00:00The largest volcanic region on Earth is not in Africa or Japan, but under the ice of Antarctica.
00:07Scientists found
00:08138 volcanoes in its western part, and if they decide to go wild, you'll surely notice it.
00:14They could melt huge amounts of ice that will move into the ocean, raise its level, and make our planet uninhabitable for humans.
00:21But before you pack your things to fly away to another planet, hear me out.
00:26Only two of the Antarctic volcanoes are officially classified as active now,
00:31and it would take a whole series of eruptions decade after decade to seriously impact the whole world.
00:38Mount Erebus, one of the two Antarctic volcanoes currently in action,
00:43proudly bears the title of the world's southernmost active one. It has been continuously erupting since at least
00:501972. It emits plumes of gas and steam and sometimes even spews out rocks.
00:55And scientists call it Strombolian eruptions.
00:58One of the coolest features is a lava lake in one of its summit craters with molten material on the surface.
01:05Such lakes are rather rare because they need certain conditions to make sure the surface never freezes over.
01:11The second active volcano is Deception Island, a horseshoe-shaped landmass.
01:16It is the caldera of an active volcano that last erupted over 50 years ago.
01:22Scientists who monitor it say it shouldn't go wild anytime soon.
01:26Antarctica also has plenty of fumaroles.
01:29Those are volcanic vents that release gases and vapors into the air. In the right conditions,
01:34they can spew out enough stuff to build fumarolic ice towers up to 10 feet tall.
01:41Scientists keep an eye on the Antarctic volcanoes with seismometers that detect when the Earth starts trembling from volcanic activity.
01:49Sometimes they also use more complicated tech.
01:52But it's all really challenging because of how far away this polar region is and how tricky it is to get there.
01:58That's why no one can predict when one of the continent's volcanoes that are now sleeping might erupt.
02:04We can guess what this waking up would look like if we analyze the events from nearly 20,000 years ago.
02:10So, shall we?
02:13One of Antarctica's sleeping volcanoes, Mount Takahe, had a series of eruptions and spewed out a good amount of halogens
02:21rich in ozone back then. Some scientists say these events warmed up the southern hemisphere.
02:26Glaciers started to melt and helped finish the last ice age. For these events to repeat,
02:32we'd need a series of eruptions with substances rich in halogens from one or more volcanoes that are now above the ice.
02:39It's an unlikely scenario, but since it already happened in the past, it's not completely impossible.
02:46As for volcanoes hiding under a thick layer of ice, it looks like their gases would hardly make it to the atmosphere.
02:53But they would be strong enough to melt huge caverns in the base of the ice and produce a serious amount of melt water.
03:00The West Antarctic ice sheet is wet and not frozen to its bed.
03:04So, this melt water would work as a lubricant and set the overlying ice into motion soon.
03:10The volume of water that even a large volcano would generate in this way is
03:14nothing compared to the volume of ice beneath it. So, a single eruption wouldn't make a difference.
03:20But several volcanoes erupting close to or beneath any of the western Antarctica's big ice streams would.
03:27Those ice streams are rivers of ice that take most of the frozen water in Antarctica into the ocean.
03:34If they change their speed and bring unusual amounts of water into the ocean, its level will rise.
03:40As the ice would get thinner and thinner, there would be more and more new eruptions.
03:45Scientists call it a runaway effect.
03:47Something like that happened in Iceland.
03:49The number of volcanic eruptions went up when glaciers started to recede at the end of the last ice age.
03:56So, it looks like for massive changes, several powerful volcanoes above the ice with gases full of halogens
04:03need to get active within a few decades of each other and stay strong over many tens to hundreds of years.
04:10Antarctica stores around 80% of all the fresh water in the world.
04:14And if they melted all of it, global sea levels would rise by almost 200 feet.
04:20And then we'd have to look for a new planet to live on.
04:23But this again is an unlikely scenario.
04:26It's more likely that the eruptions under the ice will lubricate ice streams and seep water into the ocean.
04:32But it wouldn't be the end of the world.
04:37A super strong, super angry, super volcano could do it though. And it has already happened in the past.
04:43Over 200 million years ago, the world went through a major makeover with not one, not two,
04:50but four massive volcanic eruptions in huge pulses.
04:54The super volcano called Camp had been erupting over and over for 600,000 years.
05:00It all happened in Rangelia, a large chunk of land that used to be a supermassive volcano
05:06stretching across what's now British Columbia in Alaska.
05:09And it wasn't the lava or the volcanic ash that ruined the environment. The eruption made carbon levels skyrocket.
05:16The planet would never be the same again.
05:18This volcanic activity might have helped dinosaurs grow from cat-sized critters into giants we saw in Jurassic Park.
05:26It kicked off a two-million-year rainy season. It made the whole world hot and humid. And the dinos just loved it.
05:33Researchers dug deep into sediment layers beneath an ancient lake in Asia to uncover these secrets.
05:39They found traces of volcanic ash and mercury, clear signs of those epic eruptions.
05:45There were carbon signatures showing huge spikes in carbon dioxide levels. It made the atmosphere toasty and the rain poured down.
05:54So the bad news is another eruption like this could happen.
05:58The super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park has been sleeping for nearly 70,000 years.
06:05But if it wakes up, it would be many times more catastrophic than the eruption of Mount St.
06:10Helens in 1980. It's considered the most disastrous volcanic eruption in U.S. history.
06:16It followed two months of earthquakes and injection of magma below the volcano that weakened and destroyed the entire north face of the mountain.
06:25The eruption column went 80,000 feet into the atmosphere and spread ash over 11 U.S. states and several Canadian provinces.
06:33The last Yellowstone eruption was a thousand times greater than that.
06:37The ground above Yellowstone sits on a hot spot made of molten and semi-molten rock called magma.
06:44This magma stuff flows into a chamber beneath the park about four to six miles down,
06:50making the ground puff up like a balloon. But then, as it cools down, the ground goes back to its usual state.
06:57Volcano watchers have been keeping an eye on this for a century.
07:00They noticed the ground lift up about 10 inches around 20 years ago.
07:04But since 2010, it's been going back down.
07:08The experts say we have no big eruptions on the horizon, so doomsday isn't coming anytime soon.
07:14But there's some underground activity going on lately, which keeps us interested.
07:19Since humans haven't been around to witness every little thing Yellowstone does, it's kind of tough to say for sure what's brewing down there.
07:27Yellowstone has had some epic eruptions within the last couple million years.
07:31They happen like clockwork, with gaps of six to eight hundred thousand years between them.
07:36The last big one was around 640,000 years ago, and it basically reshaped the entire landscape,
07:43spreading ash and debris as far as Louisiana.
07:46You can still see the aftermath of the last big eruption in the Yellowstone caldera today.
07:52Experts say a massive eruption like the last one is an unlikely scenario.
07:56We're more likely to see eruptions of steam and hot water or lava flows.
08:01When and with what force it will wake up remains a mystery to scientists.
08:06That's it for today.
08:07So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
08:12Or if you want more just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.
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