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It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens

It’s a shame this was written earlier this year. In Iceland there’s an ongoing magma intrusion event near (and under) the town of Grindavik. There also happens to be a geothermal power plant not far from the town. The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an eruption under that power plant we might learn something about the advantages and potential pitfalls of this proposal.

senectus1 3y ago
I suspect the SCALE required to ease the pressures would be absurd. Warhammer 40k sort of absurd. Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.
- ehnto 3y ago
  I don't have a sense of the scale you are talking, but I would love to see more megaprojects. Truly mega. When we aren't getting in our own way, humans do some pretty awesome stuff.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I don't. The reason is that even though we are probably capable of doing so we lack the responsibility required to do this without the chance of massive negative side effects. Every time we've upped the scale in our abilities it has only resulted in more damage, not quite balanced out by more progress. This is a real problem: we can get ourselves into the kind of trouble that we don't seem to be able to get ourselves out of. We never stop and say 'this is enough', we always take the next step, create a new level of problems that then requires yet another level of innovation to control it and so on. It's the sorcerers apprentice, but a weird variation on it. Just supposed that what the GP says is possible and doable: what guarantees do we have that we fully understand the system we are messing with? How much risk are we willing to take? Who are the stakeholders in these risks? Without answers to all of these questions we run the real risk of biting off more than we can collectively chew and if and when we do there won't be an 'undo' button to press. Well, technically will have pressed it, but quite possible on a time-scale that we didn't quite envision. I've seen the most stupid proposals of the kind that you are suggesting: PNE's ('Peaceful Nuclear Explosions') on a scale never dreamed of before to remake the face of the Earth, create new watersheds and so on. And to incidentally put an amount of radiation into the atmosphere that would be absolutely unparalleled. The fact that we can do these things doesn't mean that we automatically have to do these things. I keep thinking about the discovery of nuclear power: what if we hadn't? Would that be such a huge problem or would we simply have found other, better ways of providing ourselves with power? And if we did, what would be the short term, mid term and long term consequences of doing so? Because the energy stored in the core of the Earth is the ultimate form of fossil energy: between gravity and plate tectonics life had a way of escaping the oceans and without that we'd be fish, mammals in the ocean at best. Good luck with that electronics project you were working on in that environment. It's tricky: we have one Earth. Any decision that irrevocably removes something from that Earth carries a price tag the value of which may not be visible for a long time to come, so caution would seem to be the best way forward, even if that isn't our nature. Our nature is just to act and then to pass the buck to the next generation.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      I agree with everything except your conclusion. Even if we could resist our fundamental nature how do we know that our current values are more correct than the evolutionary forces that have kept us alive for millions of years? We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. What if whoever didn’t get into trouble also didn’t survive.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. The ultimate survivorship bias.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Well, yes, that’s natural selection for you.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The problem is that inaction is also fraught. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Some time ago scientists were concerned that the Earth was headed into another ice age. Then we started burning all of this carbon, so that's not happening anymore. Great, catastrophe averted. Now we're burning way too much and going hard the other way. Damn it. Okay, so the status quo is no good, maybe we should build a whole bunch of nuclear plants so we can stop burning coal. What could possibly go wrong? Or we could do this geothermal thing. Indolence is fatal. Pick your poison.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That's a fair point, however, action has often much clearer short term consequences than inaction, and the consequences of inaction can be studied at leisure because action always is still an option. But once you've done your action thingy you can't go back to what it was like before.
        3y ago
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    I invite you to find yourself a copy of any or all of The Control of Nature by John McPhee, A River Lost by Blaine Harden, and Marc Reisner's books Cadillac Desert and A Dangerous Place.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Have you heard of The Line? It's going to be a 500m high, 200m wide, 170 km long linear city / megastructure housing 9 million people; real science fiction stuff, but construction is underway with phase 1 ready by 2030: https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline
    - MandieD 3y ago
      Unfortunately, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146820
  - rapnie 3y ago
    I like a mega challenge that is manageable because everyone can do their tiny part. Like the Justdiggit project [0], on a mission to regreening Africa and cooling down the planet. All one needs is a shovel and knowledge how to dig shallow holes with a ridge to avoid rainwaters flushing furtile topsoil away, and store water for plants to grow in the dry season. [0] https://justdiggit.org/ https://justdiggit.org/
    - neuromanser 3y ago
      Do you know if they have anything on the following? Sahara is the source of minerals for the Amazon rainforest (winds carry fine sand over the Atlantic), "regreening" Africa is likely to stop this transfer, leading to soil exhaustion in Amazon.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Big fan of WH40k as the exemplar of massive scale. This article[0] defines a super volcano as >The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005). Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma. Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents. These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat. [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2006.1814 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.200...
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Those numbers aren't that large. They aren't small in anyone's estimation, but the Empire State Building is a lot less than the amount of material a motivated earthmoving company can get through in a year. There'd be some interesting technical challenges tearing down Everest, but it is conceivable. The part that requires creative thinking is why it would be worth it spending that much money.
    - suzzer99 3y ago
      To build the Panama Canal, excavators removed enough spoil to fill a city block 19 miles high.
      - mckn1ght 3y ago
        You all are talking quantitatively about volumes, but there’s also the qualitative difference between soil and magma.
      - danbruc 3y ago
        1800 Panama Canals still sound like quite a lot of work.
    - kabouseng 3y ago
      Except that volume gets released with an eruption, not over a year...Imagine 5 mount everests lifting up into the air and coming down at the same time.
ceejayoz 3y ago
> At this rate, the energy of the next eruption would be drained after about 16,000 years, and in less than 50,000 years the magma chamber would be cooled completely. Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.
- michaelbrave 3y ago
  half jokingly I thought "so we just need 160 power plants to bring it down to 100 years"
  - chii 3y ago
    hehe, or drilling down into the magma chamber 160 times causes it to erupt prematurely.
  - jconnop 3y ago
    In the article it's said the proposal already included 160 plants in a big ring around yellowstone, resulting in the 16,000 years figure. So to get it down to 100 years you'd need 160^2 = 25,600 geothermal plants. Perfectly reasonable, let's do it.
    - pacificmint 3y ago
      Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.
      - Maxion 3y ago
        We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???. Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).
        thorncorona 3y ago
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
I think the puny icelandic power plant is no match for the forces that are at play there. Also remember it takes time for heat to transfer through so much rock, so a plant would have to continuously remove energy for a very long time to reach the places where it actually matters.

senectus1 3y ago

I suspect the SCALE required to ease the pressures would be absurd. Warhammer 40k sort of absurd. Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.

ehnto 3y ago
I don't have a sense of the scale you are talking, but I would love to see more megaprojects. Truly mega. When we aren't getting in our own way, humans do some pretty awesome stuff.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I don't. The reason is that even though we are probably capable of doing so we lack the responsibility required to do this without the chance of massive negative side effects. Every time we've upped the scale in our abilities it has only resulted in more damage, not quite balanced out by more progress. This is a real problem: we can get ourselves into the kind of trouble that we don't seem to be able to get ourselves out of. We never stop and say 'this is enough', we always take the next step, create a new level of problems that then requires yet another level of innovation to control it and so on. It's the sorcerers apprentice, but a weird variation on it. Just supposed that what the GP says is possible and doable: what guarantees do we have that we fully understand the system we are messing with? How much risk are we willing to take? Who are the stakeholders in these risks? Without answers to all of these questions we run the real risk of biting off more than we can collectively chew and if and when we do there won't be an 'undo' button to press. Well, technically will have pressed it, but quite possible on a time-scale that we didn't quite envision. I've seen the most stupid proposals of the kind that you are suggesting: PNE's ('Peaceful Nuclear Explosions') on a scale never dreamed of before to remake the face of the Earth, create new watersheds and so on. And to incidentally put an amount of radiation into the atmosphere that would be absolutely unparalleled. The fact that we can do these things doesn't mean that we automatically have to do these things. I keep thinking about the discovery of nuclear power: what if we hadn't? Would that be such a huge problem or would we simply have found other, better ways of providing ourselves with power? And if we did, what would be the short term, mid term and long term consequences of doing so? Because the energy stored in the core of the Earth is the ultimate form of fossil energy: between gravity and plate tectonics life had a way of escaping the oceans and without that we'd be fish, mammals in the ocean at best. Good luck with that electronics project you were working on in that environment. It's tricky: we have one Earth. Any decision that irrevocably removes something from that Earth carries a price tag the value of which may not be visible for a long time to come, so caution would seem to be the best way forward, even if that isn't our nature. Our nature is just to act and then to pass the buck to the next generation.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I agree with everything except your conclusion. Even if we could resist our fundamental nature how do we know that our current values are more correct than the evolutionary forces that have kept us alive for millions of years? We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. What if whoever didn’t get into trouble also didn’t survive.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. The ultimate survivorship bias.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Well, yes, that’s natural selection for you.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The problem is that inaction is also fraught. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Some time ago scientists were concerned that the Earth was headed into another ice age. Then we started burning all of this carbon, so that's not happening anymore. Great, catastrophe averted. Now we're burning way too much and going hard the other way. Damn it. Okay, so the status quo is no good, maybe we should build a whole bunch of nuclear plants so we can stop burning coal. What could possibly go wrong? Or we could do this geothermal thing. Indolence is fatal. Pick your poison.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That's a fair point, however, action has often much clearer short term consequences than inaction, and the consequences of inaction can be studied at leisure because action always is still an option. But once you've done your action thingy you can't go back to what it was like before.
      - 3y ago
- cratermoon 3y ago
  I invite you to find yourself a copy of any or all of The Control of Nature by John McPhee, A River Lost by Blaine Harden, and Marc Reisner's books Cadillac Desert and A Dangerous Place.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Have you heard of The Line? It's going to be a 500m high, 200m wide, 170 km long linear city / megastructure housing 9 million people; real science fiction stuff, but construction is underway with phase 1 ready by 2030: https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline
  - MandieD 3y ago
    Unfortunately, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146820
- rapnie 3y ago
  I like a mega challenge that is manageable because everyone can do their tiny part. Like the Justdiggit project [0], on a mission to regreening Africa and cooling down the planet. All one needs is a shovel and knowledge how to dig shallow holes with a ridge to avoid rainwaters flushing furtile topsoil away, and store water for plants to grow in the dry season. [0] https://justdiggit.org/ https://justdiggit.org/
  - neuromanser 3y ago
    Do you know if they have anything on the following? Sahara is the source of minerals for the Amazon rainforest (winds carry fine sand over the Atlantic), "regreening" Africa is likely to stop this transfer, leading to soil exhaustion in Amazon.
fbdab103 3y ago
Big fan of WH40k as the exemplar of massive scale. This article[0] defines a super volcano as >The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005). Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma. Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents. These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat. [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2006.1814 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.200...
- roenxi 3y ago
  Those numbers aren't that large. They aren't small in anyone's estimation, but the Empire State Building is a lot less than the amount of material a motivated earthmoving company can get through in a year. There'd be some interesting technical challenges tearing down Everest, but it is conceivable. The part that requires creative thinking is why it would be worth it spending that much money.
  - suzzer99 3y ago
    To build the Panama Canal, excavators removed enough spoil to fill a city block 19 miles high.
    - mckn1ght 3y ago
      You all are talking quantitatively about volumes, but there’s also the qualitative difference between soil and magma.
    - danbruc 3y ago
      1800 Panama Canals still sound like quite a lot of work.
  - kabouseng 3y ago
    Except that volume gets released with an eruption, not over a year...Imagine 5 mount everests lifting up into the air and coming down at the same time.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> At this rate, the energy of the next eruption would be drained after about 16,000 years, and in less than 50,000 years the magma chamber would be cooled completely. Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.

michaelbrave 3y ago
half jokingly I thought "so we just need 160 power plants to bring it down to 100 years"
- chii 3y ago
  hehe, or drilling down into the magma chamber 160 times causes it to erupt prematurely.
- jconnop 3y ago
  In the article it's said the proposal already included 160 plants in a big ring around yellowstone, resulting in the 16,000 years figure. So to get it down to 100 years you'd need 160^2 = 25,600 geothermal plants. Perfectly reasonable, let's do it.
  - pacificmint 3y ago
    Plus you’d take a great step towards solving our energy problems.
    - Maxion 3y ago
      We'll except the fact that deep geothermal plants are completely theoretic as a means of production - the final cost of power is a big ???. Most people want cheap power. Anything over around 20 cents a kWh makes it uncompetitive to fossile equivalents (e.g. wood / oil / gas heating).
      - thorncorona 3y ago

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

I think the puny icelandic power plant is no match for the forces that are at play there. Also remember it takes time for heat to transfer through so much rock, so a plant would have to continuously remove energy for a very long time to reach the places where it actually matters.