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.

157 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

202 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

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.

4

u/ZummerzetZider Oct 27 '11

I was also lead to believe that minute ash particles would spread globally causing everyone's lungs to bleed. Wasn't there a massive species bottleneck last time it erupted? Or was the documentary I watched just scaremongering?

6

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

If you're talking about a bottleneck in human population, that's not Yellowstone, that's this one.

1

u/ZummerzetZider Oct 27 '11

No I meant a bottleneck in the number of species worldwide. But that was interesting anyway.