In Stephen King’s short story ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ The protagonist’s brother plans to bring about world peace. He does so by dumping thousands of gallons of a special chemical into an active volcano, which spreads his chemical completely around the globe-seeding it throughout the world’s water supply. So my question is how possible would that be? To literally use a volcano to disperse a chemical compund wordwide?
You’d want to use a pair of volcanoes, one in each hemisphere. Air (and the things in it) has a hard time crossing the Equator.
Volcanoes certainly can distribute material worldwide (you can see haze in the sky from an eruption on the other side of the planet). The difficult part would be providing enough of your chemical that it’s not diluted to uselessness in the process, and making it something that can survive the violence of the eruption and the upper atmosphere.
I’d be curious how King explained the properties of a chemical compund that was stable enough to withstand the heat of a volcano but yet significantly biologically active in minute doses. I don’t think even a prion would qualify.
Wait, does this mean the compound was dispersed when the active volcano erupted? That’s not really going to be possible in reality. Firstly because lava is hot, and secondly because no volcano will have worldwide dispersal.
Any single volcano with a truly worldwide dispersal is likely to be a significant problem for humanity all by itself.
You are talking about super volcanos such as Yellowstone or Tuapo and they would also need to be pretty large eruptions relative to the history of those volcanoes in themselves, in other words not only would it have to be a Yellowstone event, it would have to be one of the larger Yellowstone events.
In such a case, you probably would not need the poison anyway, and a few thousand gallons of it would be so absolutely miniscule in terms of the overall volcanic ejecta as to be meaningless, you would need millions of tons of fluid, many millions I would expect.
The really fine ash particles definitely will distribute throughout the whole hemisphere even with a relatively small volcano. Small amounts of Mt Saint Helens ash were found in the upper atmosphere for years after the 1980 eruption, which may be where the author got the idea.
But the big problem with this is that the only thing the volcano would really be useful for is getting the material into the upper atmosphere in the first place. After that, it’s just normal atmospheric circulation that moves the ash around the world. Sending the stuff up in an airplane or a weather balloon would have the same effect, without the logistical issues associated with a volcano. It certainly doesn’t have that super-villian flair to it though.