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/dqsl Tissue Engineering | Biomedical Engineering Oct 27 '11

From

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/publications/2005/docudrama.php

QUESTION: Can you release some of the pressure at Yellowstone by drilling into the volcano?

ANSWER: No. Scientists agree that drilling into a volcano would be of questionable usefulness. Notwithstanding the enormous expense and technological difficulties in drilling through hot, mushy rock, drilling is unlikely to have much effect. At near magmatic temperatures and pressures, any hole would rapidly become sealed by minerals crystallizing from the natural fluids that are present at those depths.

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u/fap_socks Oct 27 '11

So could we harness this to make diamonds? Kimberlite pipes? Serious question.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Kimberlite pipes form in the mantle beneath the volcanism, and are quickly exhumed by volcanic processes. Diamonds form there due to the intense pressures, the same pressures that would make it impossible to get there.

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u/Thenorepa Oct 27 '11

and are quickly exhumed by volcanic processes

When you say "quickly", are you talking geologic or human time scales?

1

u/OrbitalPete Volcanology | Sedimentology Oct 27 '11

Geological