Defuse a volcano? (27)

1 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-27 19:42 ID:Yc4D7ZOM This thread was merged from the former /science/ board. You can view the archive here.

As this is the ever-highly speculative Science board, I put to you a highly speculative scenario: Are you a bad enough dude/construction company/government agency/super villain to stop a volcano? Can you think of a way to take enough energy out of the equation to make a volcano sputter rather than explode?

I say this with the threat of Uturuncu popping its top sometime soon and potentially messing with the weather even worse than Pinatubo did. Also, I'm all about job creation...

Don't hold back! I want to hear crazy ideas.

2 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-28 08:36 ID:6gTp6ZU1

Well, stratovolcanoes like Uturuncu are generally caused by the presence of a subduction zone. The nastiest volcanoes are linked to plate tectonics. There's hot spots too, in which the mantle violently penetrates the crust, but after making its initial thrust the mantle doesn't have much stamina unless aroused by the proximity of a cleft. I imagine we can tolerate the continued activity of shield volcanoes.

So let's get rid of the plates. What good have they ever done for us? They're responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, and Australian wildlife, the bastards. Anyway, it may be difficult to actually put the Earth's crust back in one piece now that it's all broken up, so why don't we time travel back to near the formation of the planet and put a stop to all this tectonic business before it started.

For plates to form, the crust of a planet requires areas of weakness. On Earth, it's believed that these areas of weakness were created by the interaction of silica and water. Water is probably the easier of the two to do away with, though how exactly how that would be done is hard to say, due to our limited understanding of the Earth's formative years.

If you subscribe to the giant impact hypothesis (that a collision with another protoplanet caused the formation of the Moon), averting that may achieve our goal, as it has been theorized that material vaporized by the impact generated a high-pressure CO2 atmosphere which prevented the Earth's water from evaporating away into space. It has also been theorized that much of Earth's water may be of extraterrestrial origin, so putting an impenetrable force field around the young Earth to shield it from any and all collisions is a good bet.

Should we succeed, Earth's oceans will have been severely diminished or perhaps not exist at all, significant tectonism will not occur, and as a side effect of the reduction of surface water it is likely life would have never originated on the planet. A small price to pay for avoiding the threat of a supervolcano, in my opinion.

3 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-28 11:23 ID:BOrrV0yd

>>2
Not even thinking about boxes, he's so outside of them. I like it, but the time machine is in the shop.

Is there a way to either cool the system down? Can we just take energy out of it with some sort of enormous geothermal operation?

Can we set the whole thing off prematurely to ensure a slightly less violent eruption?

4 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-28 23:10 ID:S+l6nf9a

How much urgent is this?
Volcanoes in the Uturuncu region are known to hoard magma for 300,000 years before they erupted.

5 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-29 00:50 ID:Yc4D7ZOM

300,000 years will blow by in the blink of an eye. We need ideas, people. Coordinated nuclear blasts deep below the surface? Inject water deep below the earth? Anything? Anyone?

6 Name: Anonymous Scientist : 2011-10-29 06:48 ID:6gTp6ZU1

>>5
Well, my other brilliant plan to sabotage tectonism was by halting all radioactive decay and thus the Earth's main endothermic process, but I wasn't sure how to go about it. It appears futzing with quantum mechanics would be necessary and my understanding of that is not very solid.

Since you mention water, I'm reminded that its presence above an oceanic subduction zone actually promotes the melting of the mantle. One might decrease volcanic activity in the area by draining the adjacent ocean. (I don't have anything against oceans, seriously... they're just comparatively easier to dispose of than the other factors involved.)

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