Farmers flee as world's deadliest volcano rumbles (Tambora)

AP, via Yahoo! News ^ | September 19, 2011 | NASRULLAH ROA

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

Bold farmers in Indonesia routinely ignore orders to evacuate the slopes of live volcanoes, but those living on Tambora took no chances when history's deadliest mountain rumbled ominously this month.

Villagers like Hasanuddin Sanusi have heard since they were young how the mountain they call home once blew apart in the largest eruption ever recorded — an 1815 event widely forgotten outside their region — killing 90,000 people and blackening skies on the other side of the globe.

[Mr. K]

I think it was Krakatoa that was called “the loudest sound ever heard”

People 20 miles away lost their hearing. It was so bizarre to read a story about how suddenly everyone was walking around trying to figure out what happenened, but no one could hear anyone else.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

Yeah, and Tambora was four times bigger. Imagine the sound it made.

[TSgt]

Algore will sue God.

The Year Without a Summer (also known as the Poverty Year, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death[1]) was 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F),[2] resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3][4] It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

[WayneS]

Wow.

It's not often that the very FIRST comment (the one from the person who posted the article) gets deleted.

I wonder what Virginia Ridgerunner said...

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

I posted the accompanying photograph of Tambora. Apparently it is considered a copyrighted image, even though it’s all over the web and fair use applies.

[Godebert]

" wonder what Virginia Ridgerunner said... "

Don't know, but I'm sure it was followed by a freepmail saying "Knock-it-off".

[WayneS]

Ahhhh. That explains it.

I knew that you are not normally given to making comments so offensive as to require deletion, so I was wondering what had happened.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

I enjoy military, aviation, nautical, space, and natural history threads, but the only time I ever get in trouble with the mods (which is rare) is on the Palin threads fighting with the PDS’ers.

[Hatteras]

WHAT?!

[blam]

Only 10,000 people worldwide survived the last time Toba blew its top. Toba is in the same area.

Late Pleostocene Human Population Bottlenecks. . . (Toba)

[Vigilanteman]

Same thing happened in the United States. Scores of people left New England and moved into the Finger Lakes area of New York. The building and completion of the Erie Canal helped hasten the exodus. By 1830 or so, Buffalo was the 4th largest city in the United States (after New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore).

Very interesting history of what the canal did for the economy of New York: It basically made it the top economy and most populous state in America for the next 130 years or so.

[SampleMan]

Great... one more 2012 event.

What do food stamps get you when there isn’t any food?

[SomeCallMeTim]

Only 10,000 people worldwide survived the last time Toba blew its top. Toba is in the same area.

Great... as if conference re-alignment wasn't bad enough, now I have to start worrying about super-volcanoes again. :-(

You know... the MOST amusing part of all the Glow-Bull Warming alarmism is... anyone who knows ANYTHING about global climate knows; we are LONG overdue for another Ice Age. It WILL come... and, when they do, they start remarkably quickly.

Most likely, I'd guess... getting kick started by something like Toba. CHEERS!

[G Larry]

What do food stamps get you when there isn’t any food?

Roughage.....

[TigersEye]

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Seriously.

[ThomasThomas]

Some mods delete blank post.

Why are only farmers fleeing?

Are the butchers, bakers and candle stick makers ok with the volcano?

[Mrs. Don-o]

When was that Late Pleostocene thingie?

And is that related to the (fairly) recent assertion by evolutionary biologists that the human race cannot be traced back to a number fewer than 10,000? I haven't really looked into the details, but it occurred to me that the human race may have gone thrugh quite a few "chokepoints" at which times there were significant die-off, with the survival of a relative handful who then became the progenitors of the human race.

All of them would still have had --- if you went well back before the choke-point event --- the same ancestors, even if they were, so to speak, "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-Chromosome Adam". Thus all present humans of whatever ethnos are the same species, and thus spring from the same genetic ancestors, with subsequent spread and variation.

I have no idea if the population chokepoint referred to by the evolutioonary biologists is the same thing as the Late Pleostocene event, or even related; nor do I know where to put these events on a time line, although I am supposing it's a sensible time-line comprising only a few million years.

Can you (or some other well-informed FReeper) give me a clue here?

[blam]

Take The Journey Of Mankind, it includes the Toba event 75K years ago.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thanks very much for this. I did the quick flyover (eithout added material) and was rather surprised byt eh recentnes of Tmbora, as well as by the fact that all 6 continents had human communities a long, long time before theadvet of agriculture, which they have pegged as 8,000 - 10,00 years ago, with the retreat of the most recent planet icing.

I belive "Mitochondrial Eve" would have been way, way before that, maybe a milion years ago, and she is -- by some hypotheses --- the ancestress of all human groups presently represented on the planet. This hypotheses is based on the mitochondria in the ovum (sperm have no mitochondria), hence a method of tracking through the female line. But I'll have to look that up.

Thanks again for the good info.