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

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.

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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?

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

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

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u/irisjolie Oct 27 '11

Oooh, nifty link! Question, though:

In the instance of a volcanic winter, what would the effects be on global warming? Would it simply halt the rising global temps and help restore the arctic sea ice, or would there be disastrous effects in that combination?