Originally posted by ShadowXIX
I have seen something like this done in a lake in Africa that had posion gas build up under the lake and release all at once every once in a while killing many people in the surrounding area. They tapped the gas under the lake so it is released slowly over time so this will never happen again. It seems to work just fine.
Today, large polyethylene pipes have been placed into Lakes Nyos and Monoun with the sole purpose of siphoning water continuously from the lower layers to the surface. This will allow the CO2 dissolved in the bottom waters to slowly bubble out as the water rises to the surface, thus preventing a similar tragedy in the future.
Originally posted by Max Rushmore
I don't think a nuke would set off the super volcano at all. It might cause a vent to let off some of the building pressure. I don't think the matter is worth loosing sleep over though.
[edit on 16-10-2004 by Max Rushmore]
be responsible for the violence of the eruptions. Into a glass flask - the magma chamber - he poured a mixture of pine resin and acetone. the pine resin mimicked the magma, the acetone modelled trapped volcanic gases like carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide.
STEVE SPARKS: Pine resin is a very sticky, stiff material so it has some properties which are rather like magma and we thought that if we could get a, a gas which dissolved in pine resin, like acetone, then we could get a, a laboratory system which would represent the, the natural case.
NARRATOR: Sparks then created a vacuum above the flask to mimic the depressurisation that occurs in the magma chamber when a supervolcano begins its eruption and the dissolved volcanic gas can expand. When the vacuum reached the liquid it caused a dramatic change. The dissolved acetone suddenly became a gas. This made the resin expand causing violent frothing and blasting the contents out of the chamber.
STEVE SPARKS: These experiments give us tremendous insight into the tremendous power of gases coming out of solution and enabled to drive these very dramatic explosive flows.
NARRATOR: Unlike supervolcanoes, normal volcanoes don't have this vast reservoir of magma and trapped volcanic gases and don't have the potential for such powerful eruptions. But experiments in the laboratory cannot answer the biggest question of all surrounding Yellowstone: when will it next erupt? Scientists face a problem. They have never seen a supervolcano erupt. Until a VEI8 eruption is observed and analysed no-one knows what the telltale precursors would be to a Yellowstone eruption.
WHat would happen if a terrorist nuked Yellowstone?