Volcanic threats to global society

Abstract

The global society is under the threat of a volcanic super-eruption, with consequences that may undermine the same fabric of civilization. Recent discover that volcanic eruptions at the global scale distribute as Poisson events, and determination of the rate parameters associated to any eruption scale, allow us to compute the probability of occurrence of volcanic eruptions of any size over any time window. The yearly probability of a volcanic super-eruptions is about ten times higher that the maximum allowed probability for core melting at nuclear reactors, and ten times higher that the probability of impact with a large celestial body. Still, no resilience plans for globally impacting cataclysmic super-eruptions have been produced yet.