You can find some on Neptune's
icy moon Triton.
Volcanoes erupting so explosively that
they reach out into space.
Imagine if our own Moon
could pull that off.
Or even worse.
What if a giant volcano on Earth
could spew out lava that high?
I can tell you this right away —
if a volcano erupts with enough power
to shoot debris from the
Earth's surface into space,
we'd all be dead.
Most likely.
Earth might seem like a volcanic world, but
compared to some places in the Solar System,
we ain't seen nothing yet.
Mars wasn't always the cold
red planet we see today.
It used to have water
and an Earth-like atmosphere.
It could even have hosted
some simple life-forms.
It also had the largest active volcano
in the Solar System,
Olympus Mons.
This giant mountain is three times
the height of the biggest mountain
we have here on Earth.
It hasn't been active for millions of years.
But when it was, it could have
shot lava beyond the Martian atmosphere.
We can't know for sure if it did.
Shooting lava into space is a trait
that not every planet has.
But further in the Solar System,
sits the most distant planet
from the Sun, Neptune.
And it has a moon that's capable
of spitting plumes about
8 km (5 mi) into space.
This spectacular event was
discovered by Voyager 2,
the only space probe that's ever visited
the distant ice giant's moon.
Only Triton isn't erupting with lava.
It's spewing out nitrogen ice.
And that brings us to another
moon in the Solar System.
Io is one of Jupiter's moons.
It's covered with active volcanoes.
Unlike the volcanoes on Earth,
Io erupts plumes of sulfur.
One of its biggest volcanoes,
the active lava lake, Loki Patera,
sends such powerful eruptions
that we can detect the
infrared light from them
using the telescopes on Earth.
Pretty cool, right?
Now, why doesn't our own Moon
have similar volcanic shows?
Billions of years ago, the Moon was
blowing up with violent volcanoes.
One hundred million years ago,
the Moon was still erupting volcanic burps.
If the dinosaurs had invented telescopes,
they would have seen some lava
spewed from the Moon's surface.
Although our Moon doesn't have
any active volcanoes today,
there's still a lot of magma under its surface.
And it could erupt in the future.
If humans, or whatever else
is dominant on Earth at that time,
are interested in astronomy,
then they could observe
what the dinosaurs missed.
The only thing Earth would get from
volcanic eruptions on the Moon
would be a spectacular view.
But it would be a different story
if the Earth itself erupted into space.
There are two things that
affect how volcanoes erupt.
The first is gravity.
On Mars, the gravity is
lower than it is on Earth.
That's why it would take longer for magma
on the red planet to rise to the surface.
On some volcanic worlds,
gravity is what's causing
eruptions in the first place.
Io, for example, has an elliptical orbit.
That means that sometimes
it gets closer to Jupiter,
and the other times it distances
itself from the gas giant.
Jupiter's enormous gravitational pull
constantly deforms Io.
And that, in turn, is heating
the moon from the inside.
This is what's called tidal heating.
The second factor is atmosphere.
It affects how high volcanoes
can eject their plumes.
Earth has a thick, turbulent atmosphere.
And that's why it can only
spew volcanic debris
up to 60 km (37 mi) high.
Not enough to reach outer space,
which generally starts at 100 km
(62 mi) above Earth's surface.
For Earth to produce an eruption
that would spread into space,
it would need to be one
incredibly huge volcano.
Somewhere between 18
and 40 million years ago,
the most violent volcanic
event happened on Earth.
La Garita Caldera, a volcano
located in today's Colorado, U.S.,
ejected 5,000 cubic km
(1,200 cubic mi) of volcanic material
and killed everything in the radius
of at least 160 km (100 mi) around it.
And it did, most likely,
shoot debris into space.
We just weren't around to see that.
Volcanic particles can,
theoretically, reach space.
They just have to move fast enough,
developing the minimum
speed of 11.2 km/s (7 mi/s).
They also need enough energy to withstand
Earth's turbulent atmosphere,
which will be slowing them down
and heating them up at the same time.
Lastly, the particles have to be
big enough not to evaporate.
As I said, it would have to be a huge eruption.
Many people would die instantly.
They would either be hit
by the large chunks of rock or
suffocated by the massive gas clouds.
Even if you managed to survive that,
your days would be numbered because
all the energy from such an event
would result in global climate change and
could end up causing a mass extinction.
Our planet could erase humanity
from its surface forever,
just like it erased dinosaurs
some 66 million years ago.
And while we will probably never experience
volcanoes erupting into space,
we could get hit by a huge asteroid one day.
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.
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