, like maybe up to four hundred or so. And this thing is really hot because it's so close to Jupiter. Jupiter's like tugging on it and it's basically squeezing it. Remember we talked about like tidal forces. What happens if you get really close to a black hole, it's going to pull on one side of you more than the other side of you. Well, that happens anytime you get close to any large body. For example, the Moon is doing that to Earth and like squeezing the water on the Earth, and which is why we have tides.
It's like the gravity is kneading it right, like it's sort of like stretching in and compressing it, and that creates heat that warms it.
Up, exactly. It creates friction internally and that keeps it hot on the inside. So Io is hot because Jupiter is like kneading it with its gravity.
Boy, it's just got a little racy here, racy and spacey.
Racy at a distance, and so it melts the rock inside Io. And you have like actual lava, and you have these really huge eruptions. The new Horizon spacecraft saw one eruption from this spashtar volcano that went up one hundred and eighty miles high.
This is like actual lava.
Actual lava shot out into space.
Yeah, one hundred and eighty miles. Like, we don't get that kind of activity here on Earth, do we. Like the most Begette is a couple of miles.
Yeah, exactly. And of course, because we have much more gravity, right, so it's easier to launch like tens of cubic miles of hot lava up into space. When you're a smaller moon, there just isn't as much gravity.
It sounds like it has fear Volcanoes on Earth, right, we have millions you said underwater, maybe.
We have millions.
Yeah, yeah, but these seem more powerful, like.
More, and it's a denser volcanic environment, just like more volcanoes per square you know, kilometer or something. And Io also features what one geologist called in their paper the most powerful volcano in the Solar System.
Oh wow, there was a competition, and he gave the metal to this one. What's it called. It's called Loki. It's named after, you know, the trickster god of Norse mythology. People think it's the most powerful volcano in the Solar System. It's seven hundred times more powerful than Kilowea. For example, it puts out seven hundred times as much lava every year. Wow, that's a lot of lava. It's a lot of lava that's like harder than tom hidstone.
Yeah exactly. It'll burn you. And it's hard to measure these things, and like we don't have like great cameras taking pictures of this stuff. What they can do is sort of just watch in the infrared these eruptions of heat. You know, they watch the heat on the surface and they try to convert that heat measurement into like a volume of magma. So you know, this uncertainty is there, but these are definitely big powerful things hanging out in the surface of Io.
You say, we can look at it from here, like you can actually see the heat and the signature, or they need to get up close. And have we taken pictures of it.
We have taken pictures. We have had like flybys taking pictures of these things so you can see it. But the best shots we have come from watching it steadily day by day, and you can use like space telescopes, so like Hubble has imaged it for example. It's a weird volcano because it's constantly leaking lava, but it also tends to erupt, so like every five hundred and forty days there's like a huge outpouring of lava and then it just sort of bubbles around for a while leaking lava.
All right, So then that's our winner. That's the most powerful volcano in the Solar System. It's Loki in the moon Io, which is a moon of Juber.
Yeah, and I want to thank Robert Howell, a geologist the University of Woming, for answering all of my questions about volcanoes. And he wanted me to point out that Loki's not really a shield volcano because the weird composition and the low gravity. The lava that comes out doesn't like really build up into a shield. You called it a petera because it's like this vast pool of lava. So if you look down onto it from space, it's just this like lake of lava. But they don't even really understand exactly how it forms.
Interesting, it has a gravity assist kind of like there's less gravity there, so the maybe you can shoot higher.
Yeah, it shoot higher, and it doesn't build up the same way. So like the shape of the volcano, the whole nature of it, you can't even really call it a shield volcano because to be a shield volcano requires basically being on Earth or having a similar gravitational environment.
Like the whole shape of it is different than the dynamics of it, I imagine, exactly. Pretty cool, all right, So that's the biggest, most powerful volcano in the Solar System. It's seven hundred times more powerful then Kilowea.
Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I would not recommend Io as a family vacation destination. Hawaii is much better.
Well, you just don't go when it's erupting, but you know, you have a five hundred year window there. You can swoop in and take pictures.
All right, we'll send you there. You can go touch the lava.
Yeah, I'm sure I'll love it.
By first salad on the way.
A warm salad. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that, and think about all of the amazing things that are out there and other planets of their moons. Things that we think are big and powerful here are maybe pail in comparison to things that are right in our neighborhood.
And that's why we love to throw our minds out there into the rest of the universe to imagine how life here on Earth is different or similar to what's going on out there in the rest of the universe. When aliens come, can we talk to them about volcanoes or will they be amazed that we have these crazy bubbling pots of lava on the surface of our planet.
Interesting. We could become like a tourist destination.
We are the Hawaii of the galaxy.
There you go. We're the Tacostan of the Solar System. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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