A Brief History
On June 15, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo on the Philippine island of Luzon erupted with a massive blow. This eruption would be the second biggest land-based eruption of the 20th century after a 1912 eruption in Alaska.
Digging Deeper
The massive eruption cost at least 847 people their lives and would reduce the size of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere and affect global temperature for the next 2 years as evidenced by a 1 degree Fahrenheit drop.
Although unassuming and covered in trees, Pinatubo was a sleeping monster, its last eruption having been in 1500 A.D. When it did erupt, it blew more ash into the Earth’s atmosphere than any other eruption since the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.
Just how big was this massive volcanic eruption that reduced the summit of the mountain by 1,100 feet? About 22 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 10 billion tons of lava, the equivalent of 2.4 cubic miles of melted rock, were released! Flows of magma, as lava is called beneath ground, brought a stunning quantity of metals to the surface, including 880,000 tons of zinc, 610,000 tons of chromium, 11,000 tons of arsenic and 660 tons of copper. Other metals released in massive quantities included nickel, lead, cadmium and mercury.
The resulting ash cloud covered 48,000 square miles, burying local villages in ash; damaging the jet engines on planes that flew through the ash clouds; destroying 37,000 acres of reforested areas; rendering 200,000 acres of farmland useless; and killing 800,000 farm animals.
Untold tons of ash turned into mud which flowed over the island when it rained, creating new devastation and displacing persons and leaving them in unsanitary conditions. Around 1.2 million people lost their homes. Furthermore, the United States military ended up abandoning Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, adding to the financial loss for the Philippines. The total economic loss is hard to calculate but was probably over a half billion dollars in the short term.
Question for students (and subscribers): When and where will the next giant eruption take place? Scientists cannot say for sure; they can only monitor the instruments and hope to be able to give as much warning as possible. A big enough eruption or series of eruptions could have a devastating impact on all of mankind. Since we cannot stop such natural disasters, all we can do is hope they do not happen for a long, long time. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see:
Rantucci, Giovanni. Geological Disasters in the Philippines: The July 1990 Earthquake and the 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.
The featured image in this article, a U.S. Geological Survey Photograph taken on June 12, 1991, 08:51 hours, by Dave Harlow of the June 12, 1991 eruption column from Mount Pinatubo taken from the east side of Clark Air Base, is in the public domain in the United States because it only contains materials that originally came from the United States Geological Survey, an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. For more information, see the official USGS copyright policy.
You can also watch a video version of this article on YouTube.