Volcanic emissions pale in comparison to fossil fuels

My husband, son, mother and I visited Hawaii in summer 1993 after she had finished her final round of chemotherapy for colon cancer.

My dad had been stationed at Hawaii’s Schofield Army Base in 1950. He sent Mom many beautiful photos of the islands, but she never got to see them in person, so we helped her make that dream a reality.

Our arrival on the Big Island concurred with a series of small volcanic eruptions from the volcano Kilauea. We were able to see some of the lava flows burning up asphalt roads and trickling down hillsides. The view of these eruptions at night was quite remarkable, like a hundred little campfires burning down the mountainsides.

As we got closer to a recently active area, we could smell and taste sulfur in the air. A close examination of much of the landscape showed the yellow deposits of sulfur from previous eruptions.

The park itself is pretty large, and at that time there were no fast foods or any type of restaurant. In fact the only thing we encountered on our trip across the “moonscape” was a ranger station.

We drove for miles and miles and saw nothing but igneous rock from former lava flows. The landscape was extremely rough and sharp; you would not want to be stranded without shoes.

Looking at that land, it was hard to believe that natural weathering events (chemical and physical decomposition) would eventually create fertile soil from those sharp rocks.

Volcanic islands like the Hawaiian Islands and the Aleutian Islands are found as strings of small land masses. In the case of the Hawaiian Islands, each individual island in the chain is successively older as you travel toward the northwest side of the chain.

This area falls along a tectonic plate where there also is a hot spot of volcanic activity as well as plate movement. When eruptions occur, the tectonic plates shift, and a new land mass is formed.

After millions of years, newer eruptions begin to create the next island in the chain. In 10,000-100,000 years, Hawaii will add its newest land mass from the underwater volcano Loihi, located off the southeast coast of the Big Island.

Though volcanoes can help create new soil and eventually contributed to creating the tropical paradise of the Hawaiian Islands, they also can cause major havoc with Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and life itself.

This was the case 250 million years ago during what is now known as the Permian mass extinction event, one of the five mass extinctions that has taken place on earth. Some scientists also call this time frame the “Great Dying.” About 95 percent of all marine life and 70 percent of all life on land were wiped out, possibly due in part to a massive volcanic eruption in Siberia.

Scientists believe that this volcanic eruption released more than 200 billion gallons of molten lava over an area of land now called the Siberian Traps. As is the case in volcanic eruptions, there was a significant amount of ash and particulate matter. This acts to block out sunlight or reflect it back into the atmosphere.

Initially the earth cools. However, the eruptions also release sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide along with some methane. It was estimated that the planet warmed by 14 F because of the massive increase of greenhouse gases. Warmer ocean water meant less oxygen, causing most aquatic species to die off. Sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide reacted with atmospheric water to create the acid rain that killed off most life on land.

There’s no reason to think that the eruptions occurring today in Hawaii will be severe enough to contribute to major climate changes. While volcanoes do emit carbon dioxide, both during eruptions and through underground magma, the amount pales in comparison to what humans emit through the burning of fossil fuels.

In a 2011 peer reviewed paper, “U.S. Geological Survey,” scientist Terry Gerlach summarized data from previous global volcanic carbon-dioxide emissions reaching back to the 1970s. This data included direct sampling and data remote sensing. The emissions of carbon dioxide were about 0.2 billion tons per year on average.

Human emissions have been about 100 times greater than all volcanic action. In 2015, between fossil fuel combustion, land deforestation and cement production, humans emitted about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide, 200 times greater than volcanic action.

To put our emissions in perspective, eruptions from “Mount St. Helens and Pinatubo released carbon dioxide on a scale similar to human output for about nine hours.” However, they stopped. Humans continually burn gasoline, coal, fracked gas and other petroleum-based fuels.

Unlike volcanoes, we do not emit anything similar to the quantity of ash and aerosols that block or reflect incoming radiation. It was estimated that eruptions from Mount Tambora in 1815 “produced enough of these particles to cancel out summer in Europe and North America.”

No matter how you look at the data, unless humans make significant cuts in our carbon-dioxide emissions, we will be the cause of the death of millions of species in what will be Earth’s sixth mass extinction.