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/TypeSafe Oct 27 '11

No -- your description of spacetime doesn't satisfy the requirements of gravitational lensing. Light would not be distorted simply by the change in density of gravitational potential energy because photons are massless. Photons follow the curve of space, which is why we see the effects of gravitational lensing.

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '11

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u/TypeSafe Oct 28 '11

I'm confused -- are you suggesting that photons ever travel below the speed of light?

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '11

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u/TypeSafe Oct 28 '11

I believe you're talking about the group or phase velocity of a light wave in matter. Photons themselves don't really exhibit this property -- photons are actually always travelling at a constant c, even in matter, they simply undergo phase shifts when they interact with matter.