Relative to tectonic/geologic forces, are nuclear weapons at all substantial?
Would nuking the Yellowstone supervolcano (magma chamber) either on the surface or belowground cause any sort of eruption? Could the Russians target it as a first strike in WW3? Or if we saw a huge eruption coming, could the US use a series of smaller nukes to release some of the pressure and create less catastrophic eruptions?
Gleeful hand-rubbing encouraged.
I think this comes under “no way to know”.
Unless the caldera was on the edge of erupting anyway I doubt a man-made bomb such as is common (if that’s the right word) today would trigger it.
Attempts to “relieve pressure” could precipitate an eruption rather than moderate one.
This question has come up previously, and I believe the consensus was that using nukes to deal with volcanoes or potential earthquakes would be highly impractical and would likely either do nothing or only make matters worse.
Nukes are fairly good for leveling cities and spreading radiation… but that’s about it.
As far as the Russians targeting a super volcano as opposed to a weapons dump, populated city or factory, I would really doubt that… but how would anyone on this board know for sure?
We already know the answer to this, but we aren’t telling.
No, seriously, there has been much underground testing of nuclear weapons and we know a lot about geology and soils engineering. I doubt this has not been studied and modeled by now. The fact that it hasn’t been published may indicate something.
I am not any relevant professional, but I’m pretty sure neither you guys nor any other countries that like to play with things that go “BOOM!” have done underground nuke tests anywhere near areas that are actively volcanic (has any testing been done in areas that could even be called geologically unstable?). For that matter, there is not much soil in an active volcano, is there?
I know you guys are good, but I don’t believe that you guys can predict the results of potential (notice I said potential) cataclysmic activities with minimal information to work with,
I don’t think it would influence the magma jutting upward from way down below. You’d just end up with a lot of radioactive magma all over the place. E-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t.
You know, just for the hell of it.
I am quite sure there is a specific SKU for this in the Rhymer Industries catalog.
[quote=“dolphinboy, post:3, topic:686992”]
This question has come up previously, and I believe the consensus was that using nukes to deal with volcanoes or potential earthquakes would be highly impractical and would likely either do nothing or only make matters worse.
Nukes are fairly good for leveling cities and spreading radiation… but that’s about it.
As far as the Russians targeting a super volcano as opposed to a weapons dump, populated city or factory, I would really doubt that… but how would anyone on this board know for sure?[/QUOTE]
Unless they’re a spy! hee hee 
The top of the magma chamber appears to be about 5km down. Even using nukes, that is a pretty difficult task to get a path that deep. Maybe a succession of bunker busting deliverly vehicles with a reasonably big weapon would get you there. Each one would excavate a reasonably large sphere, and the next go deeper. Maybe 50 nukes would do it.
The next question is what happens. I suspect we have the computer power and general understanding of the physics well enough sorted to be able to model it - so long as we knew what it was we had to model. And that we don’t know. However my guess is that it goes one of two ways.
The magma is under ridiculous pressure, and this keeps a very large amount of gas dissolved in it. If the pressure is relieved the gas expands. The magma becomes a foam of sorts, and will expand out of the opening. The danger is that the whole shebang goes off like a warm bottle of soda when you take the lid off. The passage of magma expands the hole diameter, and a large fraction of the magma chamber explosively empties itself. The other possibility is that the hole isn’t quite big enough for the chain reaction to get going, and the magma cools off enough as it rises to start to block the hole, and it all fizzles out. Finding the perfect hole size where you manage to relieve the pressure of magma in a controlled manner over a long period of time is essentially fantasy.
One of the conclusions of the decades and decades of underground nuclear testing was that nukes don’t work well for excavating material underground. When you explode a nuclear bomb underground in an area surrounded by rock, it forms a cavity by melting the surrounding rock. As you get deeper, though, the rocks are under greater pressure, raising their melting temperature and thus limiting the size of the cavity. The US actually ran a few tests with using nukes detonated in gas wells to stimulate production back in the 60’s. Even at only a few thousand feet down, using nukes in the 30 kiloton range only produced about a 25 by 100 meter cylindrical cavity.
So, you’d have to first drill all the way down to within 50 meters or so of the actual magma (easier said than done!) and then set up at least 50 nukes all the way down. Once you set them off, though, you’d only have a 25 meter hole, which would probably get plugged by cooling escaping magma fairly quickly. Since the hole would be narrower at the bottom, the magma might not even make it to the surface. Using bigger nukes might reduce the number of devices you need to use and/or make a somewhat bigger hole, but that increases the difficulty of drilling your initial hole.
Wouldn’t really work the way you envision. It’s the same reason you can’t dig tunnels using only explosives. The surrounding rock caves in, and you need people to clear out the rubble and establish a place for the next detonation. You might as well just use conventional explosives to dig the hole. Also, the matter left behind doesn’t simply disappear into energy. Unless you direct all that matter out the hole, there’s tons of original rock, now particulate matter just sitting down there on top of whatever else collapses on top of it.
ETA: Ninja’d (quite eloquently) by GreasyJack!
To just expound a little more on this, the way it worked during the “atomic fracking” experiments was that after the explosion, all the melted rock would settle to the bottom and solidify into a glassy plug. Because the glass was much denser than the original minerals and unlike the original rock has no pore space, it takes up a lot less room. It was also hoped that most of the radiation would be trapped in the glass so the gas produced by the well would be safe to use but it didn’t quite work out that way.
I’m not sure what the issues would be with the glass moving around in multiple explosions. The last test in the program actually did try to set off 3 separate nukes simultaneously to make a single 1000 foot “chimney” but the three cavities didn’t sucessfully connect.
Lessie…well, Nukemap gives the crater depth for a 100 Megaton surface burst at being about 1400 ft. But, like the name implies, that’s just for a bomb on the surface. The Sedan Crater, excavated by a 104 Kt weapon detonated in a shaft 635 feet deep, was 320 feet deep.
I don’t know of an US or Soviet test that excavated a deeper crater, but there might have been a proposed project or projects that would’ve dug deeper. But in any case, probably no single, militarized nuclear weapon—even a bunker buster—has been designed that’d do a better job than just parking the 100-Megaton nuke at ground level.
Here’s another way to look at this:
Yellowstone has had 6 earthquakes of 6.0 or more on the Richter scale in the last 50 years, with the highest at 7.5 in that period. (Wikipedia)
A 6.0 earthquake is equivalent in total power to a 15 kiloton nuke. The 7.5 earthquake is a 2.7 megaton nuke in energy equivalents. (Wikipedia)
That’s a fairly superficial comparison to this conversation because the energy types are not exactly the same, and because the placement of the nuke could be important… but it’s still relevant that Yellowstone is going through nuclear-scale seismic events fairly frequently without erupting. The system is not on some kind of hair trigger that would make it a promising target.
How much ground could a 25-meg H-bomb vaporize or heave out to make a crater? Assume ground or very near ground detonation? Your magma chamber is miles below the surface where the rocks already behave in plastic manner. If you are somehow able to place a nuke there and detonate it, you will create a large cavity that will immediately collapse and close. The French Muroroa underground test was conducted at a relatively shallow dept of 800 meters. A 2-kilometer crack appeared on the island during one test prior to the 1995 detonation.
Yeah, Yellowstone has had quakes. Several small ones, over an extended period of time. But what happens when several Tsar Bombs cause multiple, successive larger quakes? Heck, you could even set up the nukes to detonate in such a way that the shockwaves resonate, creating even bigger quakes, one after another.
Why does everyone think you need to poke a hole, to open a continuous path so that at noon sunlight can touch the lava? The chamber is already under extreme pressure. Think of the glass holding in a giant tank of water at an aquarium. You don’t need to poke a hole through to the water to get everyone wet, all you need to do is crack the glass a little so it’s structural integrity is gone, then let the pressure do most of the work it was doing anyways.
Of course it’d be a damned stupid thing to do, even for the Soviets, even in a nuclear exchange. If Yellowstone went off, it wouldn’t just cover the breadbasket (or corn belt) of the western hemisphere with ash, all the ash in the atmosphere would cause global famine. Though I’ve once read a ‘What If’ story of a hot Cold War, where the US nukes the Siberian forests, and the resulting fires cause similar atmospheric problems, so maybe the Soviets wouldn’t have hesitated regardless.
Don’t like to bump, and know it’s not quite kosher here, but I would like more info.
well how far down could you get it though? Nuclear weapons can be huge, and as you’re drilling, I think the ground gets very hot there, though how quickly I dunno. Or maybe not at all.
But just drilling a hole like that is a big endeavour
You’re assuming that Tsar Bomba would cause “larger quakes”. Even a fairly small earthquake has more energy than even a very large nuke.