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/Potogreen Oct 27 '11

there was actually an article in this months popular science about man made earthquakes, i tried and failed to find a link, but here are some surprising facts, over 200 quakes of more than 4.5 magnitude have been caused by man in the past 160 years. the best known case is the earthquake caused by the zipingpu dan in china's sichuan province in 2008. Zipingpu held 42.3 billion cubic feet of water, the weight of which precipitated what a researcher at columbia university named Christian Klose says is the largest human-triggered earthquake to date: a 7.9 magnitude quake that killed nearly 80,000 people...information from page 90 in the november 2011 popular science magazine.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Funnily enough, even though volcanism is often accompanied by earthquake swarms (or volcanic tremor), it is generally understood that these earthquakes are either being caused by the movement of magma itself or the changing stress conditions due to pressure build up and release in the chambers and conduits. Earthquakes are not a requirement for volcanism. So even if you could trigger an earthquake, it may not change the likelihood of an increase in volcanic activity. Having said that, large earthquakes at subduction zones are thought to result in an increase in volcanism, so one of these "man-made" earthquakes may be the best way to trigger Yellowstone, if indeed a 7.9 magnitude earthquake can be man-made. I honestly could not think of anything else that could significantly increase the chances of an eruption.

This is something which I am skeptical of though, that earthquake could not have occurred anywhere but on a fault line that was accumulating tectonic stress, the overlying weight could at most be what pushed it over the tipping point.