Eli5: I understand that 74,000 years ago a supereruption occurred in the Toba volcano that reduced the human population and many other animal species to near extinction. What exactly happened after the eruption that was so deadly for living things?

Question

A super eruption on the Toba volcano produced a bottleneck in the human and in many animal species. How could it be that the eruption of a volcano almost wiped out many animal species?

In: 249

Answer 1

People have already disproven the Toba bottleneck. In general, however, the idea is that:

* a lot of dust in the air lowers the amount of sunlight coming through
* plants get less sunlight, so they don’t grow as well
* less food for herbivores means that there’ll be less herbivores over time.
* Less herbivores means less food for carnivores. There’s a double whammy here because underfed herbivores will be easier to catch and won’t reproduce as much, causing them to be overhunted very easily
* And now there’s less of everything.