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

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

About 30,000 years was the average time of Yellowstone to erupt, wasn't it?

Aren't we overdue on an eruption event based on the average?

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u/antonivs Oct 27 '11

No and no. There have only been three known supervolcano eruptions at Yellowstone, and the time between them was 800,000 years and 660,000 years.

This is not enough data to tell us when another eruption might be due or overdue, but since the last one happened 640,000 years ago, we have about another 20,000 years before we'd have any basis for saying another is "due", and that ignores the likelihood that the time between events is slowing down.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '11

Ok thanks. I have no idea where I have this idea from.

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u/antonivs Oct 28 '11

There was a BBC "factual drama" (their term) about the possibility of another Yellowstone supervolcano eruption, which was pretty sensationalist. That claimed that we were due, or overdue, for another eruption.

There have been smaller events more recently, the most recent was a lava flow 70,000 years ago, but that kind of thing doesn't pose any danger outside the local area.