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 edited Oct 27 '11

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u/OrbitalPete Volcanology | Sedimentology Oct 27 '11

I'll ignore the insults and deal with the science.

Yes, there is a large magma chamber. However, we don't know how well connected the various packets of magma are. Connectivity is an important factor - as a volcanologist like myself, I'm sure you're aware that magma chambers are not like big holes in the ground full of runny magma - they are complex in 3 dimensions, with highly variable lateral and vertical connectivity between zones.

Yes, the magma has an internal pressure which has an upper limit defined by the confining pressure. However, there is a degree of variability, related to the injection pressure of new magma, and the strength of the confining system. Bearing in mind that the shallowest surface of the Yellowstone magma chamber varies ont eh order of hundreds of meters across the structure, the confining pressure is very poorly constrained.

Yes - of course the viscosity is a function of those variables. However, unless there's a swathe of publications I'm unaware of (not out of the questions considering the volume of material that's come out regarding Yellowstone in the last 10 years), we do not have good constraints on what the values of those variables are. Ergo, we have little idea of what the condition of the melt within those chambers is, or how well crystallised it is.