No, volcanoes don't spew smoke. No, volcanoes aren’t more active today than they were in the past.
Here are six myths about volcanoes debunked.
Here are six myths about volcanoes debunked.
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00:00One of the most common myths about volcanoes is that that dark gray or white material you see poofing out of the top of them is smoke.
00:10You just make out the plume of smoke and ash rising into the air.
00:23Volcanoes erupt when the system becomes really, really pressurized.
00:27Every volcano operates on its own timescale because you could get little fractures in the rock that's above where all the magma is stored.
00:35And that would release enough gas to take the pressure off the magma chamber.
00:39Sometimes magma just sits. It sits and it sits and it kind of matures underground.
00:45But there is no clock. We can't predict eruptions because there's no schedule.
00:51Volcanoes are not any more active today than they've always been.
00:59As far as you rewind, in fact, even further than life itself, volcanoes have been doing their thing.
01:05Every day, on average, there's about 45 volcanoes around the world that are erupting.
01:11We're not seeing any sort of increase in volcanic activity. We're just hearing a little more about it because of social media.
01:22They're not smoking. What's happening is the volcano is releasing gases from inside the Earth's crust.
01:31So we're talking like hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and good old H2O, water vapor.
01:39Smoke is essentially carbon that is released when something burns.
01:44With volcanoes, they're not burning things. That's a totally different process.
01:51What it is is really small, tiny little particles of pulverized rock.
02:05And that rock gets pulverized during the eruption. Right.
02:09You have an explosion happening with tons of force and that will crush the rocks that are make up the volcano.
02:16And then when that ash gets pushed out of the volcano, it can travel hundreds of miles and blanket the ground, cars, roofs of buildings.
02:27Most lavas, the fastest they can possibly move on average is about 16 miles an hour.
02:34But that's a fast flow. Usual flows are closer to like six to eight miles per hour.
02:39A healthy, able bodied adult can outrun that.
02:45You're more likely to be injured by what we call pyroclastic currents or pyroclastic flows.
02:51Those are superheated clouds of rock and water that are pushed out of the ground.
02:57And that's what causes the eruption.
02:59And that's what causes the eruption.
03:01And that's what causes the eruption.
03:03And that's what causes the eruption.
03:05You're more likely to be injured by what we call pyroclastic currents or pyroclastic flows.
03:11Those are superheated clouds of rock and gas that tumble down the mountainside from big eruptions.
03:19They can reach speeds of several hundred miles an hour.
03:22Those are what buried Pompeii back in the eruption in 79 A.D.
03:28Volcanoes each have their own distinctive magma chambers that are fueling the volcano itself.
03:36So it's kind of like, you know, each one has its own gas tank, just like each car has its own gas tank.
03:41Now, of course, in a case like the island of Hawaii, the Big Island, where you've got volcanoes right next to each other,
03:47we're not entirely sure on how the different systems are interrelated.
03:52So it could be that when one volcano is erupting, if they share a magma source at all, then the other volcano might not erupt.
04:05Sorry to tell you, but no, not in the way you think.
04:09Day to day, volcanoes actually emit less than one percent of all carbon dioxide produced on Earth.
04:17Most of it comes from us.
04:19Volcanoes actually help cool our climate.
04:23When we have a really big volcanic eruption, I'm talking like super volcano levels,
04:28that actually releases a lot of really small particulate material into the atmosphere,
04:34which serves as an insulating blanket for the planet.