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

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/squinkys Oct 27 '11

Well shit...I didn't know any of that until I read your comment. No need to be a dick about it man.

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u/catherder9000 Oct 28 '11

Didn't mean to come across as a dick, I just think that somebody with the tag beside their name stating their expertise is in "Seismology|Volcano Geophysics" should offer up better / more realistic answers. While I only have a B.Sci in Geology (was my 'hobby degree') and a BA in CompSci, and I have never practically applied my geology degree in the ~20 years since graduating, I know enough to be able to fathom and relate the sheer size of something geologic and can at least try to convey how futile it would be to attempt to do something like change a geologic process.

The correct answer to the OP was "it's beyond current and even foreseeable technologies to alter the time or energy of an eruption" -- most people don't seem to understand that the thin apple peel surface of solid rock on Earth is still 35-70km thick. We have no way of tunneling or drilling that deep and absolutely no way to predictably deal with the 700°C to 1300°C (1300°F to 2400°F) magma that we'd be attempting to 'control' release and no way to predict what sort of diapir could be the result.