Posted on 08/20/2017 8:45:36 AM PDT by EveningStar
Beneath Yellowstone National Park is a giant volcano. The heat from this volcano powers all of the park's famous geysers and hot springs, so most tourists probably don't worry about having tons of hot magma under their feet. But perhaps they should: The Yellowstone supervolcano is a disaster waiting to happen.
The supervolcano erupts about every 600,000 years, and it's been about that long since the last eruption. That means the volcano could erupt any day now, and if it does it'll send enough dust and ash into the sky to blot out the sun for years, along with blowing a 25-mile-wide crater in the western U.S. That's why a group of NASA scientists and engineers are developing a plan to prevent an eruption by stealing the volcano's heat...
NASA's plan is to drill a hole into the side of the volcano and pump water through it. When the water comes back out, it'll be heated to over 600 degrees, slowly cooling the volcano. The team hopes that given enough time, this process will take enough heat from the volcano to prevent it from ever erupting...
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Think this:
Not this:
The Centralia coal mine fire as been going around 20 years ...At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. How about they do a trial run on that fire! LOLOL
That was my thought too.
They concluded this would work after dropping a frozen turkey into a deep fryer.
Anyone want to do the calculations? Unless this generation facility is big enough to replace the western grid, I'd bet the magma temperature decline wouldn't even show up as a rounding error.
Longer than that. wiki ;
The Centralia mine fire is a coal seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. The fire is suspected to be from deliberate burning of trash in a former strip mine, igniting a coal seam.
I lived near it in 1968 and it was going pretty good then.
It might flood China too.......
Why is NASA wasting time on this when there are confederate statues that could be vaporized from space, if only NASA had enough money.
What could possibly go wrong?
In reply to post #24:
I’m sure drilling a hole will help!!! What could go wrong??
NASA JPL. More to the story here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano
In that case, De Blasio better be gathering more money to build a volcano-proof dome atop of his giant seawall he wants to build around NYC to keep out the rising ocean.
It appears that NASA doesn’t know about undersea volcanoes. All that cold seawater does not hold them back.
And the super hot steam powers what?
5.56mm
“NASA’s plan is to drill a hole into the side of the volcano and pump water through it. When the water comes back out, it’ll be heated to over 600 degrees, slowly cooling the volcano. The team hopes that given enough time, this process will take enough heat from the volcano to prevent it from ever erupting.”
there must be only about a gazillion bazillion trillion BTUs in that lava dome. And they’re gonna cool it with ONE frickin hole “given enough time”? What, like a million years? And where the hell are they gonna get that much water in Wyoming? Not to mention, talk about actually creating global warming by releasing that much heat into the atmosphere ...
what a bunch of nimrods.
What could possibly go wrong?
Sizing is your friend...
Somebody did the math in a story years ago. They figured it would need a large, man made river from Canada, that would fill up a very large dam lake. Then a whole chain of underground nuclear explosives outside the magma chamber, to create a deep valley into the hot rock.
There is a vast amount of magma in the chamber, estimated to be able to fill the Grand Canyon a dozen times over, 12 to 28 miles beneath the ground. So after the deep valley is created, a river’s worth of water pours into it, creating an immense wall of steam. For perhaps 100 years.
We probably can’t cool down the magma, but we might be able to cool the rock containing it enough so instead of melting, it thickens, creating better containment of the magma.
I remember seeing this film as a kid!
I thought it was a pretty cool film then.
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