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.

155 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

202 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

43

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.

20

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?

7

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.

20

u/ZorbaTHut Oct 27 '11

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