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Take a look at the above site on the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and there would be your answer.
You are comparing apples and oranges, and first of all, the water from Mt. St. Helens was almost entirely due to the melting of ice similar to what it would be for Mt. Rainier when it erupts as it is covered in glaciers and snow.
You are comparing two features that are very different. Mt. St. Helens is a composite volcano, so it erupts relatively little lava and mostly ash and pyroclastic material. The composition of the material is very different from the features in the opening post as well as it is more felsic than mafic. Those are essentially vast flood basalts from continental rifts which is a mafic composition. That's similar to what we'd find from theother endmember type of volcano, a shield volcano, whose eruptions are mainly lava of a basaltic composition--like those on Hawaii. So the source for the material and its mode of extrusion on to the surface in the examples you are trying to compare are vastly different.
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens produced a flow of ash and fragmented volcanic rock (not lava) and a flow of mud and WATER produced by water coming from deep within the volcano, or earth, and melt-off of snow around the mountain. The mud and water flow was the most devestating element of the eruption.
As MB has pointed out there are different types of volcanic eruptions The water that caused the St. Helens flood came from melting of the glacier ice and water that was sloshed out of Spirit Lake by the largest landslide in recorded history that occured when the side of the mountain collapsed due to an earthquake triggering the blast.
Another type of eruption is the type that produced massive continental flood basalts resulting in the large igneous provinces I described in my first post.
Now the question is how these massive basalt outflows and many super volcanoes ranging in size from 1000 to at least 10,000 times the St. Helens eruptions and all the massive meteor impacts could have occured in a mere 6,000 years of earth history without anyone even noticing any of them. The sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide released from the formation of all those massive flood basalts should have killed off most life on earth if released in a mere 6,000 years without the help of the supervolcanoes and earth impacts.
[quote]You are comparing apples and oranges, and first of all, the water from Mt. St. Helens was almost entirely due to the melting of ice similar to what it would be for Mt. Rainier when it erupts as it is covered in glaciers and snow.[Quote/]
I am only presenting another possiblity. Why debate only one possibility when the root of the debate is a much larger subject?
You are comparing two features that are very different. Mt. St. Helens is a composite volcano, so it erupts relatively little lava and mostly ash and pyroclastic material. The composition of the material is very different from the features in the opening post as well as it is more felsic than mafic. Those are essentially vast flood basalts from continental rifts which is a mafic composition. That's similar to what we'd find from theother endmember type of volcano, a shield volcano, whose eruptions are mainly lava of a basaltic composition--like those on Hawaii. So the source for the material and its mode of extrusion on to the surface in the examples you are trying to compare are vastly different.
I am only presenting another possiblity. Why debate only one possibility when the root of the debate is a much larger subject?
The debate isn't a much larger subject. Mt. St. Helens is an entirely different scenario than the processes responsible for large igneous provinces of entirely different composition and texture. Not all volcanic activity is equal.
About the supervolcanos, I think they are there and I think it may have errupted, but not 70,000 years ago, but 6,000 years ago. I think also that because they affect global warming and weather, that this contributed to the flood that covered the planet. The TV program on discovery said there was a "bottleneck" a population reduction, this happened from the flood. Just like the bible says, the bible is true and it has been proven again and again.
About the supervolcanos, I think they are there and I think it may have errupted, but not 70,000 years ago, but 6,000 years ago. I think also that because they affect global warming and weather, that this contributed to the flood that covered the planet. The TV program on discovery said there was a "bottleneck" a population reduction, this happened from the flood. Just like the bible says, the bible is true and it has been proven again and again.
Of course the bottleneck in the human population was maybe 70,000-80,000 years ago and down to about 10,000 not 6. However, most animal species do NOT show such bottlenecks even though they should have been reduced to only 2 of each kind, but that is another subject.
There was a program on supervolcanoes on the Discovery channel last night. Toba deposited ash 35 cm deep 2500 km from the volcano. The last three eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano blanketed much of the midwestern US with ash. They didn't say it on the program but I have seen an ash layer 50 feet think from one of these eruptions. An eruption of the Bruno Jarbride eruptive center in Idaho deposited thick ash in Nebraska about a thousand miles away and killed the animals that are buried in Ashfall Park. We are talking about several eruptions each 3000 to 10,000 times the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruptions.
Now don't forget the massive outflows of lava in the large igneous provinces. The Deccan Traps are about 6,000 feet thick over 200,000 square miles and they are not the largest.
Then there are all those big impact craters. As I said before 20 of them are 40 km or more in diameter and 5 are more than 100 km in diameter. The Sudbury crater is 250 km in diamter and the Vredefort crater 300. Both are significantly bigger than the Cicxulub impact which is thought to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So how did all these happen in last 6,000 years without anyone even noticing? If you try to put them all right before the flood there will be no humans left for the flood to kill or the ark to save. If you put them after the flood they should have had massive and noticible effects on the earth that noone seems to have noticed.
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