Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology => Topic started by: profound on 20/05/2018 17:17:11
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I have seen many reports of this volcano with everyone just standing round and doing hand wringing
and "observing' while this volcano was predicted well in advance to blow but no one has bothered to do anything about it.
I find it really stupid and idiotic that not one of these 'scientists' had the wit to stop it .
All they are interested in is 'observing' it an academic exercise and doing the usual hand ringing in front of the cameras.
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How do you propose to stop a volcano from erupting using current technology?
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It seems that Profound doesn't understand that it's big.
You can't just stick a cork in it.
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Some people dislike science because it claims to do so much, and others dislike it because it can't doesn't do enough.
- Profound seems to be in the second camp....
- Like the Italian government, which jailed a group of geologists for failing to predict an earthquake...
Most people just don't realise that this incredible creation around us is:
More powerful than we can handle:
- We use geothermal energy (eg in Iceland) - but a volcano will just melt the geothermal energy plant
- A large earthquake release far more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb
- We use electricity, but a lightning bolt will just short-circuit the transmission lines and blow up any electronics attached to it
- We can generate proton collisions in the LHC with energies in the TeV range, but there are cosmic rays striking the Earth every year with energies a million times higher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray
Smaller than we can handle:
- We can't directly see structures within the living cell with light, and yet we are made of cells
- We know that there are structures within the proton, but even our biggest particle accelerators have trouble peering inside
Bigger than we can handle:
- The James Webb telescope (if it ever gets into operation) will help us see parts of the universe that have faded from our view
More complex than we can handle:
- We can predict the weather out to a week using present technology, but beyond that, it is overwhelmed by chaos
- We can read the genome of a cell, but we are just starting to deal with the genome of a cancer
- The complex interactions of an ecosystem are beyond us
We even have trouble dealing with problems of our own creation:
- Pollution
- Inadequate fresh water supplies
- Habitat destruction
- Ocean acidification
- Although some have now improved like acidic rain and ozone destruction
So we are making progress, but our current capabilities are miniscule compared to the complexities of the universe...
We need a realistic perspective of where we are...
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Yeah, it's like plate tectonics! Everyone always talks about it, but nobody ever does anything! 🤷♂️
🤪
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How do you propose to stop a volcano from erupting using current technology?
What is a volcano?
high pressure and heat from below causes pressure buildup which strong enough to melt,bend rocks and cause fissures.
How do we stop it?
Simple.
Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure/excess lave into the sea or a unused area of the island.
It can't explode because the pressure has been released.Just like a boiler pressure valve.
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How do you propose to stop a volcano from erupting using current technology?
What is a volcano?
high pressure and heat from below causes pressure buildup which is strong enough to melt,bend rocks and cause fissures and explosions due to said pressure.
How do we stop it?
Simple.
Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure into the sea or a unused area of the island.
It can't explode because the pressure has been released.Just like a boiler pressure valve.
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What is a volcano?
high pressure and heat from below causes pressure buildup which strong enough to melt,bend rocks and cause fissures.
How do we stop it?
Simple.
Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure/excess lave into the sea or a unused area of the island.
It can't explode because the pressure has been released.Just like a boiler pressure valve.
Ironically, doing that could actually trigger an eruption. Magma contains dissolved gases under high pressure that can come out of solution suddenly when that pressure is reduced.
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Yeah, it's like plate tectonics! Everyone always talks about it, but nobody ever does anything! 🤷♂️
🤪
Yeah, I agree. All you have to do is drill some deep holes and put big pegs in, that’d stop it.
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What is a volcano?
high pressure and heat from below causes pressure buildup which strong enough to melt,bend rocks and cause fissures.
How do we stop it?
Simple.
Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure/excess lave into the sea or a unused area of the island.
It can't explode because the pressure has been released.Just like a boiler pressure valve.
Ironically, doing that could actually trigger an eruption. Magma contains dissolved gases under high pressure that can come out of solution suddenly when that pressure is reduced.
so? let them come out at high pressure.whats the big deal?
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The anti-fracking brigade will complain that you have started an earthquake somewhere else
The farmer who owns the land with no houses will complain that you have ruined his farm
The fishermen will complain that you have boiled the fish
Some moron will say you are Playing God
I would say that the volcano was there long before any people, so you have no just cause for complaint if you choose to live there, and geotourism is the best way to make a living by doing nothing.
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Ironically, doing that could actually trigger an eruption. Magma contains dissolved gases under high pressure that can come out of solution suddenly when that pressure is reduced.
so? let them come out at high pressure.whats the big deal?
The big deal is an eruption on the scale of Mt St Helens.
As @Kryptid says the magma below the surface is under high pressure which keeps the gasses in place. As the magma surfaces to the cone there is less weight of material to hold the gasses in and they are released relatively slowly, but still create the violent explosions and ejections of molten rock. If you tap below the cone you are suddenly releasing a much greater pressure and the magma chamber deep down will fizz and you will get a catastrophic explosion. This sudden release is basically what happened at Mt St Helens, the lava doesnt just flow out, it explodes out like a shaken fizzy drink when you release the cap.
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Why has no one STOPPED the Hawaii volcano as plenty of warning was had ?
The scientists couldn't stop damage from the volcano - the best they could do was measure seismic activity, and advise that risks were increasing or decreasing. The risks never really went away.
However, the bean-counters (apologies to all accountants) could stop damage from the volcano. For at least the last 50 years they have looked at maps of geological risk from the scientists, and put increased insurance premiums on areas with higher risk. If individuals ignored the known risks and built anyway, the bean-counters did the second-best thing, and minimised damage to their employers (the insurance companies). The reason most of the people in the affected housing estate were uninsured was because no-one was mad enough to give them insurance.
- That's why most of the population of Hawaii lives under the shadow of Diamond Head crater in Honolulu (extinct), rather than sharing their backyard with a live volcano on the Big Island (read: Still Growing Island).
Back in July 2014 I took a helicopter flight over the erupting volcano on the Big Island, and on the way back we passed over some of the areas affected by previous eruptions.
- You can see an isolated hill, with a road running through the trees. It is completely surrounded by lava flows.
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- We saw other areas with houses surrounded by lava flows.
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We went for a walk through some (cooled) lava tubes - these are several meters in diameter, and run from the summit of the volcano all the way to the sea (although the roof has collapsed in a number of sections). I read that the recent eruptions in Hawaii have now received fresh lava from the volcano, through the underground plumbing of the volcano.
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So I say: pick your fights carefully! (And if you aren't sure, ask an expert...)
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What is a volcano?
Big.
"Approximate yield of the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano." About 1000 PW Hr
"The total global nuclear arsenal is about 15,000 nuclear warheads[20][21][22] with a destructive capacity of around 1460 megatons[23][24][25][26] or 1.460 gigatons (1,460 million tons) of TNT." About 2 PWHr
from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
So, the question is, do you want to play with something that has perhaps 500 times as much stored energy as the entire world's nuclear arsenal?
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Ironically, doing that could actually trigger an eruption. Magma contains dissolved gases under high pressure that can come out of solution suddenly when that pressure is reduced.
so? let them come out at high pressure.whats the big deal?
The big deal is an eruption on the scale of Mt St Helens.
As @Kryptid says the magma below the surface is under high pressure which keeps the gasses in place. As the magma surfaces to the cone there is less weight of material to hold the gasses in and they are released relatively slowly, but still create the violent explosions and ejections of molten rock. If you tap below the cone you are suddenly releasing a much greater pressure and the magma chamber deep down will fizz and you will get a catastrophic explosion. This sudden release is basically what happened at Mt St Helens, the lava doesnt just flow out, it explodes out like a shaken fizzy drink when you release the cap.
But you have already admitted some of the gas is being released slowly via fissures.Just not fast enough.The pipeline holes would simply improve that under controlled conditions.
i can shake a fizzy drink bottle and instead of taking the lid and causing it to explode as you said above all i have do is slowly rotate the cap and hear the hissing of escaping gas and over a few minutes the gas will be released reducing the pressure.
see?
no sudden release involved.
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Why has no one STOPPED the Hawaii volcano as plenty of warning was had ?
The local police and the national guard stepped in promptly to evacuate a large area around the fissures.
After a few days, they let people back in to collect pets and valuables.
But it sounds like the guy who had his leg cauterized was sitting on his porch watching the show, rather than grabbing his stuff and driving away.
The big deal is an eruption on the scale of Mt St Helens.
The good news for Hawaii is that the lava from their mid-plate hot-spot is very "runny" (low viscosity), forming a very wide and fairly flat "shield volcano". If you drill a hole, you will just get more lava pouring out in more places, and destroying your drilling equipment.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Hawaiian_volcanoes
Mount St Helens (and the Rocky Mountains in general) are caused by a plate-boundary subduction zone; the lava is much more "sticky" (more viscous), and is prone to explosions (like popping the cork on a champagne bottle).
The really dangerous explosions have very viscous lava, and they don't leave a mountain behind after the explosion - they leave a hole in the ground, like Yellowstone or (more recently) Lake Taupo in New Zealand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_volcanic_eruptions
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Today we published an interview with UEA volcanologist Jess Johnson with an update on Hawaii's 2018 eruptions (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/podcasts/short/update-hawaiis-eruptions)...
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Exposing equipment to the 2,000 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of magma continuously for years sounds tricky. Sure, there are metals with much higher melting points than that, but you don't have to heat a metal all the way to its melting point in order for it to be structurally compromised. It's also possible that the metal will dissolve to some extent in the magma in a similar way that salt dissolves in water. On top of all of that, you'd have to worry about tremors and earthquakes bending or breaking any pipes inserted into the ground there. Volcanoes are very seismically active.
EDIT: I found a study relevant to this. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available for free: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00603755 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00603755)
It says that platinum and rhenium were found not to be corroded by basaltic lava over extended periods. Given that rhenium is significantly harder than platinum, I'd suggest using that for any hypothetical pipes. Unfortunately, both platinum and rhenium are very expensive. Even if you could get the funds to build a large, sturdy pipe of rhenium that was a few miles long, it could still be potentially damaged by earthquakes.
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Exposing equipment to the 2,000 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of magma continuously for years sounds tricky. Sure, there are metals with much higher melting points than that, but you don't have to heat a metal all the way to its melting point in order for it to be structurally compromised. It's also possible that the metal will dissolve to some extent in the magma in a similar way that salt dissolves in water. On top of all of that, you'd have to worry about tremors and earthquakes bending or breaking any pipes inserted into the ground there. Volcanoes are very seismically active.
EDIT: I found a study relevant to this. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available for free: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00603755 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00603755)
It says that platinum and rhenium were found not to be corroded by basaltic lava over extended periods. Given that rhenium is significantly harder than platinum, I'd suggest using that for any hypothetical pipes. Unfortunately, both platinum and rhenium are very expensive. Even if you could get the funds to build a large, sturdy pipe of rhenium that was a few miles long, it could still be potentially damaged by earthquakes.
these are minor engineering issues.
you seem to forget drilling for oil all these problems have been encountered and solved including the high temperatures.look it up.
for example if you drill at an 45 angle into one of the lava stems from the sea then the sea water will keep the pipe cool.also you can mold the lave into a pipe or channel as well ...
one the pressure has gone down you don't need to keep the pipes in place.
see?
i have an answer for everything.
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But you have already admitted some of the gas is being released slowly via fissures.Just not fast enough.The pipeline holes would simply improve that under controlled conditions.
There are 2 types of fissures.
Lava making its way to the surface via softer rock or fault lines will release pressure slowly as the weight of magma above reduces.
Fissures created by faults propagating from surface down hit high pressure magma and usually result in explosive release.
But as @evan says, there are different types of magna, some less volatile than others.
The good news for Hawaii is that the lava from their mid-plate hot-spot is very "runny" (low viscosity), forming a very wide and fairly flat "shield volcano". If you drill a hole, you will just get more lava pouring out in more places, and destroying your drilling equipment.
Yes, I did wonder about that based on memories of school geography.
I read that the drilling problem would also depend on size of drill. Most drilling eg oil uses a relatively small drill and lava would cool and solidify blocfking the hole, the article I read suggested it would need a hole a few meters across based on the observation that smaller vents block easily; you might even need a larger hole with a viscous lava. As far as I am aware there is no technology’s capable of doing this, the biggest I have come across is the Australian Strata 950 excavator which was used to rescue the Chilean miners. It initially drilled a 33cm wide pilot and then used a special drill bit to increase this to 66cm, which was wide enough to lower a rescue capsule down to pull out the miners one by one.
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you seem to forget drilling for oil all these problems have been encountered and solved including the high temperatures.look it up.
It is unusual to drill for oil at subsurface temperatures much above 400 deg F. Working rock at 2000 degrees presents significant problems even in a laboratory.
By definition volcanoes occur in geologically unstable areas so the drill shaft will bend and twist. This means you have to use an active tunnelling head (like the Channel Tunnel or a major coal mine) rather than a shaft-driven bore head and the problem acquires two more orders of magnitude.
The problem of moving even a well-behaved fluid like dry cement powder over long distances is significant. As has been pointed out, lava is only just fluid and will solidify on contact with the tunnel wall, gradually choking the pipe from the exit point backwards. So you have moved the problem of molten rock and high pressure gases from a known, avoidable place to somewhere a few miles away, and thus made a bit more land dangerous or uninhabitable.
The simple solution is to look a map and not build houses in areas that are prone to volcanic activity/floods/hurricanes/avalanches or other entirely avoidable hazards. Or you can cut surface channels in old lava fields and hope the new stuff behaves decently (it sometimes does).
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these are minor engineering issues.
you seem to forget drilling for oil all these problems have been encountered and solved including the high temperatures.look it up.
You think that the temperatures encountered by oil drills are anywhere comparable to that of a volcano?
for example if you drill at an 45 angle into one of the lava stems from the sea then the sea water will keep the pipe cool.also you can mold the lave into a pipe or channel as well ...
How is water going to keep the pipe cool? Are you proposing that the water is entering the pipe along with the lava? How? If the pipe is sufficiently cooled, that will tend to cool the lava within it off as well. That would cause it to solidify and narrow, or even clog, the pipe.
one the pressure has gone down you don't need to keep the pipes in place.
You don't see the problem with sending molten rock through a channel made of solid rock? That's like pumping water through a pipe made of ice. You'll get some combination of a melting pipe and freezing fluid. It would not be a stable configuration over the long run.
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So, the question is, do you want to play with something that has perhaps 500 times as much stored energy as the entire world's nuclear arsenal?
i can shake a fizzy drink bottle and instead of taking the lid and causing it to explode as you said above all i have do is slowly rotate the cap and hear the hissing of escaping gas and over a few minutes the gas will be released reducing the pressure.
see?
no sudden release involved.
I guess we can take that as a "yes"- you do want to play with a huge explosive.
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So, the question is, do you want to play with something that has perhaps 500 times as much stored energy as the entire world's nuclear arsenal?
i can shake a fizzy drink bottle and instead of taking the lid and causing it to explode as you said above all i have do is slowly rotate the cap and hear the hissing of escaping gas and over a few minutes the gas will be released reducing the pressure.
see?
no sudden release involved.
I guess we can take that as a "yes"- you do want to play with a huge explosive.
I am afraid you forgot water C0OLING pipes in the drill pipe line in the same way as any other object like reactors,etc.
Also failed to understand this is pressure reduction exercise.who cares if lava comes out or not as long as gas comes out.
Because gas coming it is more important as it drives the explosion.
Even Nasa SUPPORTS me when last year they annouced it..
(They actually stole the idea from me after i sent them the idea after watching a program about supervolcanos on bbc called Horizon.
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I am afraid you forgot water C0OLING pipes in the drill pipe line in the same way as any other object like reactors,etc
We cool gigawatt reactors- but it takes a lot of doing and it goes badly wrong if we aren't careful.
You may not realise it, but you are proposing something perhaps a million times bigger...
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Even Nasa SUPPORTS me when last year they annouced it..
Announced what?
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Hawaiian volcanoes are fairly well-behaved (runny lava), and well away from population centers (Honolulu).
- Mount Vesuvius in Italy has a history of explosive eruptions (think Pompeii and Herculaneum), and the large city of Naples is starting to surround it.
Scientists are starting an experiment to peer inside Vesuvius using muons from cosmic rays. They hope to study the internal plumbing of the mountain.
It's not so clear what they can do to study a large magma chamber which apparently lies under Naples, and might explode some day.
See: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2014/muon-versus-the-volcano
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Even Nasa SUPPORTS me when last year they annouced it..
Announced what?
Yellowstone national park is famous for its hot springs, geysers, and picturesque vistas. However, it’s the supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone that we have to thank for all of that. An eruption in Yellowstone could be a global cataclysm, but NASA has a plan to reduce the risk while also generating power. The plan is not without risks, and the price tag is high. Still, if it keeps us from being wiped out by clouds of hot ash, it might be something to consider.
Yellowstone hasn’t erupted in about 630,000 years, and there’s no way to predict when it will happen again. It could be tomorrow, or it could take another million years. The point is, it will happen. Well, it will if someone can’t come up with a way to stop it. The NASA plan involves drilling into the caldera from sites outside of Yellowstone to gain access to the magma pocket that powers the supervolcano. That’s the dangerous part — a full eruption of Yellowstone wouldn’t kill that many people, but it would create a 500-mile wide ashfall with areas of the West and Midwest receiving up to four inches of ash. Total sunlight reaching croplands would be substantially (though temporarily) reduced.
Assuming you can drill deep enough to open a channel to the supervolcano, you could use it to generate geothermal power. NASA’s plan calls for water to be piped through the volcano, which would emerge super-heated to about 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 degrees Celsius). The steam could be used to generate power, but that energy doesn’t just appear from nowhere. It’s coming from the supervolcano, which would cool over time and lower the risk of eruption. Setting up this system would probably cost on the order of $3.5 billion, according to NASA estimates.
The Yellowstone Caldera: Deceptively picturesque.
NASA’s is considering this ambitious plan because of the extreme threat a supervolcano like Yellowstone presents. The Yellowstone Caldera has erupted three times in the past, and each of them has been orders of magnitude larger than the volcanic eruptions with which we’re familiar. There have been three eruptions in Yellowstone, the first of which occurred about 2.1 million years ago. It spread ash across much of North America and left a 50-mile wide crater in Yellowstone, which is now known as the Island Park Caldera. Supervolcanoes like Yellowstone can pump many cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere, which could alter global climate for a decade or more. These types of eruptions are extremely rare, but the Lava Creek eruption rated a VEI (Volcano Explosivity Index) score of 8, and covered a huge swath of the United States.
LavaCreekTuff
The Lava Creek eruption was 640,000 years ago with an ejection volume of 1,000 cubic kilometers. Image by Wikipedia
To put this in further perspective: The eruption of Krakatoa, which destroyed an entire island, is ranked as a VEI 6 event. The most powerful eruption in the past 200 years was Mt. Tambora in 1815. This eruption kicked off what’s known as the Year Without a Summer, in which famine and wild temperature fluctuations occurred worldwide — and Tambora threw “just” 120 cubic kilometers of material. A Yellowstone eruption of comparable size to those we know happened 640 – 2.1 million years ago could be nearly 10x worse.
The more recent Yellowstone eruptions haven’t been quite as large as the first, but any eruption in Yellowstone has the potential to cause widespread destruction. Working on ways to mitigate the danger is a good idea, even if it’s expensive. It would probably take many years to know whether NASA’s plan was just slowing the buildup of pressure or actually reversing it, and in the best case scenario, it would take thousands of years to cool the caldera completely. However, that’s thousands of years Yellowstone could power a large chunk of the US.
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Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure/excess lave into the sea or a unused area of the island.
People have already done it in Hawaii - the Big Island gets a quarter of its power from pipes drilled into hot rock.
But now that geothermal power plant is about to meet some really hot rock - and they expect it to fail.
- They have siphoned off large amounts of volatile organics.
- They have bulldozed a hill of dirt between the plant and the lava,
- but if lava hits industrial equipment, I expect the lava to win!
See aerial Photo: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2018/05/22/hawaii-volcano-lava-power-plant/
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its not enough.you need to build enough stations to stop the eruptions.at lwa
Just drill a few oil pipeline holes a few hundred meters below the surface into the main stem which feeds the volcano and release the pressure/excess lave into the sea or a unused area of the island.
People have already done it in Hawaii - the Big Island gets a quarter of its power from pipes drilled into hot rock.
But now that geothermal power plant is about to meet some really hot rock - and they expect it to fail.
- They have siphoned off large amounts of volatile organics.
- They have bulldozed a hill of dirt between the plant and the lava,
- but if lava hits industrial equipment, I expect the lava to win!
See aerial Photo: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2018/05/22/hawaii-volcano-lava-power-plant/
its not enough.you need to build larger and more numerous stations which pour huge amounts of cooling water and harden the rock and also carry away the heat and excess gas from the area.
i see you ignored the NASA report to deny me vindication.I feel sad for your selfishness.
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its not enough.you need to build larger and more numerous stations which pour huge amounts of cooling water and harden the rock and also carry away the heat and excess gas from the area.
Correct.
The problem with your suggestion is that it's not enough.
We can, as I said, barely cool a gigawatt.
The problem you are trying to address is much bigger.
It is possible to extract lots of energy- they did- enough to provide much of the island's power.
And it still didn't stop the volcano.
Drawing off enough power to actually make a difference would be an absurd undertaking. It would be cheaper to abandon the island.
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NASA’s plan calls for water to be piped through the volcano, which would emerge super-heated to about 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 degrees Celsius)
The 350C is quite safe, under industrial-controlled conditions and high pressures, such as occurs in a nuclear power plant.
But if the water gets much hotter than this (or the pressure drops due to a leak), it will flash into steam and explode, destroying the power generation and cooling equipment.
To reach these temperatures, they would be drilling into hot rocks (such as is done in Hawaii and Iceland) at perhaps 400C to 500C. At these temperatures, steel is significantly softer and weaker, increasing the risk of a blowout.
This is still a long way short of drilling into a magma body with temperatures over 1,000C, or an erupting fissure, with moving lava at temperatures over 700C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
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There's no doubt that useful power might be extracted from Yellowstone. They have been running Iceland's homes and industries on geothermal power for as long as anyone can remember. But that won't necessarily prevent future eruptions because the underlying mechanism of tectonic movement is continuous, and thus continuously generating potential lava and gas.
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To extract energy from hot rocks, you need a cold body into which the heat flows (preferably after passing through a turbine to generate electricity from it)...
Iceland and Hawaii are both islands, so they have access to lots of salty water.
Yellowstone is far inland, so water supply is a bit more of a problem.
I suspect that the locals might get a bit upset if NASA boils all their lakes in the interests of preventing a possible future eruption...
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Cooling towers work OK. No problem generating electricity in the middle of Austraila. As long as the hot source is hotter than the cold sink it doesn'tmatter whether the latter is flowing water, recycled water, or air. The aircooled engine in my plane seems to work OK, and also provides 500W of electrical power!
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Common ideas of stopping volcano according to me:
Water- explosion happens
Throwing things in: ineffective/explosion happens.
Other ideas guys?
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as plenty of warning was had ?
I am familiar with the idea that the Hawaiian islands were formed from a hotspot of magma rising from within the Earth.
The following video draws a graphic similarity between the Hawaiian hotspot and a lava lamp (and an atomic bomb).
It points out that the current eruption is like the thin "tail" of the rising hot spot.
We can trace back the path of the Hawaiian hotspot across the Pacific for at least 60 million years.
And what is at the head of this trail? Siberia - and Siberia has some massive lava flows.
An interesting graphic (even if the timeline doesn't quite add up...)
The lava lamp analogy begins at about 4:00 (4 minutes).
We can't stop the thin tail today - I guess we should look for seismic indicators of rising plumes today...
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Common ideas of stopping volcano according to me:
Water- explosion happens
Throwing things in: ineffective/explosion happens.
Other ideas guys?
Easy. Don't expect geology (or physics or chemistry) to change. Plenty of virgins have been sacrificed to all sorts of hypothetical gods, to no known effect. It's time to stop praying and start learning: volcanic ash can be fertile, but volcanoes are dangerous.
I know of a farmer who grazes sheep on a tiny island that floods under exceptional tides. Sensible chap, saves a fortune in fencing and guarding, uses the land efficiently, but lives on a hill himself and drives the sheep onto the mainland before the spring tides (sheep can swim quite well, and the dogs really enjoy it).
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Common ideas of stopping volcano according to me:
Water- explosion happens
Throwing things in: ineffective/explosion happens.
Other ideas guys?
no.my idea is not to drill into the caldera but into a the gaseous region above it to release the gas pressure.
imagine a sealed can of Heinz baked beans being heated on a cooker.
the pressure will eventually build up and cause it to explode.
if you drill a 0.1 millimeter hole in the lid it will start releasing the gas pressure and delay it exploding avoiding pressure buildup.not the small size of the hole in relation to the size of the tin
the more holes you drill the more quickly you release the pressure and with enough holes you can prevent it exploding forever.
500 people dead in Guatemala from a volcano.but who cares?
they are poor and black and far away.
"no Britons were on aboard crashed airplane" says the smug newscaster so it's ok.
no 24/7 rolling news coverage for them....when all they had to do was release the gas pressure in the volcano by drilling into the side gas pockets.
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my idea is not to drill into the caldera but into a the gaseous region above it to release the gas pressure.
A volcano is not like a can of baked beans - there is no air pocket at the top.
The gas that drives the explosion is dissolved in the molten rock, under immense pressure.
Just like when you shake a bottle of cola, and open the lid: it is when you release the pressure that all the dissolved gas comes out of solution, and you get an explosive eruption.
I suspect that your drill bit would release the pressure in one small piece of magma - that would blow out your drill string; this which would release the pressure in a larger piece of magma and blow out the side of the volcano.
drill into the caldera
Caldera refers to the cauldron-shaped depression that sometimes occurs on the surface after an eruption has partially emptied the underground magma chamber. The surface rock collapses into the space now available above the emptier magma chamber.
I think you are talking about drilling into the hot rocks near the magma chamber (there being no gas pocket above the magma chamber, as the roof of this gas pocket would immediately collapse and form a caldera).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera
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Common ideas of stopping volcano according to me:
Water- explosion happens
Throwing things in: ineffective/explosion happens.
Other ideas guys?
no.my idea is not to drill into the caldera but into a the gaseous region above it to release the gas pressure.
imagine a sealed can of Heinz baked beans being heated on a cooker.
the pressure will eventually build up and cause it to explode.
if you drill a 0.1 millimeter hole in the lid it will start releasing the gas pressure and delay it exploding avoiding pressure buildup.not the small size of the hole in relation to the size of the tin
the more holes you drill the more quickly you release the pressure and with enough holes you can prevent it exploding forever.
500 people dead in Guatemala from a volcano.but who cares?
they are poor and black and far away.
"no Britons were on aboard crashed airplane" says the smug newscaster so it's ok.
no 24/7 rolling news coverage for them....when all they had to do was release the gas pressure in the volcano by drilling into the side gas pockets.
I wonder; if the TV shows that are under-reporting the catastrophe in the vicinity of the volcanoes were to report on how geology actually works (perhaps with a video of the "mentos in cola as an illustration" experiment) would you post less nonsense?
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my idea is not to drill into the caldera but into a the gaseous region above it to release the gas pressure.
A volcano is not like a can of baked beans - there is no air pocket at the top.
The gas that drives the explosion is dissolved in the molten rock, under immense pressure.
Just like when you shake a bottle of cola, and open the lid: it is when you release the pressure that all the dissolved gas comes out of solution, and you get an explosive eruption.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera
"The gas that drives the explosion is dissolved in the molten rock, under immense pressure.
Just like when you shake a bottle of cola,..."
That is not true at all.
go get a bottle of cola.shake it violently.
now turn the screw lid very slowly and gently until you hear the the hiss of escaping gas...leave it for a few minutes and all the excess gas will have been released gradually.no explosion whatsoever...see?
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now turn the screw lid very slowly and gently until you hear the the hiss of escaping gas
This is where the analogy breaks down - soft drinks/soda are always packaged with an air space at the top; active volcanoes are not.
To improve the analogy, gently open 2 bottles of your favourite fizzy drink, and then carefully top up one to the very top.
- Then carefully screw on the lid so there is no air pocket at the top.
- Now shake the bottle violently (unfortunately, this won't do much, as there is no space for it to slosh around :( )
- Now undo the lid, and see what happens...
Why has no one STOPPED the Hawaii volcano as plenty of warning was had ?
Because the Hawaiian volcanoes are among the tamest, safest volcanoes in the world.
- They are on the sparsely populated Big Island (Honolulu has most of Hawaii's population)
- There are lava tubes carrying away the runny lava away from the summit down towards the sea
- Low levels of dissolved gas, so they don't tend to explode violently
- They don't tend to produce lahars (mud flows) or pyroclastic flows (superheated ash flows) or burp carbon dioxide
- Today, they are well monitored by seismographs
- The newest eruption is still under the sea, so not currently bothering people at all
If you want to do something, try the supervolcano that one day may take out Naples.
- But if your experiment was perceived to trigger or contribute to any future bad outcome, you would be sued by the entire population of Naples
- If there were too few Neapolitans left, the Italian government would take you on...
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now turn the screw lid very slowly
Define "slowly" in this context.
To safely vent the equivalent of a thousand times more energy than all the nukes the world ever made would be a slow process.
How come you continue to live under the delusion that it's a simple matter to do it quickly?
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How come you continue to live under the delusion that it's a simple matter to do it quickly?
Possibly because he/she has not had to tackle the practical aspect, and may never have to.
It's a good thread, though. I've learned quite a lot, which, for me, is what it's all about.