What is the largest known volcanic eruption in history?

elizabethmc

Tambora, 1815 http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/honors/student/volcano/tambora.html Jan 12 04, 4:40 PM

mochyn

krakatoa http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_questions/grp7/asia/question879.html the explosion of OLYMPUS MONS on MARS, 10 million years ago is the largest known to man Jan 12 04, 4:46 PM

sequoianoir

The one on IO, a moon of Jupiter The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of a 400-km-high (250-mile-high) plume of gas and dust from a volcanic eruption on Io, Jupiter's large innermost moon. Io was passing in front of Jupiter when this image was taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in July 1996. The plume appears as an orange patch just off the edge of Io in the eight o'clock position, against the blue background of Jupiter's clouds. Io's volcanic eruptions blasts material hundreds of kilometers into space in giant plumes of gas and dust. In this image, material must have been blown out of the volcano at more than 2,000 mph to form a plume of this size, which is the largest yet seen on Io. http://www.thehubbletelescope.com/Io.html Knew I'd find the reference in the end. A team of astronomers, routinely monitoring Jupiter's moon Io, has witnessed the largest documented volcanic eruption in history. The massive eruption, described in this month's planetary journal Icarus, took place on a region of Io known as Surt in February 2001. Covering 1,180.66 square miles, the eruption was larger than the entire city of London or Los Angeles. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20021111/io.html Jan 12 04, 4:58 PM

Senior Moments

That may just have been a smudge on the lense. Back on earth, Lake Taupo, situated in the Volcanic Plateau area of the North Island, fills a crater which had been formed by the world's largest known eruption. This happened in two sections, around 1,800 and 26,000 years ago. The volcanic dust which arose from the eruption, bringing with it changes in the skies, could be seen as far away as Rome and China. http://history-nz.org/today.html Jan 12 04, 5:05 PM

Hamlet.

I hadn't thought of volcanos on other planets, but I should have. Scientists measure volcanic eruptions by the amount of material that a volcano ejects into the atmosphere. Based on that measurement system, the largest eruption on Earth is the one at Yellowstone Park in the US, some six hundred thousand years B.C.E. The eruption at Yellowstone is hard to fathom: The volcano (which would have been located in present-day Wyoming) left a crater that measures 30 by 45 miles and released 10,000 cubic kilometers of material into the atmosphere. Just about all other huge volcanic eruptions have released only about 10 cubic kilometers of earth debris into the atmosphere! Jan 12 04, 7:51 PM

icemannn007

The biggest underwater volcano in Europe could erupt at any moment and cause a tsunami http://www.biggestintheworld.org/the-biggest-volcano-in-the-world/ Jul 02 10, 12:17 PM