http://askageologist.blogspot.com/2016/03/can-you-drill-into-supervolcano-to.html Ask A Geologist People are always asking questions about geology, from rocks they pick up in their backyard, to why not use a nuclear device to "pop" a restive volcano. This blog will cover the gamut of the fascinating world of Geoscience. It's sort of a "Geology for Dummies"... but you're 'WAY smarter than that! Friday, March 4, 2016 Can you Drill into a Supervolcano to Relieve Pressure? As recently as February 2016 an article in a prestigious science journal (Nature) raises the question if a nuclear blast will have an effect on a volcanic eruption? I'm continually amazed at the fixation people have with nuclear devices; this "nuclear question" arose during the 2004 Mount St Helens eruption and again during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon seafloor oil blowout. This is a variant on the same theme, but at least doesn't suggest some fallout-creating experiment. People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater. Q: So I am watching this tv show (What on Earth) that NASA scientists have found a super volcano that has a potential to explode in a relatively near future in Italy. I'm super curious about a lot of things, but I won't waste your time. Whether if it's true or not, my question(s) is(are): Would it be possible to hypothetically drill into a deep caldera to release pressure on a magma chamber? I get that the chamber is quite a ways down and it would cost a FORTUNE, but if a drill was created to do so, would it work? And (if so) would it be a plausible reason for the world to come together to survive? Thanks for your time, I know you guys are busy. - Jon T A: A thoughtful question. You are probably referring to Campo Flegri, a 13-km diameter nested caldera in western Italy. However, there are quite a number of much bigger supervolcanoes around the earth, including at least three "owned" by the United States: Yellowstone (mainly in Wyoming), Long Valley (California), and Veniaminof (Aleutians). Unless you spent time on a drill-rig, you would probably not realize that even very large ones used for hunting deep hydrocarbons (like the Deepwater Horizon rig) have limited borehole sizes, particularly at depth, where they reach a human body diameter or less. The active magma chamber at Yellowstone is at least 45 miles (70 km) across northeast-southwest (wider at depth), and lies as shallow as 4 miles (6 km). There is a reason for all the geysers and Morning Glory pools: rain and snow-fall seep downward until they reach an upper magma chamber that is estimated to contain perhaps 48,000 cubic kilometers (11,000+ cubic miles) of molten magma. * Perhaps you can see where this is leading. A single drill-rig would not even be seen in an image that encompassed the entire caldera. Not even all the drill-rigs on earth (if they could even successfully drill down that deep) would have any noticeable effect. The scales are just so many orders of magnitude greater. Think of a fly doing push-ups on the roof of your house. You get the idea. There was an experiment years ago to drill through a recent, 100+ meter-thick recent crust in Kilauea Iki crater on the Big Island of Hawai'i. The drill crew kept losing drill bits to the heat, but eventually they got a hole far enough down that a camera above it would catch a red glow from incandescence at some depth below the top of that lava crust. I don't think they penetrated into the lava. Even if we had giant drills and lots of them, getting a drill bit to a magma chamber is not really possible. And it takes a LONG time to drill even a small hole in cold rock to those shallowest depths. * Incidentally, the reason volcanologists are not particularly worried about Yellowstone right now is that estimates of crystal content in the magma mush (from seismic data) range upwards of 95%. That means it's very hot, but verging on solid. We don't rest on this knowledge however. Geologic history tells us that a shot of deeper mantle basalt into the base of that crystal mush can quickly remobilize and prime the whole system for another vast eruption. The last supervolcano-scale eruption was 640,000 years ago, and before that another at about 1.2 million years ago. From our experience, we would first certainly see a ramping-up series of warning signs, including inflation leading to regional ground-tilt, rock-breaking manifested in a seismic swarm with a pattern to it, and the release of unusually large amounts of volcanogenic gases such as H[2]S and CO [2]. Q: Thank you so much for the information! I was extremely excited to see someone replied. I guess I didn't realize our drill rigs were so small -- and the volcanoes so freakin' huge! That's absolutely mind-blowing. I love learning these new things about geology, the planet, space, etc. Science just fascinates me. Thank you for your time! - Jon Posted by AskTheGeologist at 5:00 PM # Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest 1 comment: 1. [blogger_lo] Ricardo BanffyDecember 6, 2021 at 11:38 AM I know I'll regret asking this, but what if in a sufficiently deeop hole where the rocks are hot enough to glow red we used explosives to fragment the rocks around the end of the hole? Could be conventional (insane) or nuclear (supervillain-level). Would that be enough to make a hot magma column reach the surface and make a "magma geuser"? Would the pressure be enough to keep the magma flowing through the hole? BTW, what kind of cooling is used on the drill bits to prevent them from overheating (in cases you are not trying to pop a geological scale pimple)? ReplyDelete Replies Reply Add comment Load more... 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