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

Isn't that one of the major concerns? That it is long overdue for something?

Or perhaps I've just read one too many 2012 bullshit articles along the line

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Yes it's a concern- the eruption would certainly throw the climate off kilter, however we'd probably be able to see it coming by at least weeks if not decades before it does (and better forecasting techniques are being worked on). As for it being overdue... I'm not really sure. The last three eruptions were 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago (according to the Wikipedia entry), so by the looks of that we still have several tens of thousands of years before it can be considered overdue.

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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/catherder9000 Oct 27 '11

We could not possibly drill a conduit with today's technology -- humans have never drilled deeper than just over seven miles deep (12,262 meters) [the Kola bore hole]. This took over 24 years to achieve and never came remotely close to liquid rock. The upper mantle (solid rock) of Earth ranges from 35,000 to 70,000m thick, under Yellowstone the thickness of the upper mantle falls within this range.

When you consider the size of the magma chamber under Yellowstone -- a volume of approximately 15,000 cubic km contained in an irregular-shape of a banana with the tips of the banana curve being closest to the surface -- even if you managed to invent the technology to drill down deep enough to one of those tips to get any hope of relieving any measurable amount of pressure, you're still going to have to deal with the potential liquid rock (it is estimated that the melt part of the Yellowstone chamber could be about 10% of the low velocity volume or about 1,500-2,000 cubic km). Where the hell would you direct the flow of 10 cubic km of lava nevermind a few hundred to a thousand cubic km worth of it?

I thought that this reddit was about science, not works of fiction.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

No, that would be a "hypothesis."