NASA believes that the Yellowstone supervolcano is a greater threat to life on Earth than any other potential natural disaster, including plummeting asteroids. So it’s working on a plan.
LETTING OFF STEAM
NASA’s researchers have told the BBC they have explored what it would take to avert a super volcano catastrophe.
The answer: find a way to cool the magma down.
Supervolcanos only spill over when the molten rock is hot enough to become highly fluid.
In a slightly cooler state, it gets thicker. Stickier.
It’s not going anywhere fast.
To achieve this, the Jet Propulsion Labs team calculated a super volcano on the brink of eruption would have to be cooled some 35 per cent.
They propose to do this by pricking the supervolcano’s surface, to let off steam.
But this in itself poses risks.
Drill too deep, and the vent could cause an explosive depressurisation that may set off the exact kind of eruption the scientists were trying to avoid.
Heated water rising from deep under the surface of Yellowstone is already serving to cool the magma pool. Here Old Faithul erupts. Picture: iStockSource:Supplied
Instead, the NASA scientists propose, a 10km deep hole into the hydrothermal water below and to the sides of the magma chamber. These fluids, which form Yellowstone’s famous heat pools and geysers, already drain some 60-70 per cent of the heat from the magma chamber below.
NASA proposes that, in an emergency, this enormous body of heated water can be injected with cooler water, extracting yet more heat.
This could prevent the super volcano’s magma from reaching the temperature at which it would erupt.
Such a project could cost in excess of $3.5 billion. But it’s nothing like the reconstruction cost of digging two thirds of the continental United States out from under mountains of volcanic ash.
And it could even help pay for itself.
Steam from the superheated water could be used to drive power turbines.
“You would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years,” NASA’s Brian Wilcox says.
Source: News.com.au
This may happen or not.
Ask any liberal and you get the reply that GLOBAL WARMING IS THE CAUSE
It would be a natural disaster. (If you don’t take into consideration the benefits to ones garden in smaller amounts of course ) I don’t know where you live stay inside when the black snow comes. Wear a face mask if you have to go out side. If the ash is deep enough it will kill your car/truck motor. Be prepared to hunker down till most of it settles (and best to travel after a rain on cleared roads.) Make sure you have food and water stored for at least a week or more (Don’t forget coffee). This will be no where near the danger to the earths population if the ring of fire goes off. But yea it’s mostly scare tactics. Not as bad as it sounds, we survived when Mt. St Hellens blew.
Mt. Saint Helen was a Sunday walk in the park on a warm spring day.
Yellowstone has the power to destroy life around the world. Airplanes will be grounded. Automobiles will have trouble as the ash which is glass will cover most of this continent 2 -1000 feet deep. The eruption is past due if history is correct.
Oh that would end the global warming thing huh
Regular middle Americans are pretty much ignoring the endless verbal and physical assaults being carried out by the Swamp, MSM, PROGRESSIVE GLOBALIST CABAL in congress and all depts of government. Now they continue to TRY to terrorize us with this c**p?
When the trumpets of Revelation sound NASA will run for cover like eve r u one will.
Don’t worry about it. If it happens. We all get kicked off the playground.
Sooner the better, so tired of this bs world.
Yeah well if it does it does! They cannot control the earth!
Of course they can save us. Just like they can control climate change… (NOAA 800K years of natural climate change cycles for reference: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/Temperature-change-and-carbon-dioxide-change-measured-from-the-EPICA-Dome-C-ice-core-in-Antarctica-v2.jpg). All it takes is for you to unquestionably BELIEVE and give them lots of your $$ to work on the theory. And of course they’ll need lots more $$ to propagandize their unproven/unproveable theory as if it were gospel.