What'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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jorge, have you ever seen hot lava in real life?
I've been to see the volcanoes in Hawaii. Yeah. How
close did you get to the actual lava? Pretty close, like,
you know, a few feet. I touched it with the stick.
You actually touched the lava with a stick? And did
you love it? I did, although I'm not in love
it with it? Thank goodness for that. It is pretty

(00:30):
hot stuff though. Hi. I'm or hammy cartoonists and the
creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.

(00:52):
I'm the co author of the book We Have No Idea,
and I'm a big fan of chocolate lava kicks. 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 prochase 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

(01:14):
physics and the universe, everything that we love talking about
on the podcast. And I wrote it with you, and
it's filled with 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 me up.
And also you like chocolate lava cake? What it's that
chocolate mead out of lava or is it lava mede

(01:35):
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 undercooked chocolate cake. Yeah,
those sort of super popular, while deck 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 I Heart Radio in which we take a big

(01:56):
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 tin, these 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

(02:19):
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 physics tickled by

(02:39):
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

(03:03):
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 Teaching sponsorship from Mountain Dew right there. I wish,

(03:27):
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

(03:50):
the universe. Right we still haven't done the silliest thing
in the universe. Silliest thing in the universe. I'm not
sure that's a physics podcast topic, isn't it. What if
you define eiliness in physics terms, You know what, probably
there is some concept in physics that has nothing to
do with silliness but is called silliness anyway. It's like
another court charge or something, silliness, silliness and boringness. This

(04:14):
one has two sillies, and that one has negative one
and a half borings. And there's the the whit Sun rule,
which says that no two nerds should have a silly
podcast at the same time. We're breaking that rule right now.
It'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

(04:39):
in the Solar System? Now, Daniel, powerful doesn't end with
an E S T. Oh, Yeah, that's true. The most
dramatic ist okano in the Solar system, most powerful ist
power is well, you know, that's a linguistic problem. You know,
some of these adjectives you can't add E S T
to them, but you're still extreme because you're still the
most something. I guess adding the most helps grammatically speaking. Alright,

(05:04):
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

(05:24):
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 gonna blow
up in your mind. So I thought about most powerful
volcano buries. Yeah, exactly, the one with the worst indigestion, exactly,

(05:44):
the rudest. Alright, 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 usually, 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

(06:08):
you would like to participate, don't be shy. I promise
it's fun. Right to me two questions at Daniel and
Jorge dot com and you'll hear your guesses on the podcast.
What could be more fun than get a 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

(06:29):
everybody was up for their lecture 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,

(06:50):
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 dress you have
to look? Right? I mean I feel like in l
A that's true, Like the more successful you are, the
more like you don't care how you dressed. Maybe I
dressed like Seth Rogan, right, so I might as well
be Seth Rogan. But you know, we have one listener,

(07:11):
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 do
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

(07:32):
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 of the Concord?
Fly to the Concord? Yet? Well, last show is hilarious,
so I would be glad to be compared for that
show at any level. But anyways, we're talking about volcanoes
and we were going to ask people on the street,
but they thought was the most powerful volcano in the

(07:53):
Solar System. Here's what they had to say. I don't know,
but I'll just give stuff. It's on t Tom. 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

(08:16):
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 haunch it would be on Jupiter's moon aisle.
So we're not talking about the highest volcano. Olympus mons

(08:37):
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

(08:58):
they go off, they shoot, we 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

(09:20):
have a pretty strong volcanoes an active. But I also
know that Mars has one big volcano and that one
is not active. It is probably in the Sun. There's
the dead one on Mars, Olympus Mons, and then um

(09:43):
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 the person who
said that they're the most powerful volcano in the Solar system.
That person needs to find a new Taco truck. I
don't want to be around that person. That is not
a good sign, my friend, But nobody said any volcanoes

(10:05):
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

(10:27):
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 collapsed into
a star or something? Theoretical limits could like a whole
planet be a volcano. You know, that's pretty cool. And

(10:47):
if so, then what's the biggest volcano planet? You could
have done? Dune done 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 them monology. So you said you post the question
is the most powerful volcano and not the hottest, not
the Burke is So what does that actually mean? Well,
when I was first thinking about this, I was imagining

(11:10):
dramatic explosions, right. We all know about like Mount Saint
Helen's or other big explosions in history that have killed
lots of people, have 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're
talking about, and they have like one really big eruption.

(11:31):
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 on
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

(11:52):
leaks lava, Like the volcanoes in Hawaii 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 down hill and spreads out.
You get this very flat sort of volcano shape, not

(12:14):
you're 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

(12:35):
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 kil auo in Hawaii, it produces like two
points seven cubic kilometers of lava which spread out covering
like a hundred square kilometers over about a thirty year period.

(12:59):
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 giants prays 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

(13:20):
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 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

(13:40):
like this sort of momentary, dramatic explosion the way the
other kind of volcanoes that we call like strato volcanoes are. Wait,
so that one in Siberia, how did it kill so
many species? Well, just spread lava across like a huge
plane where species where it wasn't just the lava, it
also released a lot of mercury into the amosphere and

(14:00):
raise the temperature of the Earth by like ten degrees,
which can upset a lot of ecosystems, but it's definitely
can affect, like you know, the course of life on Earth,
all right. So then the other kind is called the
sword volcano. The other kind it's called a strato volcano.
Strato because there's like lots of layers in it. It's
like layers of magma and then other kinds of rock
and sort of builds up slowly. And this kind of

(14:21):
volcano is much more eruptive because that 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 goo eier, and so it doesn't like flow out
of the crack and the earth is easily. It tends
to be more like build up and then when the
pressure builds up underneath it and then it blows. And
so this sort of good leads to like a much
more dramatic explosion. Right and gassier too, Right, Yeah, exactly,

(14:45):
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 examples later on. Alright,
So those are the two kinds here on Earth or anywhere?
Does that apply to all other planets to 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. You'll see that they're not really a fair

(15:08):
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 in other places. I see, they're more alien. But

(15:29):
the way that geologists sort of rank volcanoes or talking
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

(15:50):
it's sort of a judgment call, but you integrate over
the eruption. And if it's a shield volcano 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 streado volcano, 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 strato

(16:12):
volcanous one, the fact that it's not erupting, it's 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

(16:33):
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

(16:53):
we don't know that it's there. And I guess, you know,
maybe just to take a step back where it's all
this lava coming, it's 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

(17:15):
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 they're just places in the Earth, where this

(17:35):
sort of the Earth's crust is thinner and this molten
magma can bubble up. I guess that's 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 of the pressure. When you have

(17:55):
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 squeeze and
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

(18:16):
have liquid inside the Earth. All right, Well, let's get
into what are the most powerful volcanoes, not just here
on Earth but in the Solar System. But first let's
take a quick break. Alright, we're talking about the hottest

(18:40):
volcanoes in the solar system, Daniel, the most powerful volcano,
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

(19:01):
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 measured by
the volume of lava. But I guess what I mean
is you could have a really powerful volcano but it's
just using kind of constantly. It's never exploding or throwing

(19:23):
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

(19:45):
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 strato volcanoes, which can release just so

(20:07):
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 St. 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

(20:28):
all sorts of stuff, so people sort of connect with it.
It's pretty small event on sort of like the top
list of volcanic eruptions and Earth's 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

(20:49):
like two d years old compared to you know, 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, and 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.

(21:09):
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 strato volcano 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 of months before and the cracked
the volcano and there was like steam coming out and
people could see the top of the mountain changing shape.

(21:31):
It was like bulging. So people were pretty well clued
in that something was going to happen, and there's a
lot of like vulcanologists 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. 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

(21:53):
maybe and people didn't think that it was going to
blow up or you know where. They just sort of like, oh,
look it's blowing out smoke and it looks woolen. 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 St.
Helen's in. What else do we have in our history? Well,

(22:15):
the most powerful recorded volcano in all of human history, right,
which is you know, not that long we're talking maybe
ten tho years is only a couple hundred years ago
in Indonesia, there was this volcano, Mount Timborra, which blew
up in eighteen fifteen, and it's famous because it deleted
a whole summer. It's called the Year without a Summer.

(22:35):
What I can relate to that experience this past summer,
This past year feels like it was raised. It blew
up so much material into the sky, went all around
the world that it's 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

(22:56):
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. So when they say like when it
snows in July as a saying that it could happen,
and it has happened exactly, and it affected you know, crops,
and hundreds of thousands of people died as a consequence

(23:19):
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 Helen's 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 blocked the sun, things
get cold. Yeah, you basically put a shroud. The whole

(23:40):
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 mound. It
lost like almost five thousand feet in height, and it
like dropped stones that are twenties cimeters wide on the
nearby villages. So it was pretty insane. You could hear
it happening like a thousand miles away. That's pretty powerful

(24:01):
stuff exactly. So that puts Mount St 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 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

(24:25):
think this was the most powerful volcanic blast in the
last million years. Mount St. Helen's blew three cubic kilometers
Mount Tambora in eighteen fifteen blew 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,

(24:48):
no summer for ten years, and it cooled the whole earth,
and its impact lasted almost a thousand years. Is that
sort of related to the Ice Age? The Ice 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 bottleneck seventy thousand years ago.

(25:11):
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 called this like a genetic bottleneck. We all have
like the same ancestors, a group of about like maybe
five to ten thousand people that lived about seventy thousand

(25:33):
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 where the ancestors for everybody who's alive today.
So we come from survivors of this volcanic exclusion. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well,
by definition, we all come from survivors. But this almost

(25:56):
wiped us out, right. It could have been the end
of humanity. Yeah, I mean killed everyone except like three
to ten tho 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

(26:17):
called Lake Toba and it's in Sumatra, Indonesia. And that's
the most powerful eruption we think in the last million years,
just from the like the geological record that we can study,
but that we can see too, right, But there'll be
things hidden underneath, you know, 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,

(26:39):
and you can tell like exactly how much was deposited
because it's like still there. You see these dark layers
in the sedimentary rock, and you can tell what happened.
And they also they can look down you know, ice
in Antarctica and stuff, and they can measure the global
temperatures and the amount of snowfall and stuff like that.
That's how they know what the temperature was, you know,
seventy five thousand years ago. Alright, what else is on

(27:01):
the list? Another really powerful set of eruption has happened
right here in the United States about two million years
ago in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is famous, of course for these
guys are as 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 the Yellowstone lies
over like a hot spot. It's like a thin spot

(27:21):
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. What 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

(27:43):
rising and rising. And some people saying, oh, Yellowstone is
like do for an eruption. That's hogwash. We don't really
know when Yellowstone will erupt again. The last time you
interrupted it was about six hundred and forty thousand years
ago in a pretty mammoth eruption that released like a
thousand cubic colorometers. But over the last two million years
it's erupted several times, many of those times just as

(28:06):
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

(28:29):
world history. Kind of makes you wonder what might have
been you know, what could humans have looked like those
other humans that survived. You know, it could have been
taller or better looking, or smarter or more susceptible to
volcanic eruptions. Yeah, it's cool to think about how like
random moments that could have been different really shaped in
the path of life on Earth. You know, the asteroid

(28:49):
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 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

(29:12):
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? Or we invest in
that giant volcano plug idea. I think if you plug
up a volcano, you end up just putting it off
and it's a bigger explosion when it happens now if
you plug it really good, Daniel. But maybe the biggest

(29:33):
eruption in the history of the Earth that we know
of have been even further back in history. There's this
eruption a 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

(29:54):
called Gondwana, which is you know how sort of South
America tucks into the little armpit of Africa there. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So it used to be a single continent and it
was split apart by tectonic activity, and they think that
about a 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

(30:16):
right around there. And if you've ever been to like
Iguazoo 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. I
guess you you know, these continent ships and these motions
and splitting of continents. They all happened because of volcanic activity. Right,
It's all sort of like magma and and you know,

(30:39):
Earth turning down there and moving things around exactly. So
this volcanic activity is very closely connected to these cracks
and earth 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 on the water, right, they are underwater,

(31:01):
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

(31:22):
Hawaiian island, or does it make a you know, fluffy
pillow underwater or does it get like shot out into space.
Because they'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 or volcanoes. It's a whole
region down there and it's called the Piranha and etan
Deca traps, and it's down there still in South America.

(31:42):
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 chinormous explosion. There's
a lot of discussion about that, as you might be
able to guess. It's hard to tell exactly what happened
a hundred and two million years ago, so the evidence
isn't conclusive, and some people think, oh, this was like

(32:02):
a network of volcanoes. Some people think it was one
mega explosion. Geologists still argue about it at 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 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

(32:24):
if there are you know, species that we had no
idea about. It could be. But you know, they look
at the fossil records 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 critters alive before
and after the eruption. All right, well, that's volcanoes on
planet Earth. Let's get into what are some of the

(32:45):
most powerful volcanoes 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. All right, Daniel,

(33:07):
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 moods. 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

(33:27):
to have volcanoes. In fact, one of the largest mountains
in the Solar System is on Mars Olympus Mons 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 rite

(33:50):
of passage almost for all planets, because there all planets
start off it's molten, and then they get crusty and
cool on the outside, and you know that exhorts 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.

(34:10):
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 you 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 volcanoes,
but we don't actually know whether it still has a
liquid core. Some people think it's totally cooled, and some

(34:33):
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,
we'll 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

(34:54):
these other bodies are not dead, They're not just like
cold places. Volcanoes are a sign of like ACTIVI city,
and activity means heat, and the heat maybe means life.
It's excited 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

(35:15):
Neptune which is called Triton. There's Insulatus, 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 Insulata? Because that is literally the Spanish word for salad.
I was trying to figure out how to pronounce it.
I think it's insulatus, isn't it is inseladus enceladus insulatus. Well,
I think I'd like a Caesar insulatus please. Well, we'll

(35:38):
get that to you straight from Saturn. But 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

(35:58):
left on Mars. And of course there's this fossil of
a volcano, Olympus Mons, it's the largest mountain in the
Solar System, is not currently anymore volcano. There's nothing happening there.
I guess what makes us special then? Here on Earth?
What is it about Earth that let's just 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

(36:21):
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 Venus 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 it. 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

(36:43):
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 big part
of like why we have our atmosphere, and so it's

(37:03):
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
volcanoes 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

(37:25):
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 and the formation,
but most of that boiled off into space and it
needed to be replenished mostly by comets and other things

(37:45):
in the same way we need 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 there too cold. You can't actually
have volcanoes on ice planets like ice law. Yeah, but
they are cryo volcanoes. They do not blow out like
molten rock. And that's what we think is going on.

(38:06):
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 most
of like nitrogen gas or some water vapor, or methane
or ceo two. Some of these things are called cryo

(38:27):
volcanoes 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 gonna warm you up,
Oh my god, liquid nitrogen volcano, like a volcano that's

(38:47):
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 Triton in 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, and these
geysers just like shoot out into space. Well, it was

(39:10):
so exciting the astrophysicists cry, and that's why they called
it a cryo volcano. 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 cryo volcano. It's a cold volcano.
It's a frozen volcano. Oh, I see they get a

(39:32):
derivative name. Yeah, sort of. And this thing happens in
other places, so like in Silatus or in Saladust. The
Moon of Salads as the same kind of thing. It
shoots up icy particles. And Cassini in two thousand 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

(39:54):
methane and carbon dioxide and stuff like a sur pricing
amount of ranch dressing, which is we too much ranch dressing.
Everybody always overdoes ran dressing, more crutons, 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

(40:15):
cracks and you get these geysers of frozen water, vapor
plumes that come out that might, for example, I have
little microbes in them. So we're sending a mission to
Europa to sample of these geysers. And you know, can
you call them geysers? Can you call them volcanoes? You know,
I don't know cryo geysers, cryo geysers, Yeah, exactly. But
there is one that you can definitely call a volcano

(40:37):
and is very impressive. And this is a volcano that's
on the moon Io, that's a moon of Jupiter. Yeah,
Io is a moon of Jupiter. It's the innermost moon
of Jupiter. Okay, so this one actually has like love
on it. Yes, this is the most volcanically active body
in the entire Solar system. They've seen like a hundred
and fifty different volcanoes. They think there's even more, like
maybe up to four hundred or so. And this thing

(40:59):
is really hot because it's so close to Jupiter. Jupiter
is 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 gonna
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,

(41:21):
and which is why we have tides. It's like the
gravity is needing it, right, Like it's sort of like
stretching in and compressing in, and that creates heat that
warms it up exactly, creates friction internally, and that keeps
it hot on the inside. So Io is hot because
Jupiter is like kneeding it with its gravity. Boy, it's
just got a little racy here, racy and spacey racy

(41:41):
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 a hundred and
eighty miles high. This is like actual lava, actual lava
shot out into space. Yeah, hundred and eighty months. Like,

(42:03):
we don't get that kind of activity here on Earth,
do we. Like the most we get 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 that just isn't as much gravity.
It sounds like it has fear of volcanoes and earth. Right,
we have millions you said underwater, maybe we have millions. Yeah, yeah,

(42:24):
but these seem more powerful, like more dramatic, and it's
a denser volcanic environment. Is like more volcanoes per square
you know, kilometer or something. And I also features what
one geologists called in their paper the most powerful volcano
in the Solar System. There was a competition and he
gave the medal to this one. What's it called. It's

(42:46):
called Luki. It's named after, you know, the trickster god
of North mythology. People think it's the most powerful volcano
in the Solar system. It's seven hundred times more powerful
than Kilauea. 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 hotter than Tom Hilton.

(43:06):
Yeah exactly. It'll burn you. And it's hard to measure
these things, 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, there's uncertainties there, but
these are definitely big, powerful things hanging out in the

(43:29):
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 fly bys 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

(43:51):
it's constantly leaking lava, but it also tends to erupt,
so like every five 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 low key in the moon Io,
which is a moon of Yeah, and I want to

(44:12):
thank Robert Howell, a geologist University of why Ivan, for
answering all of my questions about volcanoes. And he wanted
me to point out that Locy is 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. That he called it a ptera because
it's like this vast pool of lava. So if you
look down onto it from space, it's just just like

(44:34):
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 that maybe you
can shoot higher. Yeah, it shoots 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

(44:56):
similar gravitational environment. Like the whole shape of it is
different than h 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 than
kill a whale. 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

(45:17):
you have a five hunded in your 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. Stop by first salad on the way,
a warm salad. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that.
And think about all the amazing things that are out
there in other planets of their moons. Things that we
think are big and powerful here are maybe pale and

(45:39):
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

(46:01):
we could become like a tourist destination. We are the
Hawaii of the galaxy. There you go, were the Taco
Stand 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 explained.

(46:22):
The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or
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