Did you know…volcanoes can hurt you?
Just some random statistics about volcanoes and how destructive they can be.
When Mount St Helens blew up in 1980, it exploded with the force of 500 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. The top 1300 feet of the mountain were blasted away, and when the side of the mountain collapsed, the dirt and rock traveled down the mountain at 150 miles per hour and was the largest landslide in recorded human history. The landslide moved enough dirt and rock to cover Manhattan Island to a depth of 400 feet, and 230 square miles of forest were leveled from the initial blast alone.
In 1815 on the Island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, the volcano named Tambora exploded and killed 100,000 people from the blast and associated tsunamis. It was 150 times bigger than Mt St Helens, and it is estimated that this single volcano blasted 36 cubic miles of ash and dust into the atmosphere. This ash and dust blocked so much sun that 1816 is on record as one of the coldest summers and most drastic growing seasons in human history. A famine and typhoid epidemic in Ireland killed 65000 people. In New England, morning frosts continued until mid-June and little seeded plants would grow.
Then there was Toba, in Sumatra, which exploded about 74,000 years ago. It was so big that Greenland Ice Cores show that earth suffered through 6 years of volcanic winter after the explosion, and it is thought to have brought early humans to the brink of extinction.
If we go back 2 million years, one of the big Yellowstone eruptions (you do know that Yellowstone park is a volcano?) put enough ash into the atmosphere to bury New York state to a depth of 67 feet. If this blast were represented by a ball 4 foot across, Mt St Helens would be the size of a pea.