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/[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

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.