3 ms·

I wonder how is that comparable to contaminations due to a natural volcanic eruption. I bet the numbers will be several times bigger for volcano.

• godelski 8y ago
  Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano. From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA