Tag Archives: volcanoes

July 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.

Most hopeful story: The Great Lakes states, provinces, and cities may be the best climate havens North America has to offer.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.

Mount Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, aka Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings (Guillaume Piolle)

climate change vs. volcanoes

Climate change is scary. Earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are scary. But these disasters are unrelated, right? Not so fast, says the Guardian. Losing ice in places like Iceland, South America, and Antarctica changes the pressure on underground magma chambers and can trigger eruptions. And apparently there are “at least 100” active volcanoes under Antarctica.

There is no discussion of how all this will affect the secret Nazi and alien bases under Antarctica.

Don’t forget to worry about volcanoes!

Amid all the many choices of things to worry about, we sometimes forget volcanoes! But actually, they can be quite dangerous and are not as uncommon or far away as one might think. This article from Cambridge has some numbers on how common and damaging they actually are, and how we seem to pay them less attention than some other types of disasters that are actually less disastrous.

“Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years…

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision…

“The last magnitude seven eruption was in 1815 in Indonesia,” said co-author Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcano expert and visiting CSER researcher, now based at the University of Birmingham.

“An estimated 100,000 people died locally, and global temperatures dropped by a degree on average, causing mass crop failures that led to famine, violent uprisings and epidemics in what was known as the year without summer,” he said.

Cambridge University

So we are not necessarily matching our money and effort to the greatest risks. Then again, I’ve heard it suggested that a small-ish nuclear winter would not be as damaging in the future as it could have been because the cooling effect would be partially offset by climate change.