Amid all the many choices of things to worry about, we sometimes forget volcanoes! But actually, they can be quite dangerous and are not as uncommon or far away as one might think. This article from Cambridge has some numbers on how common and damaging they actually are, and how we seem to pay them less attention than some other types of disasters that are actually less disastrous.

“Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years…

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision…

“The last magnitude seven eruption was in 1815 in Indonesia,” said co-author Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcano expert and visiting CSER researcher, now based at the University of Birmingham.

“An estimated 100,000 people died locally, and global temperatures dropped by a degree on average, causing mass crop failures that led to famine, violent uprisings and epidemics in what was known as the year without summer,” he said.

Cambridge University

So we are not necessarily matching our money and effort to the greatest risks. Then again, I’ve heard it suggested that a small-ish nuclear winter would not be as damaging in the future as it could have been because the cooling effect would be partially offset by climate change.