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内容は分かり易い。 「超巨大噴火」は 当面数千年はないらしいが、日本は火山国。
ふつうの火山に関する知識はもっておきましょう。

易　５分　150wpm　　　　

字幕 ： 開始後 で字幕On/Off､ で言語選択。文字の色やサイズﾞはｵﾌﾟｼｮﾝから｡
.　　　　 動画を見るとき、 でフルスクリーンに拡大すると見やすい。

★下記英文は ポップアップ辞書 が使えます｡
　　　トランスクリプト（テキスト）のリンクはない。

The year was 1816. Europe and North America had just been through a devastating series of wars, and a slow recovery seemed to be underway, but nature had other plans. After two years of poor harvests, the spring brought heavy rains and cold, flooding the rivers and causing crop failures from the British Isles to Switzerland.

While odd-colored snow fell in Italy and Hungary, famine, food riots and disease epidemics ensued. Meanwhile, New England was blanketed by a strange fog that would not disperse as the ground remained frozen well into June. In what came to be known as "the Year Without a Summer," some thought the apocalypse（この世の終わり）
had begun.

A mood captured in Lord Byron's poem "Darkness": "I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; morn came and went -- and came, and brought no day. "

They had no way of knowing that the real source of their misfortunes had occurred a year ago thousands of miles away. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was what is known as a supervolcano, characterized by a volume of erupted material, many times greater than that of ordinary volcanoes.

And while the popular image of volcanic destruction is molten rock engulfing the surrounding land, far greater devastation is caused by what remains in the air. Volcanic ash, dispersed by wind, can blanket the sky for days, while toxic gases, such as sulfur dioxide, react in the stratosphere（成層圏）, blocking out solar radiation and drastically cooling the atmosphere below.
　成層圏： 地表から１０kmの対流圏の上にある10～50kmの雲のない空気層

The resulting volcanic winter, along with other effects such as acid rain, can effect multiple continents, disrupting natural cycles and annihilating the plant life on which other organisms, including humans, depend. Releasing nearly 160 cubic kilometers of rock, ash and gas, the Mount Tambora eruption was the largest in recorded history, causing as many as 90,000 deaths.

But previous eruptions have been even more deadly. The 1600 eruption of Peru's Huaynaputina is likely to have triggered the Russian famine, that killed nearly two million, while more ancient eruptions have been blamed for major world events, such as the fall of the Chinese Xia Dynasty（夏王朝）, the disappearance of the Minoan civilization（ミノア文明）, and even a genetic bottleneck in human evolution that may have resulted from all but a few thousand human beings being wiped out 70,000 years ago.
　夏王朝 　　： 前21世紀～前16世紀、中国最古とされる伝説の王朝
　ミノア文明 ： 前20世紀～前14世紀、クレタ島で栄えた文明

One of the most dangerous types of supervolcano is an explosive caldera, formed when a volcanic mountain collapses after an eruption so large that the now-empty magma chamber can no longer support its weight. But though the above-ground volcano is gone, the underground volcanic activity continues. With no method of release, magma and volcanic gases continue to accumulate and expand underground, building up pressure until a massive and violent explosion becomes inevitable.

And one of the largest active volcanic calderas lies right under Yellowstone National Park. The last time it erupted, 650,000 years ago, it covered much of North America in nearly two meters of ash and rock. Scientists are currently monitoring the world's active volcanoes, and procedures for predicting eruptions, conducting evacuations and diverting lava flows have improved over the years. But the massive scale and global reach of a supervolcano means that for many people there would be nowhere to run.

Fortunately, the current data shows no evidence of such an eruption occurring in the next few thousand years. But the idea of a sudden and unavoidable civilization-destroying apocalypse（この世の終わり） caused by events half a globe away will remain a powerful and terrifying vision. Less fictional than we would like to believe. "The winds were withered in the stagnant air, and the clouds perish'd; darkness had no need of aid from them -- she was the universe." - Lord Byron
　注意： apocalypse 「この世の終わり」 は普通名詞
　　　　　 the Apocalypse は 「ヨハネの黙示録」=新約聖書の最後に出てくる終末預言
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