Hey at least it wasn’t nuclear winter ash
Is there a difference? Yellowstone may very well have the oomf(?) to put nuclear bombs to shame
Yellowstone would really suck, but it would suck differently than nuclear winter.
For starters, I don’t think it would be directly catastrophic on the other side of the world. The Americas would be pretty fucked, but some places would probably only see climate problems rather than the actual end of days.
Also, nuclear winter would include nuclear fallout. It would involve far less actual material coming out of the sky, but what it did bring would be poison in a way which volcanic ash wouldn’t really match (not to say volcanic eruptions aren’t poisonous, but they’re not persistently and insidiously poisonous like radioactive decay could be)
If you dropped 100 bombs on the U.S., I think Yellowstone would have greater effect. Not to mention how many would be shot down. If 0% I give it to Yellowstone
Well, that wound entirely depend on the severity of the eruption - species could get fucked & if most of the species die on the other side of the world that’s a global problem (eg one of the biggest such eruptions, wiki/Siberian_Traps, causing wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event).
With volcanic eruptions the atmosphere could get full of greenhouse gases pushing the planet into extremes of dry & wet, and also heating atmosphere to the point of forests being burnt off entirely, oceans could acidify killing most things, and sunlight reaching the surface could get greatly diminished making growing things hard, etc.
The above linked event had the giant volcano/basin erupting for 200k years & the inhospitable enrolment lasting for 8 million years (iirc, -ish).
(Compared to this - this is what ppl don’t realise how much CO2 are we pumping into the atmosphere in just years!!)Yellowstone would probably not be that bad, but it could affect plant growth globally, as well as mortality rates (heavy metal vapours & such).
Also things like air travel would basically stop with current engines. Nations would go to wars over food & water, mass migrations, changes in how humans live (types of houses, if even above ground, what we wear, how we filter the air, what we eat, where we gather, etc).As a bonus, Yellowstone vs Siberia:
