Best Volcanic Eruption?

Lowbrow Answer: Mt. Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland - 2010
What is this shit? No piles of dead animals, no rivers of molten rock, no clouds of super-heated poisonous gas melting people alive. In other words: no fun. I'm going to start printing novelty t-shirts and selling them in Iceland: "My volcano exploded and all I got were delays at Heathrow Airport."

Speaking of which, All I've heard this week arenews reports about European airport delays. Boo. Fucking. Hoo. Quit your whining. Thirty years ago we didn't even have commercial airlines. Oh, how horrible. You're stuck in beautiful southern Italy. You can't get back to your worthless job as an I-banker and have to spend an extra five days on the beach in Sardinia. Poor you. Ass Monkey.


Middlebrow Answer: Mt. Vesuvius, Italy - 79 AD
In one of the most famous eruptions of all time time, Mt. Vesuvius explodes and wipes the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum completely off the map. Ten feet of ash falls onto Italian soil. The heat is so intense that many of the victims are found with the tops of their heads missing—their brains having boiled and exploded. That's right, exploding heads. The ten-year-old inside me just popped a boner.

Although, am I really impressed by something that just kills a bunch of Italians. If that were the case, I'd be in love with the 1943 Allied Invasion of Sicily. (Hiyo! World War II joke! What UP?!) Vesuvius is certainly cool, but come on. These aren't Russians we're talking about. They're Italians. I could kill 50 of them right now just by snipping the break-lines on a few Vespas.


Highbrow Answer: Mt. Tambora, Indonesia - 1816
On April 10th, Mt. Tambora is 13,000 feet tall. Five days later, on April 15th, the mountain has spewed 93 cubic miles of ash and debris into the air and is now just 9,000 feet tall. Talk about a crash diet. It's like bulimia on steroids. The eruption kills 92,000 people, and another 100,000 from starvation and lung-problems in the following six months.

"Oh my god," you might be thinking. "All those people dead. That's so terrible." I wouldn't worry about it. Most of them were morons anyway. Especially the ones that thought, "Let's live at the base of an active volcano. The view here is great."

What's really amazing is the effect this blast had on the planet: 1816 became known as the “year without a summer” because of the volcanic ash in the atmosphere that lowered worldwide temperatures. It snowed in New England that June, and crop failures were common throughout Northern Europe and North America.

So. To conclude with a little math: (Mass Destruction + High Death Toll) x (Worldwide Devastation + Random Act of Nature) = [Proof that life is meaningless] = High/Brow