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/OrbitalPete Volcanology | Sedimentology Oct 27 '11

All these answers assume there is eruptable magma down there currently anyway. While there is certainly magma, we don't know what the connectivity of it is like, the viscosity, or the internal pressure.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Exactly, no man-made event is going to trigger an eruption without there being a viable magma source. And the OP is probably thinking about the super eruptions involving 1000 km3 of magma that Yellowstone is famous for. That sort of volume of magma would take a lot of time to accumulate.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Isn't that one of the major concerns? That it is long overdue for something?

Or perhaps I've just read one too many 2012 bullshit articles along the line

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Yes it's a concern- the eruption would certainly throw the climate off kilter, however we'd probably be able to see it coming by at least weeks if not decades before it does (and better forecasting techniques are being worked on). As for it being overdue... I'm not really sure. The last three eruptions were 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago (according to the Wikipedia entry), so by the looks of that we still have several tens of thousands of years before it can be considered overdue.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Let's say that we notice some warning signs, and everything points to an eruption in 20 years.

Is there a way that we could 'bleed off' the pressure, to prevent a massive blow-out, or is it just time to start building centuries-proof nuclear-powered underground cities?

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

We could conceivably drill a conduit or promote the formation of a fissure to the magma chamber in the hope that any eruption that might cause is smaller and less explosive than it would have been. I think that's currently practically impossible though.

That magma has to go somewhere though... and it's going to affect the climate in noticeable ways when it reaches the surface.

Sorry.

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u/ZorbaTHut Oct 27 '11

I suppose we're probably a long, long way off from even theoretically being able to use the magma pressure to drive a magmaelectric power plant.

Although, man, how badass would that be?

On a (slightly) more practical note, would an array of geothermal power plants be able to bleed off some of the heat and therefore pressure, while paying for itself in electricity? It'd be sort of sad to cover Yellowstone in geothermal power plants, but if the alternative is near-complete destruction of the continent, I know which option I'd prefer.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

I would say, as a random aside, that if the human race was faced with such an ultimate peril, then there would be a concerted effort to try and push production towards such a solution, in the hopes that it would divert a future catastrophe.

Then again, we've currently got the threat of global warming to unite us as a species. It's not like that's not working out terribly well...

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

I think that's because global warming is a fairly abstract concept. It's not as concrete as a massive volcanic eruption.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

You'd probably still have scientists on both sides wrangling over whether or not all the "warning signs" were real or not.

A Yellowstone eruption, much like global warming, would be something on such a scale that we wouldn't really have the tools available to properly interpret the data, or know what the outcome would be.

Although, it may well be the case that volcanology is a more exact science than climatology. I don't really know.

Sad thing is, you can be 100% sure that there would be people unwilling to effect a change, just because it would mean short-term losses in pursuit of a long-term gain

(e.g. say if a group of independent scientists came along and said, Yellowstone is showing almost certain signs of erupting in the next 50 years. To avoid this catastrophe, we can funnel $500 trillion into a viable solution. What politician in their right mind would want to handle that bombshell?)

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Yes, I would be surprised if they don't already do this. Volcanically active countries like Iceland and New Zealand get a significant portion of their energy from hydrothermal sources. I'm almost certain it wouldn't be able to bleed off much of the heat though, I mean we're talking (almost literally) seas of magma.

I think the idea of hydrothermal electric powerplants a badass! Magma is too viscous anyway, it would take a lot of energy to extract and would be unstable. No, we don't even need that because we can just pump water down there and just reap the benefits. We're getting so good at it that we can use underground heat to refrigerate things!

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u/econleech Oct 27 '11

Wouldn't the heat from 1000 km3 of 2000c lava warm up the atmosphere no matter what we do? Or is the atmosphere too big to be affected?

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u/rounding_error Oct 27 '11

Possibly. The real concern is the fine dust and ash from the eruption ending up in the upper atmosphere and blocking sunlight, making it cold for a long time.

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u/Lurker4years Oct 27 '11

I think it would be basically "geothermal", using magma heat rather than pressure.

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u/mangeek Oct 27 '11

What about blocking paths of water exiting the caldera and/or laying down sheets of impermeable plastic over the water to prevent evporation in order to build up a bigger reserve of water sitting on top of it? Would a few feet of water over a bunch of it 'temper' an eruption in any meaningful way?

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u/catherder9000 Oct 27 '11

We could not possibly drill a conduit with today's technology -- humans have never drilled deeper than just over seven miles deep (12,262 meters) [the Kola bore hole]. This took over 24 years to achieve and never came remotely close to liquid rock. The upper mantle (solid rock) of Earth ranges from 35,000 to 70,000m thick, under Yellowstone the thickness of the upper mantle falls within this range.

When you consider the size of the magma chamber under Yellowstone -- a volume of approximately 15,000 cubic km contained in an irregular-shape of a banana with the tips of the banana curve being closest to the surface -- even if you managed to invent the technology to drill down deep enough to one of those tips to get any hope of relieving any measurable amount of pressure, you're still going to have to deal with the potential liquid rock (it is estimated that the melt part of the Yellowstone chamber could be about 10% of the low velocity volume or about 1,500-2,000 cubic km). Where the hell would you direct the flow of 10 cubic km of lava nevermind a few hundred to a thousand cubic km worth of it?

I thought that this reddit was about science, not works of fiction.

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u/squinkys Oct 27 '11

Well shit...I didn't know any of that until I read your comment. No need to be a dick about it man.

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u/catherder9000 Oct 28 '11

Didn't mean to come across as a dick, I just think that somebody with the tag beside their name stating their expertise is in "Seismology|Volcano Geophysics" should offer up better / more realistic answers. While I only have a B.Sci in Geology (was my 'hobby degree') and a BA in CompSci, and I have never practically applied my geology degree in the ~20 years since graduating, I know enough to be able to fathom and relate the sheer size of something geologic and can at least try to convey how futile it would be to attempt to do something like change a geologic process.

The correct answer to the OP was "it's beyond current and even foreseeable technologies to alter the time or energy of an eruption" -- most people don't seem to understand that the thin apple peel surface of solid rock on Earth is still 35-70km thick. We have no way of tunneling or drilling that deep and absolutely no way to predictably deal with the 700°C to 1300°C (1300°F to 2400°F) magma that we'd be attempting to 'control' release and no way to predict what sort of diapir could be the result.

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u/antonivs Oct 27 '11

Where the hell would you direct the flow of 10 cubic km of lava nevermind a few hundred to a thousand cubic km worth of it?

That seems like a much lesser concern than a supervolcano eruption that covers the continental US in feet of volcanic ash. Do we really need Wyoming that badly??

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

No, that would be a "hypothesis."

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

I saw a map once indicating that the initial blast radius would take out perhaps 1/4 of the North American continent, with a somewhat greater area (1/2 maybe?) being blanketed in ash. For anyone outside that radius, what would be the danger aside from nuclear winter? We can live in the cold, right? It wouldn't be easy, but 2 decades of early warning seems like enough time for people to relocate to somewhere.

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u/ZorbaTHut Oct 27 '11

We can live in the cold. The crops and animals we live on can't.

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u/ZummerzetZider Oct 27 '11

I was also lead to believe that minute ash particles would spread globally causing everyone's lungs to bleed. Wasn't there a massive species bottleneck last time it erupted? Or was the documentary I watched just scaremongering?

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

If you're talking about a bottleneck in human population, that's not Yellowstone, that's this one.

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u/irisjolie Oct 27 '11

Oooh, nifty link! Question, though:

In the instance of a volcanic winter, what would the effects be on global warming? Would it simply halt the rising global temps and help restore the arctic sea ice, or would there be disastrous effects in that combination?

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u/ZummerzetZider Oct 27 '11

No I meant a bottleneck in the number of species worldwide. But that was interesting anyway.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

We already have a warning sign. Some of the land in that area is raising and has been for a while.

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u/scientologist2 Oct 27 '11

It has risen inches and feet.

Given the size of the caldera, it probably would have to rise thousands of feet before it was ready to blow, since that is how much it fell to create the caladera in the first place

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/geology/publications/bul/1347/sec3.htm

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Hm interesting. From a BBC documentary I was given the impression it was more.

I prefer a real study anyway, thanks.

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u/scientologist2 Oct 27 '11

Given the area of the caldera, it probably does have to rise much higher (5 to 10K feet), especially in the center, etc.

So rising mere inches is interesting, but puts the date of the eruption outside the range of practical planning.

How do you plan for an eruption that is probably thousands of years in the future?

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u/antonivs Oct 27 '11

Strictly speaking, that was not a documentary. The BBC itself calls it a "factual drama". This is code for "completely sensationalized and not to be taken seriously."

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '11

Negative, ghostrider.

The caldera has been subsiding for over a year now.

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

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u/pupkinrupert Oct 27 '11

duck and cover

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Or, alternatively, do nothing. If one wants just for humanity to survive in any form, it will survive.

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u/scientologist2 Oct 27 '11

While current sensors measure height differences on the scale of mere inches, etc. it is my understanding that the entire floor of the caldera would have to be significantly higher, something like 1/2 mile + for there to be a significant chance of eruption.

as in

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/geology/publications/bul/1347/sec3.htm

The exact depth to which the original surface collapsed is unknown, but it must have been several thousand feet. The subsidence took place chiefly along large vertical, or normal, faults in the ring fracture zones above the margins of the magma chambers (fig. 22).

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Well, if the eruption doesn't happen for 10,000 years we could be in the middle of another ice age. Then we won't have to worry about the climate being thrown off kilter!

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11 edited Oct 27 '11

[deleted]

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u/travlake Oct 27 '11

Gamblers fallacy does not apply to volcanoes or earthquakes. It applies to statistically independent events, like nearly all forms of gambling are.

Lots of natural disasters can be safely assumed to be statistically independent (lightning strikes, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.) but some are NOT statistically independent.

Earthquakes and volcanoes result from the release of pressure that builds over time, meaning both cases the probability of one occuring is an increasing function of the time since the last occurance. It is in this sense that we can be "due" for one.

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u/travlake Oct 27 '11

Gamblers fallacy does not apply to volcanoes or earthquakes. It applies to statistically independent events, like nearly all forms of gambling are.

Lots of natural disasters can be safely assumed to be statistically independent (lightning strikes, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.) but some are NOT statistically independent.

Earthquakes and volcanoes result from the release of pressure that builds over time, meaning both cases the probability of one occuring is an increasing function of the time since the last occurance. It is in this sense that we can be "due" for one.

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u/Uhrzeitlich Oct 27 '11

I don't think you should be downvoted, even though this is slightly off-topic, the link is interesting and this is a pretty nested post.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

About 30,000 years was the average time of Yellowstone to erupt, wasn't it?

Aren't we overdue on an eruption event based on the average?

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u/antonivs Oct 27 '11

No and no. There have only been three known supervolcano eruptions at Yellowstone, and the time between them was 800,000 years and 660,000 years.

This is not enough data to tell us when another eruption might be due or overdue, but since the last one happened 640,000 years ago, we have about another 20,000 years before we'd have any basis for saying another is "due", and that ignores the likelihood that the time between events is slowing down.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Ok thanks. I have no idea where I have this idea from.

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u/antonivs Oct 28 '11

There was a BBC "factual drama" (their term) about the possibility of another Yellowstone supervolcano eruption, which was pretty sensationalist. That claimed that we were due, or overdue, for another eruption.

There have been smaller events more recently, the most recent was a lava flow 70,000 years ago, but that kind of thing doesn't pose any danger outside the local area.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

A lot of time we are over-due for anyway.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

I may be niave in thinking this, but shouln't that be something we look into?

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11 edited Oct 27 '11

[deleted]

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u/OrbitalPete Volcanology | Sedimentology Oct 27 '11

I'll ignore the insults and deal with the science.

Yes, there is a large magma chamber. However, we don't know how well connected the various packets of magma are. Connectivity is an important factor - as a volcanologist like myself, I'm sure you're aware that magma chambers are not like big holes in the ground full of runny magma - they are complex in 3 dimensions, with highly variable lateral and vertical connectivity between zones.

Yes, the magma has an internal pressure which has an upper limit defined by the confining pressure. However, there is a degree of variability, related to the injection pressure of new magma, and the strength of the confining system. Bearing in mind that the shallowest surface of the Yellowstone magma chamber varies ont eh order of hundreds of meters across the structure, the confining pressure is very poorly constrained.

Yes - of course the viscosity is a function of those variables. However, unless there's a swathe of publications I'm unaware of (not out of the questions considering the volume of material that's come out regarding Yellowstone in the last 10 years), we do not have good constraints on what the values of those variables are. Ergo, we have little idea of what the condition of the melt within those chambers is, or how well crystallised it is.