Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead

sciencehabit writes "A project to drill deep into the heart of a 'supervolcano' in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep. The project’s organizers originally intended to bore a 4-kilometer-deep well in the area of the caldera late in 2009, but the plan was put on hold by then-mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino after scientists expressed concerns about the risks."

Re:In other news

[bobwrit]

I feel like I should share this story at this point. While I was taking Differential Equations at my University, our prof would (pretty heavily) motivate problems with stories behind them. His method of elaborating second order linear ODE's. was "OK, imagine that you have a mass on a spring. This system is then immersed in a vat of goo. You put on your hazmat suit, and go into the goo yourself, with a pointy stick. You then begin to poke the mass on the spring. We want to model the mass's movements. Go." It was quite hilarious at the time, and one of my more memorable moments(the other two were his motivation for non-linear first order ODE's(it involved bunnies stacking on top of each other), and solving 2nd order non-linear ode's... specifically with Einstein's corrections to newton's second law to deal with perihelion precession. and seeing the solutions for black holes pop out from that). Back to the topic at hand: this could be a good idea, but only if they don't plan on drilling a significant distance to the magma chamber of the volcano. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the stress may cause a premature eruption(which, albeit, probably wouldn't be as bad as letting it go to full term/letting the chamber fill up so much it erupts).

Re:In Italy?

[Grishnakh]

On the other hand, one problem with volcanoes, super or otherwise, is that they do erupt from time to time. The smaller ones are bad enough: look what happened when Mt. St. Helens erupted. Or much worse, Krakatoa in 1883, which was so loud it was reportedly heard 3000 miles away! But a supervolcano is really bad; according to Wikipedia, the Lake Toba eruption ~74000 years ago eradicated 60% of the human population with the volcanic winter it produced. A supervolcano erupting now would be devastating to our modern society, much like an Apophis-sized asteroid striking the earth would.

Instead of sitting around and hoping no eruptions happen, it's probably better we learn about how these geologic processes work, and figure out ways to control them, so we aren't constantly in danger of near-extinction. I'm no geologist, but drilling into volcanoes to relieve the pressure seems like a good idea to prevent impending eruptions. Similarly, instead of sitting around and hoping no big asteroids hit us, it would make a lot more sense to develop space-based capabilities and technology to avoid any asteroid strikes. However, humans are notoriously short-sighted so if such things happen before a giant disaster instead of after, it'd be a miracle. What's bad is that these disasters have happened (both asteroid strikes and supervolcanoes), many times before in history, just not within living peoples' memories.

Sidoarjo Mud Flow

[tiny69]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow [wikipedia.org]

It is expected it to flow for the next 25 to 30 years.

Re:In Italy?

[khallow]

I dimly recall a quote from a fantasy author, Glen Cook on this. To paraphrase, with enough lead time one can control nature. A supervolcano eruption is just a lot of energy. Dissipate it and there is no eruption. But one won't be able to do so in a short period of time.

For example, a while back, I did a crude calculation on the energy entering the Yellowstone hotspot. My guess is that it is roughly the same order of magnitude as the electric power currently produced by the US (roughly a terawatt of heat introduced over hundreds of thousands of years). That's feasible to dissipate either as useful power or waste heat to space. For example, dumping a terawatt to the large lake, Lake Yellowstone present in the caldera, would result in a dissipation of roughly 3000 watts per square meter (1 terawatt over 350 square km of lake) over the lake's surface (assuming one didn't enlarge the lake to its ice age borders), which is roughly equivalent, I think to about 10-20 times the energy received by the lake from the Sun during the summer solstice. It's a lot of heat, but something that would be possible to dissipate just with what's present at the caldera.

Do that over a few hundred thousand years and you've probably defused the Yellowstone hotspot permanently.

The point is not to lobby for radical environmental and geological changes, which may well be more costly than the disasters they are intended to prevent, but to point out that we have a surprising capability here to prevent global disasters which in the past would have just been considered unstoppable "acts of god".