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When humans nearly vanished : the catastrophic explosion of the Toba volcano / Donald R. Prothero.

by Prothero, Donald R. author.

Washington, DC : Smithsonian Books, [2018]

Description:

198 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Contents:

Prologue : A very bad day on Planet Earth -- 1. Mystery of the missing megavolcano. Serendipity ; Frozen in the ice ; Data in Davy Jones's locker ; Blowing the case wide open ; Mystery solved -- 2. Vulcan's fury. The forge of Hephaistos ; Incineration ; Why do volcanoes behave so differently from one another? -- 3. Land of the killer volcanoes. The Indonesian Arc ; Krakatau cracks ; Tambora and the year without a summer ; Supervolcanoes -- 4. Clues in your genes. The blueprint of life ; Too many genes ; Clockwork DNA ; "Mitochondrial Eve" ; Through the bottleneck ; Bottlenecks in humans -- 5. Roots. The third chimpanzee ; Fossils versus molecules ; Out of Eurasia? ; The Piltdown hoax -- 6. Out of Africa. The Taung child, Mrs. Ples, and Dear Boy ; The human lineage ; Our genus, Homo ; Modern humans evolve -- 7. Humanity at the crossroads. Consilience ; The threads of Toba ; Bottlenecks everywhere ; Testing the hypothesis ; The critics strike back ; Where do we stand now? -- 8. Volcanoes of doom. The "Big Five" ; The doom of the dinosaurs ; "The Great Dying" ; The third eruption ; Volcanoes and extinction -- 9. Future shocks. Could it happen again? ; Supervolcanoes in America ; A perspective on catastrophes.

Summary:

Various historic volcanoes, and the ability to survive them. It includes the Toba volcano, from Indonesia.

"The true story of the explosion of the Mount Toba supervolcano, the largest eruption in the past 28 million years, and its lasting impact on Earth and human evolution."---Provided by publisher

Some 73,000 years ago the eruption of the Toba supervolcano released the energy of a million tons of explosives; seven hundred cubic miles of magma spewed outward in an explosion, and so much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation, causing global temperatures to drop by five to nine degrees. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, creating a 'genetic bottleneck' whose survivors could be the ancestors of all humans alive today. -- adapted from jacket

Some 73,000 years ago, the huge dome of Mount Toba, in today's Sumatra, Indonesia, began to rumble. A deep vibration shook the entire island. Jets of steam and ash emanated from the summit, followed by an explosion louder than any sound heard by Homo sapienssince our species evolved on Earth. The eruption of the Toba supervolcano released the energy of a million tons of explosives; seven hundred cubic miles of magma spewed outward in an explosion forty times larger than the largest hydrogen bomb and more than a thousand times as powerful as the Krakatau eruption in 1883. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop by five to nine degrees. It took a full decade for Earth to recover to its pre-eruption temperatures. When Humans Nearly Vanishedpresents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide. Human genes today show evidence of a "genetic bottleneck," an effect seen when a population of organisms becomes so small that their genetic diversity is greatly reduced. This group of survivors could be the ancestors of all humans alive today. Donald R. Prothero explores the geological and biological evidence supporting the Toba bottleneck theory; reveals how the explosion itself was discovered; and offers insight into how the world changed afterward and what might happen if such an eruption occurred today. Prothero's riveting account of this calamitous supervolcanic explosion is not to be missed.

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