Is Yellowstone Park sitting on a supervolcano that’s about to blow?
I’m just curious if anything can be done to relieve the pressure, such as drilling a hole near the magma area to let some of the steam and pressure and debris come out safely. Or perhaps other measures.
Like controlled fires to keep wildfires from happening, kind of thing.
I know there’s another thread on this article, but it’s about proofreading, I have a ? about solving.
The logistics of drilling wells that deep are so nearly impossible that it would be a triumph of engineering greater than that anything man has ever done before.
It would put the Pyramids, Great Wall, Moon landings and every building every built by man to shame - and it would probably be ineffective.
We’ve drilled holes as deep as 7.4 miles before - are you telling me that drilling a hole that deep here wouldn’t do anything? I realize the “head” is 50 miles deep and 7.4 miles isn’t 50 miles, but it’s still pretty far, and for all we know, it will act like a pinprick in a waterbed - let pressure out slowly so we don’t have a big one later.
There’s another thread on this somewhere on the board, and the answer to drilling to relieve the pressure is that we wouldn’t be able to drill holes that wouldn’t close up almost immediately (because we’re dealing with magma, not water) unless we “drilled” the holes with a string of nuclear devices, and that would create another set of control issues (we don’t want to end up with a crater the size of Montana, even if it would be better than a supervolcano); plus, even though the relative danger of the radioactivity from a string of nukes is small compared to the danger of the volcano, people would still freak the hell out about the idea of using atom bombs for pretty much anything.
Link to ongoing thread in GQ: Could We relive [sic] the Pressure build-Up at Yellowstone?