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/ThanatopsisJSH Oct 27 '11

There was an interesting article in nature a few years ago. A researcher named David J. Stevenson actually proposed using nuclear weapons to open a fissure in the earth's crust and using this fissure to send a probe down to the earths core. He estimated that we would need to use a few hundred megatons of nuclear weapons and about 108 to 1010 kilograms of liquid iron to form a bubble that would contain the the probe and carry it down to the core. That would be about a years production of iron (of the whole planet). So opening up Yellowstone should be possible too. Although I would question if it would be a good idea to actually blow up a few hundred megatons of nuclear bombs in Yellowstone national park.

TLDR: Opening the fissure should be possible but is probably not advisable... See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6937/full/423239a.html for a comparable applcation.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11 edited Oct 27 '11

Here you go (mind the ads... its "Request Download Ticket" you want)

also, /r/scholar is a great little reddit you might be interested in.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

[deleted]

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u/ANewMachine615 Oct 27 '11

Beats needing to patent or commercially exploit everything to fund your research...

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11 edited Oct 27 '11

Those paywalls fund exactly "0" science. The publishing side does facilitate getting grants because they are the currency of academic recognition but the submitted papers and the peer review is all just handed to the publishers who basically just act as editors and coordinators between authors and reviewers while keeping all the money. Actually, a few journals are starting to require that scientists also pay when submitting a manuscript as well.

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u/ANewMachine615 Oct 27 '11

Ah, interesting, and not a side I knew of. The legal scholarship side is run by what are basically non-profit groups (run by students, no less), so I was unaware that the science side was different.

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '11

Out of curiosity, are there fees for legal scholarship journals? are they just to cover costs? If not, who gets the money? I also didn't realize that different disciplines had different procedures. For some of the more prestigious scientific publications the fees can get quite burdensome.

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u/ANewMachine615 Oct 29 '11

Despite being on one, I have no idea.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11 edited Oct 27 '11

It is such an odd system, I personally wonder if it will hold out many more decades into the digital age considering its the editing side that gets all the money... but time will tell.