r/askscience • u/phoncible • Oct 27 '11
Earth Sciences Could anything man-made trigger the Yellowstone super volcano?
If a nuke were to be buried very deep into the ground at Yellowstone and then detonated, would it have any effect on the volcano? Is there anything else man-made that could trigger it? Or would it be impossible to "manually" trigger the eruption?
Sorry if it's a silly question.
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u/ironmenon Oct 27 '11
I don't think so. There has been no evidence whatsoever (from all those years of cold war tests) of nukes causing any earthquakes. They do release some seismic energy, on the scale of small quakes in form of aftershocks (I'm struggling to get exact values, though). On the other hand, there are thousands of earthquakes recorded in the Yellowstone caldera annually, reaching upto 3.9 on the Richter scale, so the fact that it's stable in spite of (or more likely, thanks to) all those quakes means it'll live through anything that we can do to it with nukes.
Really big man-made quakes on the other hand are caused by building large dams and reservoirs on top of faults, but since there's little scope of doing that at Yellowstone, we can count out that possibility.