The biggest bang: When Indonesian volcano blew its top

Iread this week that astronomers have detected the largest explosion since the Big Bang.

Luckily, it was in some far-off corner of the Universe, but it made me ponder what the largest explosion on earth has been – a nuclear bomb, I would imagine? –P.

Scientists announced last week they had discovered the second largest explosion ever. It emanated from a supermassive black hole in the middle of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, 390,000,000 light years from Earth.

One compared it to the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in US history, saying: “The difference is you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas”.

On earth, the largest nuclear explosion was the 1961 detonation of the Russian’s Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device with a force equivalent to 50-58 megatons of TNT.

However, that fades in comparison to the largest eruption in nature when, in 1815, Mount Tambora catastrophically exploded.

The volcano, in Indonesia, exploded with the force of roughly 1,000 megatons of TNT.

The blast hurled out something like 140 billion tons of rock and magma, killing more than 70,000 people.

The ash it released into the atmosphere created a climate disaster, cooling global temperatures by 0.53C, the effects of which probably caused several hundred thousand deaths due to starvation.

The following year became known as The Year Without A Summer.