Let's Blow This Volcano Stand

My first understanding of volcanoes probably came from watching cartoons as a kid. From there, I feel that I really developed my strong understanding of lava when we would play games pretending that the floor was made of the stuff. 'Don't step in the lava!' We would joyfully cheer, as we bounced inconsiderately all over Mum's nice furniture. 


Lava is formed from liquefied rock, also known as molten rock. The rock deep down in the earth is exposed to such extreme temperatures that its arse just melts. When the lava first erupts from a volcano, it can comes out at temperatures between 700 to 1200°C and perhaps higher. It can flow great distances before it cools and starts to solidify. 

A volcano is essentially a pressurised chimney which transfers the molten rock from the depth of the earth to the surface. 

Volcanoes, like other naturally disastrous forces of human nature, come in all levels of dangerous. Not only can a volcano cause earthquakes, fast floods, mud slides, tsunamis and the likes, but the dust, ash and molten rock that comes with them can kill life in mass scales and have long term effects like famine. 


The most fascinating volcano (in my and many other's opinion) is the sleeping dragon which lies under Yellowstone Park, in the United States. This guy hasn't erupted in about 640,000 years, but according to some scientists, it is a few thousand years over due.


Because the volcano is essentially a 64 kilometre wide, severely pressurised bath of molten rock, lying only 10km underground, the eruption of said bath would cause disaster at a level which is pretty hard to comprehend. The lava would be flung some 50 kilometres into the earth's atmosphere with virtually all life within 1000 kilometres perishing under the falling ash, lava flows and sheer explosive force of the eruption.


"One thousand cubic kilometers of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole USA with a layer 5 inches thick....it would bring the bitter cold of Volcanic Winter to Planet Earth. Mankind may become extinct." - Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at the Benfield Greif Hazard Research Centre at the University College of London.


While this probably is a real threat, it's really nothing to dwell on. It could erupt in two years or it could be one thousand. How are we to know? There are many real threats out there, for example, the earth could be hit at any moment with a flying, giant space rock that we wouldn't even spot until it reached our atmosphere, possibly giving us a couple of minutes to call our loved ones and say goodbye. Exciting and depressing! Such is life I suppose.

The Scale of the Universe

We're small. Stupidly small. There are much bigger things in this universe than you or me, much more powerful and much more fascinating. 


I am in no way trying to insult your intelligence by telling you this, as I have no doubt that you're already fully aware about how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. I just thought I'd try and get you to stop and think about it for a second or more.


So here is my home-made perspective: 


Walking at a quick pace, it will take me 10 minutes to walk 1km and then 1 hour to walk 6km at the same pace. Walk 36km at this pace and I'll finish in 6 hours. 72km = 12 hours and so on. 


Now think about the circumference of the earth at the equator - 40,075.16km around, now divide that by 6km per hour and apparently it would take me 278 days, almost a year, to walk around what is essentially, a small planet. 


I don't have that kind of time to spare.


I only really used 6km/hour as an example because that is about my walking speed on the treadmill at the gym, but that's tiring after an hour. The average human walking speed is approximately 4km/hour, so in actual fact it could take us over a year (417 days) to walk around the world - this is of course if you didn't need to stop, eat or sleep, you could walk on water and didn't you mind a bit of harsh terrain.


As you can see, we are pretty small and walking around the world isn't something you really consider (although it has been considered and then done http://www.blessitt.com).  


Sometimes it even annoys me having to walk down to the shops to buy milk. Mostly because I don't really drink a lot of milk, but also because I wish I could fly - even walking a couple of hundred metres can take up way too much of my valuable time in the day.


Now let's look at this picture. Hello picture.

See how earth is only a fraction the size of beasts like Jupiter or Saturn? Imagine how long it would take to stroll around those mothers. Then there's the big ol' sun, which is vastly greater than any of the pathetic looking planets there. And then of course there are all the other millions of suns out there that would make our sun look like a marble next to a football (the soccer kind silly).


Another interesting thing about our planets, which Bill Bryson kindly enlightened me with in the early chapters of A Short History of Nearly Everything, is the idea that although the picture above is a common way of displaying the scale of our planets in size, it in no way depicts the scale of distance between them.


There is no way we could do that on one piece of paper. In this picture, Jupiter is shown to be only a couple of centimeters away from Earth, with Pluto, just a few after that. In a real sense, if we had Earth depicted as the size of a pea, we would have to place Jupiter about 300 meters away, with Pluto hanging out almost 2.5 kilometers down the road.


It really is an absolutely astonishing perspective and I hope you've enjoyed having a little think about it. 


On that note, I leave you with this website which will hopefully enlighten you even further than Earth from Pluto.


http://scaleofuniverse.com/