What would be the cost of forcing a major volcanic eruption? How hard would it be, say for Mauna Loa – for the sake of argument, suppose you evacuate the Island first and want the biggest bang for your buck. Would you just drop an H-bomb somewhere that you’d get a big magma spurt? I’d like the least expensive solution; very rough price estimates are fine. Feel free to use ingredients of plutonium, etc. if you find it most expeditious.
Repeat the same calculation for a Yellowstone super-eruption, please. Thanks in advance.
Volcanos don’t occur because there is a hole in the crust; they occur because of a contentration of high pressure and concentration of silica in the mantle below which forces magma up through the crust, either along high shear regions (e.g. fault lines at the interfaces between tectonic plates) or at hotspots in mid-plate regions. Nuclear weapons (and bombs in general) are a very poor way of digging deep holes as they tend to remove material in shallow craters. The reason for this is that the bomb creates a pressure wave that is reflected by the Earth below such that once the pressure is equal to the weight of the material above it is relieved by ejecting that material. The only practical way to use a bomb to “create” a volcano would be to bore a hole down to the mantle and blow material back upward through the bore. Even then, unless it is in a particular high pressure region, the bore would likely just collapse upon itself and freeze the top layer of magma.
The only way to create a volcano artificially would be to pierce the crush all the way through with a very dense and fast moving meterorite. A solid bolide in the 150 m or larger category moving at high interplanetary speed could potentially punch a hole through solid crust and into mantle, creating conditions that could initiate a volcano, at least for a short eruption. A bolide on the order of 1 km diameter could potentially impact with enough momentum to penetrate and create conditions to support a supervolano. But the attendant damage from the impact alone would be sufficient to devastate the regional area for decades or centuries to come, notwithstanding any long term seismic effects.