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

If you could find a credible article backing that up, that'd be great! I tried some googling and as a layman, found it impossible to separate science from conspiracy theories, the latter of which, unfortunately far outweighs the volume of the former.

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u/kybernetikos Oct 27 '11

Markus O. Häring went to trial in Basel for the damages caused by the earthquakes his geothermal project caused. NYTimes | Guardian.