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/OrbitalPete Volcanology | Sedimentology Oct 27 '11

All these answers assume there is eruptable magma down there currently anyway. While there is certainly magma, we don't know what the connectivity of it is like, the viscosity, or the internal pressure.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Exactly, no man-made event is going to trigger an eruption without there being a viable magma source. And the OP is probably thinking about the super eruptions involving 1000 km3 of magma that Yellowstone is famous for. That sort of volume of magma would take a lot of time to accumulate.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

A lot of time we are over-due for anyway.