Dear physics geeks, could the LHC’s cooling system be repurposed to chill a volcano to stop or prevent an eruption? Looking forward to back of the envelope calculations regarding energy and cost if possible.
I would imagine you would need to scale up the cooling system by a few orders of magnitude to cool off a volcano.
And all the heat still has to go somewhere.
Suppose that geophysicists are telling us that this is “the big one” that is going to wipe out humanity within the next 10-20 years and so we consider any cost reasonable as long as it is actually doable.
People keep asking questions like this every time there is a natural disaster, from hurricanes to earthquakes.
Nature is ridiculously more powerful even in its minor manifestations, like this current volcano, than anything we can do. Remember, this volcano is sitting under a glacier, which is being boiled away. How is a cooling system to compare to that?
Actually doable? Not by human technology.
Are there any live streaming links for this volcano?
Yes, I’m extremely bored.
I said back of the envelope, not out of your arse!!
What’s the LHC?
The Large Hadron Collider which is cooled with ~130 short tons of liquid helium.
Large Hadron Collider*, @ CERN
- Be very careful when typing that in, or have your Google filter on fill blast. “Large hardon collider” brings up some truly terrible gay pr0n.
Presumably the Large Hadron Collider, and I think we are orders of magnitude away from anything even close to cooling a volcano, even the smallest one.
The closest thing I’ve seen is the cooling of a small portion of the lava flow from an Icelandic volcano that was going to cut off the port in the town. They did this by pumping sea water onto the lava stream in hopes that it would solidify in one spot, blocking the flow and forcing it elsewhere. The port was saved, but it’s not clear if all the work they did had any impact, or it was just happenstance. You can read about it in John McPhee’s “The Control of Nature”.
You’re talking about tampering with the geothermal evolution of the planet. Even if we had the capability to stop this eruption, we’d be literally playing with fire, and the consequences could be cataclysmic.
If you insist on tampering with it: How about finding a way to trap the particles that have already been erupted.
I don’t see any problem with keeping the lava underground. The idea is to provide a quick deep freeze that creates such a thick crust between the surface and the lava flow that it can’t penetrate back through anytime soon. Imagine keeping liquid helium over the entire surface area of a volcano - basically a mountain-sized deep freezer.
Note that while seawater won’t be as good a coolant as liquid helium, it’s actually very close, and there’s a heck of a lot more seawater than there is liquid helium. Molten lava will be somewhere over 1000 Kelvin, seawater will be around 300 K, and liquid helium will be around 4 K, which means that the temperature difference between the lava and the water will be about 70% of the temperature difference between lava and liquid helium. Actually, the water might even be more effective than an equal amount of liquid helium, since water probably has a significantly higher specific heat than helium. And if it’s frozen, like in the Icelandic glacier, then it’s even better, since it takes more heat to melt the ice, in addition to the heat used in raising the temperature.
Is this much different than simply exposing the lava to the atmosphere?
Water will cool things quicker than air. Take two pieces of steel and heat them up to red-hot. Then put one piece of steel in a bucket of water and let the other air cool. Check the temperatures of both a minute later. The liquid cooled one will be colder.
Ok, but I’m not sure I can really see using water to stop an eruption from happening. Since eruptions happen underwater (in the ocean) water is clearly not effective enough at cooling the earth.
So the question is, how much liquid helium are we talking?
A lot more than we have, by several orders of magnitude. And you have no way of getting it where you need it.
Well, based on Chronos’s numbers, I don’t think any amount of liquid helium would work, since, as you observe, no amount of water seems to work. As Chronos pointed out, the temperature difference is only 30% less for the water as compared to the helium, and water has much higher specific heat.
It’s not true that no amount of liquid helium or water would work, but I will accept that it is a very large amount.
Supposing we had enough coolant to simulate removing earth’s atmosphere - e.g., it is the volcano versus the vaccuum - what about then? I’m surprised no one has tried to actually compute the energy figures involved here. That’s really what I was hoping for. I’m getting answers of “that’s impossible” when I’m looking for “here’s the astronomically large figures I just computed.” Thanks!