First, yellow stone blowing would not trigger extinction, it’s going to suck for majority of NA, but climate change would only be temperate.
So for the thing to actually erupt, you need sufficient magma and pressure building. If we drilled a deep hole and nuked it… You just get a nuke going off, because the magic pressure that actually has the thing spewing everywhere just isn’t present.
Probably not. Yellowstone’s magma chamber is many miles underground and has only a small amount of magma in it currently. even if you could dig down that far with nukes, the released pressure likely wouldn’t cause any substantial eruption.
You’d need to increase the volume of magma and the pressure on the magma enough for it to burst. If you had a weapon that produced pressurized magma in enormous volumes, then you don’t really need a super volcano.
Brian Wilcox did theorize that were you to drill straight down into it and introduce water at high pressure, you could potentially enbrittle the cap of the volcano and trigger a harmful release of gasses. That gets you something like a triggered volcano, but you’re releasing less material at less pressure because that’s all the material and pressure available.
No more than putting a firecracker in a steam engine.
The amount of energy in a supervolcano is enormous. But it has to be there. It is enough pressure to place hundreds of cubic kilometres of rock into the air. Even tickling it with a nuke wouldn’t be more than a mosquito bite.
Could we? Probably, but it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Would probably involve a nuke, but also a really deep borehole since the magma chamber is so deep. And there’s no research done on if its possible because we really, really wouldn’t want to.
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No.
First, yellow stone blowing would not trigger extinction, it’s going to suck for majority of NA, but climate change would only be temperate.
So for the thing to actually erupt, you need sufficient magma and pressure building. If we drilled a deep hole and nuked it… You just get a nuke going off, because the magic pressure that actually has the thing spewing everywhere just isn’t present.
Probably not. Yellowstone’s magma chamber is many miles underground and has only a small amount of magma in it currently. even if you could dig down that far with nukes, the released pressure likely wouldn’t cause any substantial eruption.
You’d need to increase the volume of magma and the pressure on the magma enough for it to burst. If you had a weapon that produced pressurized magma in enormous volumes, then you don’t really need a super volcano.
Brian Wilcox did theorize that were you to drill straight down into it and introduce water at high pressure, you could potentially enbrittle the cap of the volcano and trigger a harmful release of gasses. That gets you something like a triggered volcano, but you’re releasing less material at less pressure because that’s all the material and pressure available.
No more than putting a firecracker in a steam engine.
The amount of energy in a supervolcano is enormous. But it has to be there. It is enough pressure to place hundreds of cubic kilometres of rock into the air. Even tickling it with a nuke wouldn’t be more than a mosquito bite.
Could we? Probably, but it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Would probably involve a nuke, but also a really deep borehole since the magma chamber is so deep. And there’s no research done on if its possible because we really, really wouldn’t want to.