> they estimated that Kuwae’s eruption had released vast quantities of magma, enough to fill the Empire State Building 37 million times over<p>This is a unit of journalistic measurement I have never come across before.
Imagine observing these events and trying to explain them with rudimentary scientific understanding. At the time, the best explanations for volcanoes involved wind causing friction in narrow canyons or subterranean rivers of fire, but nobody really knew. One can appreciate mythology more in this light, given the titanic scale of volcanic eruptions and an entire species agape in wonder.<p>Cool stuff. Really drives home that we are guests of this planet.
Mighty interesting, sure. Still, I can't stand these awe-driven narratives. The formula is getting old and in the jumping from one wow to the next a lot of the real questions and facts are left half-explained. And as somebody already pointed out, the units... football fields, Hiroshima bombs and the area of California... they should standardize those already, right? Journalists could use abbreviations and the rest of us would get to write unit converters when learning a new programming language.
They say it could have been caused by an asteroid, but don't explain why this theory is seemingly discarded.<p>Edit: 2min of googling and I find a not very well know 20km impact crater dated at exactly the right time (mid 15th century): <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater</a>
Spoilers: The volcano is unlikely to still be massive. Probably a good sized crater or two though.<p>(Ice core evidence shows a pair of eruptions around the 1460s, likely the cause of major famines across the planet in following years. The locations of the eruptions are still unknown, though.)