[Robert A Cook PE]

A surface blast is still no more than a half-mile-1 mile deep hole in the ground.

A long ways, but would it actually release pressure "safely" by destroying a natural park, or only delay it a few months or a few years, or release too much pressure prematurely?

The problem is predicting what happens if you vent the pressure, but release so much that catastrophe ensues anyway.

If you knew that Mt St Helens and Pinatubo were going to blow, but you couldn't prevent it, would you want to accelerate their schedule, or delay their schedule?

[Kevin Curry]

Apparently, an enormous magma chamber (fed by a plume rising from deep within the earth) lies about 8000 meters beneath the surface of the park. In one sense that seems almost impossibly close to the surface. On the other hand, it represents approximately the same vertical distance as the summit of Mt McKinley from sea level. That's a lot of earth and stone. But what a pressure cooker! When and if it does break loose, it'll push that earth and stone skyward with almost unimaginable catastrophic force.

I don't believe there is an alternative to allowing nature to take its cataclysmic course. There would almost surely be precursor signs building to a major eruption. I suspect there would be a huge migration to the north and south. Mexican illegal aliens might even stop coming into the US for awhile.

There have been about 30 Pinatubo scale-eruptions at Yellowstone in the past 600 thousand years as well. Chances are much more likely we'd see one of those lesser blowups in our lifetimes.