The concept of multiple nukes creating “resonating” shockwaves is not realistic, either. It’s more of an SF concept. An explosion doesn’t create waves with predictable or stable frequencies. The explosion covers nearly all frequencies. It’s close to “white” noise, so I’m not sure what you are getting to resonate.
I guess you mean somehow synchronizing the blast fronts to hit a single point at the same time? That may be possible (but logistically very, very difficult), but the Yellowstone caldera isn’t like a bottle with a single cork. There’s no single target to hit that would do the trick.
Likewise, the analogy of an aquarium isn’t apt. It’s not like the pressure chamber is covered by a single sheet of glass waiting for a single point of failure. It’s contained within an already leaky sieve of rock. A sieve with multiple cracks and multiple layers of rocks. Small amounts of pressure equivalent to the results of nuclear blasts are released constantly (hence the earthquakes). Just not nearly enough to avoid an eventual explosion. A nuke or even a series of nukes would most likely release a bit more pressure without appreciably changing the overall situation. Plus you’d have all the fallout to deal with.
What if…
and this is a combination of various stories…
The reason the planet is getting hot(poles melting) Is actually completely normal?
What if the REASONS for us having the poles, in the past, filled with so much ice and snow, not to mention the ice age, was all CAUSED by these super volcanoes in the first place?
None can prove otherwise, but it is definitely (to me) a probable fact!
Back to the post: I don’t think nukes or digging anywhere near volcanoes, is a smart idea!
I mean, when you peak under that tin foiled veggie platter on the barbecue, doesn’t the vapors hitting your fingers tell you something? Seriously?
Honestly, you’re just working from a faulty assumption and you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.
Let’s take the glass aquarium analogy. It’s a bad analogy. The layers of earth and rock are not like a sheet of glass. For starters, they’re not a solid piece of anything; they’re already pretty fractured up. They’re holding things in through sheer mass, not through structural strength. This is why making holes is difficult and potentially ineffective - given a chance, all that earth will happily move in to fill up a hole.
It’s like… imagine that you’re at the beach and you’ve been buried in the sand so deep that you can’t move. Someone comes by and removes a single bucketful of sand. That’s what bombing Yellowstone is like. It’s nothing like breaking glass at the aquarium.
I’ll leave it to the climate specialists, but let’s just say that they’ve tested this hypothesis and ones like it, and found them lacking. It simply doesn’t explain the observed evidence under current models of the climate.
To the extent that we can prove anything like this, it has been proven otherwise. At the very least, we can say with confidence that it is NOT “a probable fact.”
bandit76, you can prove otherwise. Ice ages are rare in our planets history, and ice at the poles is an relatively rare circumstance. Supervolcanos go off fairly regularly, down through the epochs, and don’t correlate strongly (if at all) with ice ages (though IIRC some believe the ‘snowball earth’ was ended by volcanism). They do cause global drops in temperature, but on the scale of years or decades, not millions of years.
Also thanks everyone for answering! I guess I knew that in the abstract (caves, aquifers, ect.), but when I thought it was under massive pressure I formed the wrong picture. But if it’s really the weight of the ground holding back the pressure of the magma chamber, then why do supervolcanos ‘blow’? I was under the impression that there was tons of pressure, and once it got out, it’s kind of like popping a balloon (or the aforementioned aquarium), where if there’s a hole it all goes out. But if that’s not the case because the hole will always collapse because of gravity, then how do they blow up? A massive magma surge from deeper in the planet?
You’re not entirely wrong with this idea, it’s just that I think you’re still thinking too much in terms of things like rubber balloons or glass tanks. Maybe I should say that you’re making a mistake of scale rather than of concept.
Looking specifically at Yellowstone, researchers can watch bulges in the terrain (National Geographic’s take on this). Notice that they specifically say that this bulge is a result of pressure increasing from the magma chamber, but that the magma is 10 km deep. Therefore, no one is worried about an explosion at this time. At 1 km deep, they’d be more worried. See how much role the sheer weight is playing? The volcano can shove all this dirt up by three inches a year without creating any holes sufficient for an eruption.
As a comparison that maybe fits your conception a little better, let’s look at the Mt St Helens eruption in 1980. For starters, it wasn’t just a matter of a little crack in the rock that allowed this eruption - it was actually the largest landslide ever recorded. (Wikipedia), moving about 0.7 cubic miles of material off the mountain.
The magma in preceding days had resulted in a 500-ft bulge, growing by 5 feet per day. So you can see both the scale and rate of bulging were enormously more than what we see in Yellowstone right now… and yet still not enough to cause the explosive eruption without the landslide to help uncork the situation.
A 104 kt nuke created the Sedan crater, which is .004 cubic miles in size. So… 200 nukes to move that much dirt?
Of course, the landslide was triggered by a 5.1 earthquake, and that’s more achievable with just a few nuclear weapons
But I hope you’re remembering that Mt St Helens was on the tipping point of an eruption under its own power. Volcanoes do not sit around ready to blow at any moment. As impressive as Yellowstone’s bulging is, it’s just not anything like a balloon ready to be popped at any moment.
The other thing going on during an eruption is some types of magma are full of gas which is held in suspension by the tremendous pressure. Until the lid comes off and then the gas comes out of solution.
In other words, a gassy magma volcano is a lot like a Coke & Mentos fountain. Once something, be it a nuke, earthquake, or magma pressure from below breaches the containment and lava starts to flow, it quickly “boils” and froths and expands violently as the gas comes out of solution. Then you rapidly get an effect like a dam bursting. The rapidly expanding magma tears a bigger hole, which in turn releases more pressure, which leads to more “boiling”, more hole tearing, etc.
Pretty quickly, like within a couple minutes, your original small breach has turned into a monster.
Coupled with what the folks above have said about the “lid” in most volcanos being huge volumes of loose but heavy material, you can see that what we have is a device with a hair trigger. Right now there’s lots of safety margin; the lid is plenty heavy to keep the pressure inside.
But if for whatever reason the margin is successively eroded, things will remain mostly calm until fairly suddenly they go supercritical.
A little wiki research will tell whether Yellowstone is thought to be gassy or not.
