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Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

askageologist.blogspot.com

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Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#81

Post by kingaillas »

gambiting wrote: post #18
Supermancho wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an issue of national security. I would not want to be the person who spends money to set up drilling toward the Yellowstone Supervolcano without alerting the US Department of the Interior of the plans.

I can only imagine that such a massive enterprise would be entirely conducted by the US Government, probably any of the military branches(is Engineers Corps still a thing?)

The Army Corps of Engineers is a thing... their civil works authority makes them the final authority on water management (changing river flow, dams, anything related to water management.) Not sure about supervolcanos though, couldn't find that on their website.

I am sure that a minimum of the US Geological Survey and ACE will be involved in any supervolcano remediation plan. And probably FEMA but hopefully they won't need to act. ;)

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#82

Post by [deleted] »

gambiting wrote: post #18
Supermancho wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an issue of national security. I would not want to be the person who spends money to set up drilling toward the Yellowstone Supervolcano without alerting the US Department of the Interior of the plans.

I can only imagine that such a massive enterprise would be entirely conducted by the US Government, probably any of the military branches(is Engineers Corps still a thing?)

[deleted]

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#83

Post by margalabargala »

anm89 wrote: post #42

Follow up question: if you were able to meaningfully release that heat, would it be enough to affect the global climate?

Generally no. Heat on earth is radiated out to space quite quickly.

When Mount St Helens exploded, it released about 1.0e11 MJ of energy. The earth receives 21MJ of energy from the sun, per day, per square meter. So MSH in total released as much energy in total as a square of land 70km on a side receives in a single day from the sun. Which isn't tiny, but is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the whole planet.

Considering that this hypothetical heat source would be very concentrated and so would radiate to space efficiently and not spread out as much, I wouldn't expect it to have much of any effect on the climate.

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#84

Post by aspenmayer »

hilbert42 wrote: post #78

"People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater." I can well attest to that. A year or so after the major eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, I had…

External links to your photos are definitely on topic. Please post them for us!

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#85

Post by db65edfc7996 »

ortusdux wrote: post #36
upwardbound wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly: apparently it would be a good idea to destroy the Martian moon Phobos before settling the planet. It's a fascinating proposal and makes sense; you can read about it here: https://marspedia.org/Bringing_down_Phobos

If we are going down that rabbit hole, I love the plan to create an artificial Martian magnetosphere by placing a magnetic field generating satellite between mars and the solar winds. Generating an atmosphere on mars is all well and good, but it will just blow away again without some protection. The generator would only require roughly 583.9 exajoules, or roughly the world's total energy consumption in 2020. https://…

>Generating an atmosphere on mars is all well and good, but it will just blow away again without some protection.

NASA estimates the Martian atmosphere is ~2.5e16 kgs[0]. Current estimate[1] is that the Martian atmosphere loses 2-3 kg/s. Presently losing something on the order of 1e-9 percentage per day. I think if humans ever have the ability to thicken the Martian atmosphere, we can cover the loss.

[0] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm... [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2018.05.030

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#86

Post by Brian_K_White »

jjk166 wrote: post #17
ortusdux wrote: post #8

Re: the first paragraph's reference to nuking the Deepwater horizon's oil leak, Soviet engineers demonstrated that this was a viable technique back in the 60's. Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years, but this is the only one I can think of that is actually somewhat of a good idea. Any fallout is minor and contained under 1km+ of bedrock, and the harm prevented is wort…

The author's logic is that only things comparable in scale to a volcano can cancel out the volcano by brute force, and nuclear detonations are thousands to millions of times smaller than volcanic eruptions. Proposals for things like this involve using nuclear detonations to make small but critical disruptions to systems, so the logic doesn't apply, but without actually digging into it you generally wouldn't know that…

I would think the biggest point about collapsing a well is that the well IS a human-made, human-scale object. It IS a blunt instrument not a pin prick in that case.

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#88

Post by ceocoder »

intpx wrote: post #52
ethbr0 wrote: post #45

My favorite National Park Service quip of all time. At the bottom of the page on Yellowstone's volcano [0] are a few questions and answers, and among them this gem: >> What is Yellowstone National Park doing to stop or prevent an erruption? > Nothing can be done to prevent an eruption. The temperatures, pressures, physical characteristics of partially molten rock, and immensity of the magma chamber are beyond human a…

This is a very clear distillation of the absolute lack of imagination that is endemic across the National Parks Service. It is this mindset that stagnating progress in the National Parks. 105 years and there have been no major developments in Parks technologies. No waterfalls running in reverse, no water-skiing bison, no Grander Canyon. /s

You really had me until the very end, I even had a “parks don’t need disrupting” speech planned

Re: Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)

#90

Post by chasd00 »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #21

Also if you apply hydraulic equations to the lave through such a small diameter borehole, you quickly find that you would NOT be in control of anything and you'd probably do more to trigger a large eruption - the velocity of lava out of such a borehole would be hypersonic at least and quickly open the borehole to form a new vent equal to an actual eruption.

Well if it came out above the escape velocity maybe it would just shoot off into space ;)
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