>Serious question: will Earth after a super volcano be less habitable than Mars?
Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing.
Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well.
At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).
hours to days after you inhale enough on Earth vs. unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
markedly less sunlight on Earth vs even less on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
most plant life and animal life would be dead on Earth vs. zero plant or animal life on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
In some areas surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing due to an average 3c drop vs. Much of mars could be warmed by 100c and still be below freezing. (Earth Wins!)
So really, even then the Earth with still be a paradise compared to Mars.
What supervolcano are you predicting? The last Yellowstone caldera distributed its tephra only within the range roughly of the Great Plains--people in Chicago wouldn't see ashfall. Sure, airline travel would be screwed.
The rest of your comment is... I mean, to seriously believe that, you'd have to believe that there's severe extinction level events every million years or so, and the frequency of those kinds of extinction-level events is closer to every 50 million years.
>What supervolcano are you predicting? The last Yellowstone caldera distributed its tephra only within the range roughly of the Great Plains--people in Chicago wouldn't see ashfall.
Mt St Helens dropped from trace amounts to 1/2 inch of ash as far south as most of Colorado and as far east as western Minnesota. Ritzville, more than 250 miles away, had 2-5 inches of ashfall. Mt St Helens was comparable in volume to Vesuvius and was less than 1 cubic kilometer of volume, Oruanui eruption which was a relatively small super volcano eruption was estimated around 1170 cubic kilometers and dumped 7 inches of ash 620 miles away on the Chatham Islands.
Toba released between 2000 and 3000 cubic kilometers of ejecta (800 cubic kilometers being ashfall), killed a significant portion of humans alive at the time, created a genetic bottleneck responsible for the current genetic makeup of billions of people, lowered the temperature as much as 27F in places (5.4-9F globally). They found ash deposit from it in the South China Sea 600-800 miles away. If that happened in the middle of America, keep in mind the U.S. exports an absurd amount of its crops, you're talking bye bye population in North America, considerable cooling for Europe which would likely mean no crops in northern Europe. Then you lose the oil, natural gas and coal exports from North America. Air travel would likely be grounded for months the world around, if we keep assuming it's yellowstone in this scenario then if it happens in the winter here southern hemisphere crops would likely have poor yields depending what part of summer it is, if it happened in the summer here then European and Asian crops would suffer. Massive food shortages, fuel shortages, abnormally cool weather which could further effect crop growth and could get some areas into freezing temperatures during winter consistently instead of extremely rarely. Mt St Helens triggered air quality detectors in the northeastern United States so you'd likely have a deterioration in air quality the world around as well. Of course as most of the population of North America is dying from the ash fall starting in as little as a day or two you now have fewer and fewer people to fight fires when they break out, at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked, ash will have toppled some to many trees allowing fires to spread easier in forests, even if someone was here to launch planes to try and extinguish the planes the ash won't have cleared enough from the air to allow flight. Etc etc, so on and so forth. What the other guy in this thread, and the people downvoting me forget, is that the last time one of these happened... we were living in very very primitive structures and our population was likely under 1 million (at 10,000 BC population estimates are between 1 and 15 million, the last supervolcano eruption happened around 24,000 BC, lake Toba around 74,000 BC).
Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
>The second-coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere since around 1400 was 1816, and the 1810s are the coldest decade on record. That was the consequence of Tambora's 1815 eruption and possibly another VEI-7 eruption in late 1808. The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817, and 1818 were −0.51 °C (−0.92 °F), −0.44 °C (−0.79 °F), and −0.29 °C (−0.52 °F), respectively.[8] Parts of Europe also experienced a stormier winter.
> Toba released between 2000 and 3000 cubic kilometers of ejecta (800 cubic kilometers being ashfall), killed a significant portion of humans alive at the time, created a genetic bottleneck responsible for the current genetic makeup of billions of people, lowered the temperature as much as 27F in places (5.4-9F globally).
The Toba genetic bottleneck theory is generally considered discredited in modern scientific circles. There is evidence of an ash layer as far as Lake Malawi, but there is no evidence of any significant disruption to flora and fauna. It failed to even show a major cooling event in that region.
> at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked
At this point in your little rant, I broke down laughing. You're clearly someone who has bought into the nuclear winter theories, and the most outlandishly over-the-top ones at that. We've been able to observe out-of-control boreal forest fires in recent decades (such as the McMurray fire not two years ago), and the effects of such fires are extremely short-lived. Even setting an entire country's oil fields on fire failed to produce any significant regional effect, much to the chagrin of the nuclear winter fear-mongers.
> Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
Tambora is the strongest eruption in recorded history. It is also the strongest link we have to a volcanic winter, the effects of which were so devastating that you have to go read books on Tambora to discover that it happened. The only other eruption posited to have had enough of an impact to cause political repercussions is Huaynaputina in 1600, which may have caused the Russian famine during the Time of Troubles.
There is a significant gap between "measurable drop in global temperature" (which is well-attested) and "significant population drop due to crop failures" (which is not), and an even more significant gap to "extinction of several species as a result of major climactic changes."
To believe that a supervolcano is capable of making the human race extinct, you'd have to believe either that >99% of species are less susceptible to extinction than humans, or that extinction-level events happen every few million years, the latter of which is contradicted by fossil evidence.
Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing.
Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well.
At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).