Supervolcano wiped India clean
A massive volcanic eruption of Toba in Sumatra about 73,000 years ago deforested much of central India, researchers report.
The volcano ejected an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, leaving a crater (now the world's largest volcanic lake) that is 100km long and 35km wide, and flattened trees 3,000 miles away.
Ash from the event has been found in India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.
The bright ash reflected sunlight off the landscape, initiating an 'Instant Ice Age' that - according to evidence in ice cores taken in Greenland - lasted about 1,800 years.
During this time temperatures dropped by 16degsC, which could have led to an apparent bottleneck in human populations that geneticists believe occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.
The lack of genetic diversity among humans alive today suggests that during this time period humans came very close to becoming extinct.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
