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Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?

213 points by tim_sw 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
This definitely feels like an "The answer to all titles posed as questions is No" example.
- vuln 3y ago
  It is exactly that. Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli... Edit: To all the down voters, please cite where in the article it proves the answer is _yes_. Because it looks like a lot of _ifs_ and no real data or science to back it up.
its_ethan 3y ago
"If heat could be bled off of the magma chambers, cooling and solidifying them, not only would that stop the volcano from erupting..." Where does the confidence to make this claim come from? I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong the newly cooled down barrier had become? Unless the suggestion is that we could effectively bleed out ALL the heat from that system? Seems a bit unlikely imo lol Still, geothermal sounds really cool and we should do more of it.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines aside. I feel like the scale of the topic is almost completely human inconceivable when trying to tie it to a realistic engineering task. It seems like a fun what-if, but when you do that you are using making giant hand waving excuses, and not anything that looks like a factual claim.
  - m348e912 3y ago
    Agreed. Geothermal energy can be cheap and awesome, but there are reasons why it's only practical in certain parts of the world.
    - anecdotal1 3y ago
      We should be able to use the latest horizontal drilling tech from fracking to tap Yellowstone from miles away
    - Clamchop 3y ago
      The article states that the JPL plan only considers the energy generation to be a useful byproduct. If the risk were truly imminent and quantifiable, I assume it would be pursued however absurdly exotic and fanciful it seemed on its face. On the other hand, defusing a volcano on a timeline of a thousand years or longer would be politically challenging. That might see the dissolution and construction of multiple states (here, electric power generation may help assure survival). Add in that civilization can't seem to get its head on straight about comparatively faster-acting climate change, for example, and can barely prepare for an earthquake. At least imagining an exploding apocalyptic supervolcano may elicit more visceral emotions. Still, it doesn't appear there's much cause for worry so it's only a brainstorm.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - rcoveson 3y ago
    > Betteridge's law of headlines aside. Godwin-Bettridge-Graham law: Any headline that ends in a question mark which is posted to HN will have Bettridge's law of headlines mentioned at least once in its first dozen comments.
    - its_ethan 3y ago
      What's the law for when someone has to point this out too, I wonder?
- erulabs 3y ago
  Yeah not to mention the construction of the plant itself! I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! I’m optimistic. If we spent less time engineering society and more time engineering the earth, I think we’d all be a lot happier.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    The JPL plan doesn't actually puncture the magma chambers.
    - erulabs 3y ago
      I felt the ignorance in my fingers even as I typed it. That's awesome!
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - hellcow 3y ago
    > I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! Years of Dwarf Fortress have prepared me for this moment.
  - theandrewbailey 3y ago
    > I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! Even if that happens, I wonder if the hole would be so deep, that the magma cools and solidifies in the borehole before it reaches the surface. Similar to how pristine sub-glacial Antarctic lakes are sampled by drilling straight into them (!) and letting the water flow up into the hole, where it freezes. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-drilled-into-an-antarctic-lost-lake-for-the-second-time-in-history https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-drilled-in...
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill This is where AI applications could actually be of benefit. Also, instead of sending Harry Stamper and a bunch of misfit roughnecks to some asteroid of doom, we could just train AI on Harry's knowledge of deep well drilling. It'll be fine.
- version_five 3y ago
  > I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong the newly cooled down barrier had become? Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist working late into the night redoing the calculations and realizing that as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger the volcano. In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved. It feels a bit like those "put a bunch of reflectors in space to stop climate change" ideas. On the other hand, removing energy from a system seems like a good way to make it safer...
  - macintux 3y ago
    > Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist working late into the night redoing the calculations and realizing that as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger the volcano. Jor El in any number of them.
  - its_ethan 3y ago
    > In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved. This is similar to what I was trying to get across -- how do we know something this complicated will have only the intended effect that the author is describing? The comparison to reflectors in space to address climate concerns is a great one - something where a first pass/ back of the envelope makes it seem interesting, but any amount of detail added reveals that we'd have no clue what would happen
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > On the other hand, removing energy from a system seems like a good way to make it safer... Nope, that one rule of thumb can't help you. There is way too much energy for that to make any difference. Just notice how the timescale of an active disaster is completely different from the ones estimated for success.
- elil17 3y ago
  I have a lot of skepticism about anything I read from constructionphysics.substack.com. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a civil engineer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but it reads like it's written by someone who does not have a solid understanding of engineering fundamentals. For example, they suggested in their "How to design a house to last for 1,000 years" series that you'd want to build such a house out of stainless steel because it "has extremely high corrosion resistance." Even my introductory courses in materials science it is very clear that stainless steel might last for 1,000 years, but it would depend entirely on the environmental conditions and the type of stainless used.
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    I mean, it would be exposed to the normal conditions any residential construction is exposed to. How often is your house dunked into seawater? 800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential buildings everywhere are screwed.
    - nickff 3y ago
      Not a civil engineer, but I think different areas have very different considerations, and I'm not sure there is a 'normal' residential construction. A beach-side house in Florida probably has very different issues from a house built somewhere like Las Vegas. Salt, humidity, wind, earthquakes, soil, and other considerations vary.
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      > How often is your house dunked into seawater? For people hit by hurricane Sandy the answer is at least once.
    - elil17 3y ago
      Over that long a time period it could be damaged just by rain - it's hard to say because corrosion tests aren't done with respect to a 1000 year operating life in mild conditions. I'm sure an expert could figure that out, but it would require looking at the corrosion rate of the specific steel, the exposure to any kind of forces that could damage the oxide layer (e.g. scratches), and the thickness of the member.
- sp332 3y ago
  The linked JPL proposal is exploratory and, while it has a more serious engineering perspective, it does not have "confidence". https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file... The USGS is very unconvinced. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-it-erupting https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-it-e...
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    >Any allowed geothermal extraction would lower the pressure on the existing geysers and hot springs, altering their behavior and, in many cases, causing them to disappear. Oh no. Saving the lives of ten million people might make a geyser stop working. How awful.
    - fahrradflucht 3y ago
      Have you read the whole thing? It says it is not at all clear that this will save lives. It also could cause an eruption.
      - bradwood 3y ago
        This is HN. No-one reads the whole thing. Some don't even read the beginning!
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    From the USGS article: > Scientific research has proven again and again that depressurization is one of the factors that drives magma toward the surface to erupt. The first time I heard of this idea my immediate thought was, "so you want to shove a needle into a massive magma balloon." I know I wouldn't.
- hristov 3y ago
  Well, consider the fact that the vast majority of the earth surface, in fact, almost the entire surface of the earth is entirely volcano-less. Look under your feet -- no volcanoes! Move over a couple of steps and look again -- no volcanoes. So it is safe to say that a certain thickness of rock would serve enough to prevent volcanoes. You just have to provide enough cooling to ensure a sufficiently thick layer of magma solidifies into solid rock.
  - RhodesianHunter 3y ago
    Yeah, but how much? The crust is far deeper than humans are capable of penetrating. It's probably a fair concern that it's also far deeper than humans are capable of cooling.
    - hristov 3y ago
      Well, lets ponder this a little further. Currently there are no volcanoes in Yellowstone. So we know that the rock layer is sufficient. We also know that the rock keeps losing heat with time because it has higher than average temperature. But we also know that the rock keeps gaining heat from magma pushing up from some deep underground crack. What we have to do is measure the net heat gain and calculate how much additional heat a geothermal plant has to extract from the rocks to turn it into net heat loss. Of course the plant will have to extract it from the hotter spots in order to prevent any local maximums from causing volcanoes. But that is the most efficient option for a geothermal plant anyways. As far as measuring the net heat gain -- it should not be that hard. All you need is to sprinkle a couple of hundred sensors in the rock, monitor them for a while to be able to remove surface effects (like the sun and ambient air temperature) and you should be able to get a decent estimate. In fact I would not be surprised if seismologist already have a pretty good estimate of the heat gain. Then, when you build the plant, you can be certain that as long as heat is being drained from the rock, magma will keep solidifying and the rock layer will keep getting thicker, etc. Of course a good earthquake can screw up all of these plans, but an earthquake can destroy any power plant. But then again Yellowstone is one of the most earthquake prone areas of the world, so that perhaps is the biggest danger of this plan.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Where does the confidence to make this claim come from? I have no idea, but I can give you a data point from my personal experience: about ten years ago we visited Rotorua in New Zealand, which promotes its geothermal activity as a tourist attraction [1]. We were told by the locals when we were there that the geothermal activity had reduced noticeably since a geothermal power plant was installed some years prior, resulting in controversy over the wisdom of having built it. Rotorua's geothermal activity area is a lot smaller than Yellowstone, but as an anecdote it indicates that reducing the risk of eruption is not entirely implausible. --- [1] https://www.waiotapu.co.nz/ https://www.waiotapu.co.nz/
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- tut-urut-utut 3y ago
  Good comment, but had to automatically downvote because of the use of “lol”.
- Apofis 3y ago
  Maybe the earth just burps occasionally and it's not really a gradual buildup of pressure and this would do nothing.
PicassoCTs 3y ago
Imagine if a asteroid impact worked like a shape charge, leaving behind a dent in the deeper layers, that becomes the base for a future volcano. Something like the Chicxulub Event would leave two "dents" one at the impact site and one at the opposite site, were the pressure wave would meet into a spike. To test that pet-theory yellowstone would need to be on the antipodde of a huge impact crater from million years ago, roughly around https://eng.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande-Terre https://eng.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande-Terre.
javajosh 3y ago
This is the seed of a science fiction novel that takes place in a far future dystopia where humanities remnants scavenge in the ruins, and who's brightest members are kidnapped by a mysterious group that turns out to be an AI run organization executing the Yellowstone mega project on a 50kyr timeline. And so on.
- fabian2k 3y ago
  There is a plot point a bit along those lines in the DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn with a project to prevent a Yellowstone eruption that is controlled by an AI.
- hyperbole 3y ago
  I think you just described the show "Travelers"
  - enono 3y ago
    holy shit don't bring this show up I'm crying. Why did it have to get cancelled
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      Meanwhile, the SyFy channel's "The Ark" just got renewed for a 2nd season...
cubefox 3y ago
tl;dr: Theoretically, probably yes; practically, probably no.
aurizon 3y ago
Tapping the hot plume would not penetrate the magma chamber. They would drill down and created a number of holes turned horizontally in the hot rock zone above it. They would then drill a number of holes horizontally - which they would fracture(frack) and inject cold water - in one set and get steam from another. The steam used in turbines and then returned. Minerals and ions would make this water very corrosive and the pipe alloys would be chosen for long life(?). As to whether or not they can reduce volcano risk = accurate models and assessment of the existing heat flux that now makes Yellowstone bubble might give some ideal of any hope for success. In any event, they should at least create and study these models and assess in the rate of migration of the hop spot - since it is a slowly changing steady state, it may be that removing enough heat can change when the next eruption occurs. The actual magma may be too hot for pipes to carry water in as the metal may be so close to the melting point that they will explode from the flash steam. An intermediate heat transfer fluid could be used(such as melted sodium) to get closer to the hotter zones with a lower risk of pressure explosions. The other aspect is what % of the heat could be extracted this way - if it is 0.1% - it might not be worthwhile. The Icelandic ongoing work in this area is worth looking into.
jdblair 3y ago
The article makes the common (and grating) error of conflating power (1.5 gigawatts) and energy (power over time). Put another way, "1.5 gigawatts" does not in any way describe a rate. Do they mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per year? I'm referring to this section: ...the rate that energy builds below the volcano is only around 1.5 gigawatts - less heat than a typical power plant sheds. Yellowstone currently bleeds heat at a rate of about 4.5 to 6 gigawatts, mostly through heated water moving below the surface.
- jmharvey 3y ago
  Watts are a rate. Joules per second.
- nynx 3y ago
  You made a correct assertion initially "power (1.5 gigawatts) and energy (power over time)," but then failed to use it correctly. 1.5 gigawatts is a rate, of 1.5 billion joules per second.
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- phkahler 3y ago
  >> Do they mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per year? 1.5 gigawatts is 1.5 billion joules per second. If you sustain that power for 2 hours it will produce 3 gigawatt-hours of energy. 1 watt-hr is 3600 joules because 1J/s for 3600 seconds.
- mlsu 3y ago
  Huh? A watt is a joule per second, [energy/time]. They are describing rates. If you build a 1.5 GW heat engine on top of Yellowstone (assuming it's possible) the energy that builds below the volcano is 0, because you captured it and turned some of it into electricity, and dumped the waste heat into a river or the atmosphere.
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bell-cot 3y ago
Dear Prof. Hand-Wave, Please tell me about your heat sink - the one that can soak up the heat from a few hundred cubic km or so of molten lava. Without major ill effects. On a reasonable budget. Asking for a friend.
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- sp332 3y ago
  This was linked from the article. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812... Along with the JPL's proposal which gets into the crust dynamics. https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    A critical paragraph in the second one... > Yellowstone has erupted 3 times in the past approx. 2.1 million years, with total ejected ash approaching 10^15 kg. While the heat energy associated with this ash is some 10^23 J, this averages to only approx. 1.5 GW continuous magmatic thermal power input to the volcano over the span of these eruptions, and is well within the capacity of humans to safely introduce heat into the environment – a typical electrical power plant commonly rejects more heat than this. However, this assumes that heat is provided to the magmatic system in a steady state manner, which is almost certainly not valid, although the degree to which it is invalid is unknown. ...which, by my lights, sounds far too much like specifying "able to withstand the local average wind speed" in the building code for Hurricane City, Florida.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
no.
sickofparadox 3y ago
Firstly, Law of Headlines - the answer is no. But secondly, Volcanologists are not even worried about Yellowstone erupting anytime soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts
- boxed 3y ago
  But in this case: yes. Surprisingly easily. And this seems like a thing it's better to start with BEFORE volcanologists believe there's an imminent danger :P
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
Just build a lid with a bunch of vents. Bunch of turbines that can variate their resistance so to not spin too fast. How much pressure is it conpared to Starship?
phkahler 3y ago
What about drilling (maybe nuking) a hole to create a "small volcano to relieve pressure?
- cjensen 3y ago
  The pressures involved have a bad habit of enlarging any hole when venting.
- dylan604 3y ago
  so in order to reduce pollution from the creation of energy, we're just going to replace the CO2 with radiation? yeah, that sounds like a winning strategy.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  The thing is, think about what are you relieving: magma. It's not gas. It's literally liquid rock being squeezing up a channel pushing against the weight of the earth above it. If the pressure of the earth is greater than the magma it can start to spread horizontally and forms a chamber like a bladder. Then it keeps building pressure lifting the earth until it either bursts or maybe the earth shifts and pressure is relieved or moved elsewhere, or or equalizes and just hangs around. It's like a pimple really. Don't pop it unless you want to clean up after it.
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skywalker69 3y ago
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yayr 3y ago
that's interesting. Could that be a use case for microwave drilling? e.g. with https://www.quaise.energy https://www.quaise.energy
stefanos82 3y ago
Only by reading this article's title, without knowing its actual content, two memes come in mind: the "c'mon do something" and the "no touchy!". Am I allowed to be scared, let alone petrified just by thinking anything around dealing with a super-volcano?
more_corn 3y ago
Could we accidentally trigger a world-ending super volcano while trying to prevent one by drilling bores for huge power plants? Yes, yes we could.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago
  Best to leave that earth-sized zit unpopped.
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Quillbert182 3y ago
Even if we could, to do so would be an ecological disaster, and it would destroy the natural wonders of Yellowstone.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  Ultimately it's a giant volcano that's going to eradicate anything within a few hundred miles with the force of a nuclear blast. As ridiculous as it sounds, if we can find a way to diffuse it that does a lot more for both the natural world, and for the humans that live in proximity to it.
  - Quillbert182 3y ago
    If the chances of that happening in the next 1000 years are one in a million, I would say it is absolutely not worth it.
    - sliken 3y ago
      Sure kick the can down the road ... just like the dinosaurs did. Mitigating risk of an extinction level event from an asteroid seems much like a supervolcano. Sure the risk in any given year is low, but losing a 1-8 billion is a big loss, even if it's every few million years.
  - pl90087 3y ago
    The risk that this happens until we have technical means of avoiding the ecological disaster that current proposals entail is orders of magnitues closer to zero than the next pandemic wiping 50% of humans off the earth within your lifetime. Have you proposed the next lock-down yet?
GuB-42 3y ago
Short answer: no For a slightly longer answer, here is the conclusion of the article: Trying to build an enormous geothermal power plant and associated transmission lines(!) in one of the most beloved National Parks(!!), which there’s specifically a law against (!!!), and which could potentially trigger a civilization-destroying volcanic eruption (!!!!) is like the final boss of the permitting reform movement. Also, most volcanologists don't expect Yellowstone to erupt anytime soon, if at all.
- thesis 3y ago
  Anytime soon is one thing, but "If at all"? It's been happening for millions of years, and it sure seems like there still "activity" there. Not sure what kind of scientist could say they don't expect it to ever erupt again?
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  - lkbm 3y ago
    If we can be pretty confident it'll be 100 years, that's long enough for technology to progress a lot before we fiddle with it. Not sure what "soon" means in this case, but I suspect they don't mean "within a couple years".
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      > Not sure what "soon" means in this case Like there being infinite number of infinities that are ever larger, there's a seemingly infinite number of soons, each further away in time than the previous. So I propose we invent something like aleph[1], but for soon. This way we can communicate clearly just how soon soon is. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      Technological advancement doesn't happen Inna vacuum. To get good at things you have to try them. Getting good at the sort of technology required to build such a project requires trying such a project. It's not a matter of waiting 100 years, it's a matter of trial and error for 100 years.
ramblenode 3y ago
This highlights the risk of ordinary geothermal, which extracts heat energy by changing the structure of the underlying earth, making it potentially unstable. Like fracking, it is now well known to cause earthquakes [0]. It could be useful for siphoning heat in volcanically active zones, but I wish the risks elsewhere were better known. Fracking has caused widespread structural damage from seismic activity in areas that were previously quiet and we should not see that mistake repeated. [0] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-solving-geothermals-earthquake-problem/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...
heisenbit 3y ago
So there is heat coming up. We tap the top and cool it. That makes the top layer cooler and harder. This allows less heat to escape so if we can not transport all heat away with technical means the heat again builds up. So we have delayed the eruption but how will this affect the size of the eruption? My experience with leaving pots on the stove where a skin builds at the top would make me anxious if I believed anyone actually tried that on super volcano scale.
_uhtu 3y ago
Just so everyone knows, the whole "Yellowstone is a supervolcano that could erupt any minute and cause cataclysmic effects on the planet" is just not true. It was made up for TV "documentaries". Yellowstone does not pose any real threat to society at large. Volcanologists are practically unanimous in that belief. See this video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts
- zzzeek 3y ago
  why did what we would presume are fairly professional level engineers and scientists at JPL (at least not working for TV "documentaries") write a whole paper called "DEFENDING HUMAN CIVILIZATION FROM SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS" which has all of its emphasis on Yellowstone? https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
  - _uhtu 3y ago
    Kinda weird to just go for an argument of authority huh? I'd recommend watching the video for a non-authority based series of arguments based on multiple sources and a lot of data. Anyway, the reason they wrote that paper is probably because they are talking about extreme hypotheticals themselves. Notice how their comparison is that it's twice as likely as a 2km asteroid impact, which are once in every few million year events. So we're still dealing with something extremely unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Posing an extremely large threat at 1/1000000 odds still seems like something.
    - zzzeek 3y ago
      I watched it and sure it makes sense but I'm an idiot, and so do climate change denial videos if I don't look up counterarguments. That's what I didn't get about that video, all these laypeople are like "great!". Like sure, a once in a 600k year event, and maybe not even that, great . Doesn't mean some generation of humans or otherwise arent going to get whacked someday
glitcher 3y ago
This sounds like it came straight out of a "What If?" book from Randall Munroe :)
meindnoch 3y ago
Could we accidentally cause Yellowstone to erupt by constructing a giant geothermal power plant at the wrong place?
AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago
No, but you could probably start it erupting.
SerChudTheThird 3y ago
[dead]
ezekiel68 3y ago
Narrator: But what they could not have known at the time was that activation of the geothermal power plant would subtly perturb the magma flows in such a way as to hasten the supervolcanp's eruption. [just an alternative take, not based on any firm facts]
xg15 3y ago
I found the whole issue of Yellowstone being "overdue" becoming significantly less urgent when I learned that by that definition, it was already overdue back when humans were still hunting wooly mammoths with sticks.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  The whole overdue thing is also a logically fallacy. If something has an x% chance of happening per year and it hasn't happened for many years it has an x% change of happening next year, not some greater percentage.
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  - rurp 3y ago
    The odds of some natural event happening aren't always independent from year to year. If a volcano eruption is caused by a buildup of pressure past a certain threshold, and pressure is actively building in an area, then going longer than expected without an eruption absolutely would increase the chances for upcoming years.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    That's not generally the case when dealing with things involving plate tectonics, which often have a build up of pressure over time (tens, hundreds, thousands of years). The tension can slowly build up at a plate boundary before snapping to relieve the tension. In general with phenomena like this it makes less sense to start from the assumption that the root cause for something is just a random number generator that the Earth's programmer decided to hook up to add variability. Rather, things in the real world have actual causes, and if they typically happen on the order of 100,000 years apart, there's probably a time-need reason for that. (There are plenty of phenomena that are just statistics, of course.)
    - iudqnolq 3y ago
      Here's one scientist saying that while that logic kinda works for earthquakes volcanoes don't behave that way. https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano-eruption https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano... Also, even if it would be possible to compute that an earthquake/eruption is overdue I've yet to see it done correctly. Obviously I don't know where the person I'm replying to got their statistic. But if you Google something like "Yellowstone overdue" the results use very poor logic, often just extrapolating from three data points millions of years ago.
bee_rider 3y ago
I’m in favor of free geothermal energy, but we should consider the risks—imagine if we built a big geothermal plant, only to find that we messed with the pressure too much and prevented a giant eruption that could have saved us from Wyoming, Iowa, and Montana.
- koheripbal 3y ago
  It's neither shallow enough to make geothermal energy , nor fragile enough to risk a "burst"
cashsterling 3y ago
I think I read a lengthy technical proposal about 15 years ago about turning the outskirts of Yellowstone into a massive network of geothermal energy plants. I tried finding it real quick but no luck. I did work at JPL pre-2016 so I might be conflating things... I remember talking about this very topic at JPL over coffee at least once. Key points I recall from the technical report I read: - could power much the US... of course, distribution of power from this remote location is a big problem by itself. - most of the geothermal plants would be >95% underground and would pose little blight on the landscape. Many geothermal plants are largely subterranean anyhow. Of course, things would ugly AF during construction. - power transfer network to connect the locus of small power plants together and to switching stations could use cryogenic high-temperature superconducting wire (YBCO or MgF2)... the power transfer needs and relatively short distances may make it the best solution economically. - modern drilling technology make doing this a lot easier than it used to be. - might help avert a super volcano disaster
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I read one more recently and managed to find it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
zackees 3y ago
Yellow stone is not going to erupt because it’s venting its gases. If it wasn’t then that would be a problem.
- theautist 3y ago
  Ok everyone, the debate is settled. No more eruption talk.
kvetching 3y ago
I'd much rather wait till we have superintelligence and it can come up with a solution to this if it's a real issue
_8j50 3y ago
ELI5: Why not make underground magma pipes from places like this to power plants near cities or better yet, why not generate steam for both heating and power generation supplement?
heavyset_go 3y ago
How sure are they that disrupting whatever equilibrium the Yellowstone caldera has reached won't have unexpected consequences, like potentially changing the rate of eruption, or even triggering eruption, earthquakes, etc?

213 points by tim_sw 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

This definitely feels like an "The answer to all titles posed as questions is No" example.

vuln 3y ago
It is exactly that. Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli... Edit: To all the down voters, please cite where in the article it proves the answer is _yes_. Because it looks like a lot of _ifs_ and no real data or science to back it up.

its_ethan 3y ago

"If heat could be bled off of the magma chambers, cooling and solidifying them, not only would that stop the volcano from erupting..." Where does the confidence to make this claim come from? I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong the newly cooled down barrier had become? Unless the suggestion is that we could effectively bleed out ALL the heat from that system? Seems a bit unlikely imo lol Still, geothermal sounds really cool and we should do more of it.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines aside. I feel like the scale of the topic is almost completely human inconceivable when trying to tie it to a realistic engineering task. It seems like a fun what-if, but when you do that you are using making giant hand waving excuses, and not anything that looks like a factual claim.
- m348e912 3y ago
  Agreed. Geothermal energy can be cheap and awesome, but there are reasons why it's only practical in certain parts of the world.
  - anecdotal1 3y ago
    We should be able to use the latest horizontal drilling tech from fracking to tap Yellowstone from miles away
  - Clamchop 3y ago
    The article states that the JPL plan only considers the energy generation to be a useful byproduct. If the risk were truly imminent and quantifiable, I assume it would be pursued however absurdly exotic and fanciful it seemed on its face. On the other hand, defusing a volcano on a timeline of a thousand years or longer would be politically challenging. That might see the dissolution and construction of multiple states (here, electric power generation may help assure survival). Add in that civilization can't seem to get its head on straight about comparatively faster-acting climate change, for example, and can barely prepare for an earthquake. At least imagining an exploding apocalyptic supervolcano may elicit more visceral emotions. Still, it doesn't appear there's much cause for worry so it's only a brainstorm.
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- rcoveson 3y ago
  > Betteridge's law of headlines aside. Godwin-Bettridge-Graham law: Any headline that ends in a question mark which is posted to HN will have Bettridge's law of headlines mentioned at least once in its first dozen comments.
  - its_ethan 3y ago
    What's the law for when someone has to point this out too, I wonder?
erulabs 3y ago
Yeah not to mention the construction of the plant itself! I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! I’m optimistic. If we spent less time engineering society and more time engineering the earth, I think we’d all be a lot happier.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  The JPL plan doesn't actually puncture the magma chambers.
  - erulabs 3y ago
    I felt the ignorance in my fingers even as I typed it. That's awesome!
- deleted 3y ago
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- hellcow 3y ago
  > I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! Years of Dwarf Fortress have prepared me for this moment.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  > I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill that punctures the magma chambers! Even if that happens, I wonder if the hole would be so deep, that the magma cools and solidifies in the borehole before it reaches the surface. Similar to how pristine sub-glacial Antarctic lakes are sampled by drilling straight into them (!) and letting the water flow up into the hole, where it freezes. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-drilled-into-an-antarctic-lost-lake-for-the-second-time-in-history https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-drilled-in...
- dylan604 3y ago
  >I wouldn’t want to be operating the drill This is where AI applications could actually be of benefit. Also, instead of sending Harry Stamper and a bunch of misfit roughnecks to some asteroid of doom, we could just train AI on Harry's knowledge of deep well drilling. It'll be fine.
version_five 3y ago
> I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong the newly cooled down barrier had become? Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist working late into the night redoing the calculations and realizing that as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger the volcano. In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved. It feels a bit like those "put a bunch of reflectors in space to stop climate change" ideas. On the other hand, removing energy from a system seems like a good way to make it safer...
- macintux 3y ago
  > Certainly the movie version has the one rogue scientist working late into the night redoing the calculations and realizing that as soon as the plant goes live it will trigger the volcano. Jor El in any number of them.
- its_ethan 3y ago
  > In real life, I have no idea how this kind of thing gets analyzed, and what kind of uncertainty is involved. This is similar to what I was trying to get across -- how do we know something this complicated will have only the intended effect that the author is describing? The comparison to reflectors in space to address climate concerns is a great one - something where a first pass/ back of the envelope makes it seem interesting, but any amount of detail added reveals that we'd have no clue what would happen
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > On the other hand, removing energy from a system seems like a good way to make it safer... Nope, that one rule of thumb can't help you. There is way too much energy for that to make any difference. Just notice how the timescale of an active disaster is completely different from the ones estimated for success.
elil17 3y ago
I have a lot of skepticism about anything I read from constructionphysics.substack.com. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a civil engineer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but it reads like it's written by someone who does not have a solid understanding of engineering fundamentals. For example, they suggested in their "How to design a house to last for 1,000 years" series that you'd want to build such a house out of stainless steel because it "has extremely high corrosion resistance." Even my introductory courses in materials science it is very clear that stainless steel might last for 1,000 years, but it would depend entirely on the environmental conditions and the type of stainless used.
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  I mean, it would be exposed to the normal conditions any residential construction is exposed to. How often is your house dunked into seawater? 800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential buildings everywhere are screwed.
  - nickff 3y ago
    Not a civil engineer, but I think different areas have very different considerations, and I'm not sure there is a 'normal' residential construction. A beach-side house in Florida probably has very different issues from a house built somewhere like Las Vegas. Salt, humidity, wind, earthquakes, soil, and other considerations vary.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    > How often is your house dunked into seawater? For people hit by hurricane Sandy the answer is at least once.
  - elil17 3y ago
    Over that long a time period it could be damaged just by rain - it's hard to say because corrosion tests aren't done with respect to a 1000 year operating life in mild conditions. I'm sure an expert could figure that out, but it would require looking at the corrosion rate of the specific steel, the exposure to any kind of forces that could damage the oxide layer (e.g. scratches), and the thickness of the member.
sp332 3y ago
The linked JPL proposal is exploratory and, while it has a more serious engineering perspective, it does not have "confidence". https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file... The USGS is very unconvinced. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-it-erupting https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-it-e...
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  >Any allowed geothermal extraction would lower the pressure on the existing geysers and hot springs, altering their behavior and, in many cases, causing them to disappear. Oh no. Saving the lives of ten million people might make a geyser stop working. How awful.
  - fahrradflucht 3y ago
    Have you read the whole thing? It says it is not at all clear that this will save lives. It also could cause an eruption.
    - bradwood 3y ago
      This is HN. No-one reads the whole thing. Some don't even read the beginning!
- MisterTea 3y ago
  From the USGS article: > Scientific research has proven again and again that depressurization is one of the factors that drives magma toward the surface to erupt. The first time I heard of this idea my immediate thought was, "so you want to shove a needle into a massive magma balloon." I know I wouldn't.
hristov 3y ago
Well, consider the fact that the vast majority of the earth surface, in fact, almost the entire surface of the earth is entirely volcano-less. Look under your feet -- no volcanoes! Move over a couple of steps and look again -- no volcanoes. So it is safe to say that a certain thickness of rock would serve enough to prevent volcanoes. You just have to provide enough cooling to ensure a sufficiently thick layer of magma solidifies into solid rock.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Yeah, but how much? The crust is far deeper than humans are capable of penetrating. It's probably a fair concern that it's also far deeper than humans are capable of cooling.
  - hristov 3y ago
    Well, lets ponder this a little further. Currently there are no volcanoes in Yellowstone. So we know that the rock layer is sufficient. We also know that the rock keeps losing heat with time because it has higher than average temperature. But we also know that the rock keeps gaining heat from magma pushing up from some deep underground crack. What we have to do is measure the net heat gain and calculate how much additional heat a geothermal plant has to extract from the rocks to turn it into net heat loss. Of course the plant will have to extract it from the hotter spots in order to prevent any local maximums from causing volcanoes. But that is the most efficient option for a geothermal plant anyways. As far as measuring the net heat gain -- it should not be that hard. All you need is to sprinkle a couple of hundred sensors in the rock, monitor them for a while to be able to remove surface effects (like the sun and ambient air temperature) and you should be able to get a decent estimate. In fact I would not be surprised if seismologist already have a pretty good estimate of the heat gain. Then, when you build the plant, you can be certain that as long as heat is being drained from the rock, magma will keep solidifying and the rock layer will keep getting thicker, etc. Of course a good earthquake can screw up all of these plans, but an earthquake can destroy any power plant. But then again Yellowstone is one of the most earthquake prone areas of the world, so that perhaps is the biggest danger of this plan.
lisper 3y ago
> Where does the confidence to make this claim come from? I have no idea, but I can give you a data point from my personal experience: about ten years ago we visited Rotorua in New Zealand, which promotes its geothermal activity as a tourist attraction [1]. We were told by the locals when we were there that the geothermal activity had reduced noticeably since a geothermal power plant was installed some years prior, resulting in controversy over the wisdom of having built it. Rotorua's geothermal activity area is a lot smaller than Yellowstone, but as an anecdote it indicates that reducing the risk of eruption is not entirely implausible. --- [1] https://www.waiotapu.co.nz/ https://www.waiotapu.co.nz/
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tut-urut-utut 3y ago
Good comment, but had to automatically downvote because of the use of “lol”.
Apofis 3y ago
Maybe the earth just burps occasionally and it's not really a gradual buildup of pressure and this would do nothing.

PicassoCTs 3y ago

Imagine if a asteroid impact worked like a shape charge, leaving behind a dent in the deeper layers, that becomes the base for a future volcano. Something like the Chicxulub Event would leave two "dents" one at the impact site and one at the opposite site, were the pressure wave would meet into a spike. To test that pet-theory yellowstone would need to be on the antipodde of a huge impact crater from million years ago, roughly around https://eng.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande-Terre https://eng.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande-Terre.

javajosh 3y ago

This is the seed of a science fiction novel that takes place in a far future dystopia where humanities remnants scavenge in the ruins, and who's brightest members are kidnapped by a mysterious group that turns out to be an AI run organization executing the Yellowstone mega project on a 50kyr timeline. And so on.

fabian2k 3y ago
There is a plot point a bit along those lines in the DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn with a project to prevent a Yellowstone eruption that is controlled by an AI.
hyperbole 3y ago
I think you just described the show "Travelers"
- enono 3y ago
  holy shit don't bring this show up I'm crying. Why did it have to get cancelled
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Meanwhile, the SyFy channel's "The Ark" just got renewed for a 2nd season...

cubefox 3y ago

tl;dr: Theoretically, probably yes; practically, probably no.

aurizon 3y ago

Tapping the hot plume would not penetrate the magma chamber. They would drill down and created a number of holes turned horizontally in the hot rock zone above it. They would then drill a number of holes horizontally - which they would fracture(frack) and inject cold water - in one set and get steam from another. The steam used in turbines and then returned. Minerals and ions would make this water very corrosive and the pipe alloys would be chosen for long life(?). As to whether or not they can reduce volcano risk = accurate models and assessment of the existing heat flux that now makes Yellowstone bubble might give some ideal of any hope for success. In any event, they should at least create and study these models and assess in the rate of migration of the hop spot - since it is a slowly changing steady state, it may be that removing enough heat can change when the next eruption occurs. The actual magma may be too hot for pipes to carry water in as the metal may be so close to the melting point that they will explode from the flash steam. An intermediate heat transfer fluid could be used(such as melted sodium) to get closer to the hotter zones with a lower risk of pressure explosions. The other aspect is what % of the heat could be extracted this way - if it is 0.1% - it might not be worthwhile. The Icelandic ongoing work in this area is worth looking into.

jdblair 3y ago

The article makes the common (and grating) error of conflating power (1.5 gigawatts) and energy (power over time). Put another way, "1.5 gigawatts" does not in any way describe a rate. Do they mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per year? I'm referring to this section: ...the rate that energy builds below the volcano is only around 1.5 gigawatts - less heat than a typical power plant sheds. Yellowstone currently bleeds heat at a rate of about 4.5 to 6 gigawatts, mostly through heated water moving below the surface.

jmharvey 3y ago
Watts are a rate. Joules per second.
nynx 3y ago
You made a correct assertion initially "power (1.5 gigawatts) and energy (power over time)," but then failed to use it correctly. 1.5 gigawatts is a rate, of 1.5 billion joules per second.
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phkahler 3y ago
>> Do they mean 1.5 gigawatts per hour? or per day? or per year? 1.5 gigawatts is 1.5 billion joules per second. If you sustain that power for 2 hours it will produce 3 gigawatt-hours of energy. 1 watt-hr is 3600 joules because 1J/s for 3600 seconds.
mlsu 3y ago
Huh? A watt is a joule per second, [energy/time]. They are describing rates. If you build a 1.5 GW heat engine on top of Yellowstone (assuming it's possible) the energy that builds below the volcano is 0, because you captured it and turned some of it into electricity, and dumped the waste heat into a river or the atmosphere.
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bell-cot 3y ago

Dear Prof. Hand-Wave, Please tell me about your heat sink - the one that can soak up the heat from a few hundred cubic km or so of molten lava. Without major ill effects. On a reasonable budget. Asking for a friend.

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sp332 3y ago
This was linked from the article. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812... Along with the JPL's proposal which gets into the crust dynamics. https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
- bell-cot 3y ago
  A critical paragraph in the second one... > Yellowstone has erupted 3 times in the past approx. 2.1 million years, with total ejected ash approaching 10^15 kg. While the heat energy associated with this ash is some 10^23 J, this averages to only approx. 1.5 GW continuous magmatic thermal power input to the volcano over the span of these eruptions, and is well within the capacity of humans to safely introduce heat into the environment – a typical electrical power plant commonly rejects more heat than this. However, this assumes that heat is provided to the magmatic system in a steady state manner, which is almost certainly not valid, although the degree to which it is invalid is unknown. ...which, by my lights, sounds far too much like specifying "able to withstand the local average wind speed" in the building code for Hurricane City, Florida.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

no.

sickofparadox 3y ago

Firstly, Law of Headlines - the answer is no. But secondly, Volcanologists are not even worried about Yellowstone erupting anytime soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

boxed 3y ago
But in this case: yes. Surprisingly easily. And this seems like a thing it's better to start with BEFORE volcanologists believe there's an imminent danger :P

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

Just build a lid with a bunch of vents. Bunch of turbines that can variate their resistance so to not spin too fast. How much pressure is it conpared to Starship?

phkahler 3y ago

What about drilling (maybe nuking) a hole to create a "small volcano to relieve pressure?

cjensen 3y ago
The pressures involved have a bad habit of enlarging any hole when venting.
dylan604 3y ago
so in order to reduce pollution from the creation of energy, we're just going to replace the CO2 with radiation? yeah, that sounds like a winning strategy.
MisterTea 3y ago
The thing is, think about what are you relieving: magma. It's not gas. It's literally liquid rock being squeezing up a channel pushing against the weight of the earth above it. If the pressure of the earth is greater than the magma it can start to spread horizontally and forms a chamber like a bladder. Then it keeps building pressure lifting the earth until it either bursts or maybe the earth shifts and pressure is relieved or moved elsewhere, or or equalizes and just hangs around. It's like a pimple really. Don't pop it unless you want to clean up after it.

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skywalker69 3y ago

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yayr 3y ago

that's interesting. Could that be a use case for microwave drilling? e.g. with https://www.quaise.energy https://www.quaise.energy

stefanos82 3y ago

Only by reading this article's title, without knowing its actual content, two memes come in mind: the "c'mon do something" and the "no touchy!". Am I allowed to be scared, let alone petrified just by thinking anything around dealing with a super-volcano?

more_corn 3y ago

Could we accidentally trigger a world-ending super volcano while trying to prevent one by drilling bores for huge power plants? Yes, yes we could.

oofta-boofta 3y ago
Best to leave that earth-sized zit unpopped.

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Quillbert182 3y ago

Even if we could, to do so would be an ecological disaster, and it would destroy the natural wonders of Yellowstone.

oceanplexian 3y ago
Ultimately it's a giant volcano that's going to eradicate anything within a few hundred miles with the force of a nuclear blast. As ridiculous as it sounds, if we can find a way to diffuse it that does a lot more for both the natural world, and for the humans that live in proximity to it.
- Quillbert182 3y ago
  If the chances of that happening in the next 1000 years are one in a million, I would say it is absolutely not worth it.
  - sliken 3y ago
    Sure kick the can down the road ... just like the dinosaurs did. Mitigating risk of an extinction level event from an asteroid seems much like a supervolcano. Sure the risk in any given year is low, but losing a 1-8 billion is a big loss, even if it's every few million years.
- pl90087 3y ago
  The risk that this happens until we have technical means of avoiding the ecological disaster that current proposals entail is orders of magnitues closer to zero than the next pandemic wiping 50% of humans off the earth within your lifetime. Have you proposed the next lock-down yet?

GuB-42 3y ago

Short answer: no For a slightly longer answer, here is the conclusion of the article: Trying to build an enormous geothermal power plant and associated transmission lines(!) in one of the most beloved National Parks(!!), which there’s specifically a law against (!!!), and which could potentially trigger a civilization-destroying volcanic eruption (!!!!) is like the final boss of the permitting reform movement. Also, most volcanologists don't expect Yellowstone to erupt anytime soon, if at all.

thesis 3y ago
Anytime soon is one thing, but "If at all"? It's been happening for millions of years, and it sure seems like there still "activity" there. Not sure what kind of scientist could say they don't expect it to ever erupt again?
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- lkbm 3y ago
  If we can be pretty confident it'll be 100 years, that's long enough for technology to progress a lot before we fiddle with it. Not sure what "soon" means in this case, but I suspect they don't mean "within a couple years".
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    > Not sure what "soon" means in this case Like there being infinite number of infinities that are ever larger, there's a seemingly infinite number of soons, each further away in time than the previous. So I propose we invent something like aleph[1], but for soon. This way we can communicate clearly just how soon soon is. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    Technological advancement doesn't happen Inna vacuum. To get good at things you have to try them. Getting good at the sort of technology required to build such a project requires trying such a project. It's not a matter of waiting 100 years, it's a matter of trial and error for 100 years.

ramblenode 3y ago

This highlights the risk of ordinary geothermal, which extracts heat energy by changing the structure of the underlying earth, making it potentially unstable. Like fracking, it is now well known to cause earthquakes [0]. It could be useful for siphoning heat in volcanically active zones, but I wish the risks elsewhere were better known. Fracking has caused widespread structural damage from seismic activity in areas that were previously quiet and we should not see that mistake repeated. [0] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-solving-geothermals-earthquake-problem/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...

heisenbit 3y ago

So there is heat coming up. We tap the top and cool it. That makes the top layer cooler and harder. This allows less heat to escape so if we can not transport all heat away with technical means the heat again builds up. So we have delayed the eruption but how will this affect the size of the eruption? My experience with leaving pots on the stove where a skin builds at the top would make me anxious if I believed anyone actually tried that on super volcano scale.

_uhtu 3y ago

Just so everyone knows, the whole "Yellowstone is a supervolcano that could erupt any minute and cause cataclysmic effects on the planet" is just not true. It was made up for TV "documentaries". Yellowstone does not pose any real threat to society at large. Volcanologists are practically unanimous in that belief. See this video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

zzzeek 3y ago
why did what we would presume are fairly professional level engineers and scientists at JPL (at least not working for TV "documentaries") write a whole paper called "DEFENDING HUMAN CIVILIZATION FROM SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS" which has all of its emphasis on Yellowstone? https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...
- _uhtu 3y ago
  Kinda weird to just go for an argument of authority huh? I'd recommend watching the video for a non-authority based series of arguments based on multiple sources and a lot of data. Anyway, the reason they wrote that paper is probably because they are talking about extreme hypotheticals themselves. Notice how their comparison is that it's twice as likely as a 2km asteroid impact, which are once in every few million year events. So we're still dealing with something extremely unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Posing an extremely large threat at 1/1000000 odds still seems like something.
  - zzzeek 3y ago
    I watched it and sure it makes sense but I'm an idiot, and so do climate change denial videos if I don't look up counterarguments. That's what I didn't get about that video, all these laypeople are like "great!". Like sure, a once in a 600k year event, and maybe not even that, great . Doesn't mean some generation of humans or otherwise arent going to get whacked someday

glitcher 3y ago

This sounds like it came straight out of a "What If?" book from Randall Munroe :)

meindnoch 3y ago

Could we accidentally cause Yellowstone to erupt by constructing a giant geothermal power plant at the wrong place?

AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago

No, but you could probably start it erupting.

SerChudTheThird 3y ago

[dead]

ezekiel68 3y ago

Narrator: But what they could not have known at the time was that activation of the geothermal power plant would subtly perturb the magma flows in such a way as to hasten the supervolcanp's eruption. [just an alternative take, not based on any firm facts]

xg15 3y ago

I found the whole issue of Yellowstone being "overdue" becoming significantly less urgent when I learned that by that definition, it was already overdue back when humans were still hunting wooly mammoths with sticks.

iudqnolq 3y ago
The whole overdue thing is also a logically fallacy. If something has an x% chance of happening per year and it hasn't happened for many years it has an x% change of happening next year, not some greater percentage.
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- rurp 3y ago
  The odds of some natural event happening aren't always independent from year to year. If a volcano eruption is caused by a buildup of pressure past a certain threshold, and pressure is actively building in an area, then going longer than expected without an eruption absolutely would increase the chances for upcoming years.
- SamBam 3y ago
  That's not generally the case when dealing with things involving plate tectonics, which often have a build up of pressure over time (tens, hundreds, thousands of years). The tension can slowly build up at a plate boundary before snapping to relieve the tension. In general with phenomena like this it makes less sense to start from the assumption that the root cause for something is just a random number generator that the Earth's programmer decided to hook up to add variability. Rather, things in the real world have actual causes, and if they typically happen on the order of 100,000 years apart, there's probably a time-need reason for that. (There are plenty of phenomena that are just statistics, of course.)
  - iudqnolq 3y ago
    Here's one scientist saying that while that logic kinda works for earthquakes volcanoes don't behave that way. https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano-eruption https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano... Also, even if it would be possible to compute that an earthquake/eruption is overdue I've yet to see it done correctly. Obviously I don't know where the person I'm replying to got their statistic. But if you Google something like "Yellowstone overdue" the results use very poor logic, often just extrapolating from three data points millions of years ago.

bee_rider 3y ago

I’m in favor of free geothermal energy, but we should consider the risks—imagine if we built a big geothermal plant, only to find that we messed with the pressure too much and prevented a giant eruption that could have saved us from Wyoming, Iowa, and Montana.

koheripbal 3y ago
It's neither shallow enough to make geothermal energy , nor fragile enough to risk a "burst"

cashsterling 3y ago

I think I read a lengthy technical proposal about 15 years ago about turning the outskirts of Yellowstone into a massive network of geothermal energy plants. I tried finding it real quick but no luck. I did work at JPL pre-2016 so I might be conflating things... I remember talking about this very topic at JPL over coffee at least once. Key points I recall from the technical report I read: - could power much the US... of course, distribution of power from this remote location is a big problem by itself. - most of the geothermal plants would be >95% underground and would pose little blight on the landscape. Many geothermal plants are largely subterranean anyhow. Of course, things would ugly AF during construction. - power transfer network to connect the locus of small power plants together and to switching stations could use cryogenic high-temperature superconducting wire (YBCO or MgF2)... the power transfer needs and relatively short distances may make it the best solution economically. - modern drilling technology make doing this a lot easier than it used to be. - might help avert a super volcano disaster

brucethemoose2 3y ago
I read one more recently and managed to find it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...

zackees 3y ago

Yellow stone is not going to erupt because it’s venting its gases. If it wasn’t then that would be a problem.

theautist 3y ago
Ok everyone, the debate is settled. No more eruption talk.

kvetching 3y ago

I'd much rather wait till we have superintelligence and it can come up with a solution to this if it's a real issue

_8j50 3y ago

ELI5: Why not make underground magma pipes from places like this to power plants near cities or better yet, why not generate steam for both heating and power generation supplement?

heavyset_go 3y ago

How sure are they that disrupting whatever equilibrium the Yellowstone caldera has reached won't have unexpected consequences, like potentially changing the rate of eruption, or even triggering eruption, earthquakes, etc?