Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead 109
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."
Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead? (Score:1)
"That's what SHE said!" ;-)
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Kind of takes the phrase "fire crotch" to a whole new level.
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After you sent her the card last week? Slashdot is no place for your oedipal fantasies.
Dear Syfy (Score:5, Funny)
The Italians would like to give you the plot and backdrop for your next movie. Add a giant creature (maybe it's den was in a cavern above the caldera.. or even better it lives in the magma) and there you go, instant movie.
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The Italians would like to give you the plot and backdrop for your next movie. Add a giant creature (maybe it's den was in a cavern above the caldera.. or even better it lives in the magma) and there you go, instant movie.
...
I see no other possible outcome...
Facciamolo!
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Haven't they done that movie... a few times... in the last couple weeks...?
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Not that this has stopped anyone, but I think it's been done [imdb.com].
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The Italians would like to give you the plot and backdrop for your next movie.
Mario Bros vs. Cthulhu
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Murphy's Law (Score:1)
What could go wrong?
Jesus. Just JESUS! (Score:1)
Jesus. Is this shit smart? They want to bury another city in volcanic ash???
In Italy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Awesome this time they will be able to give a good warning... In the next three months while we drill into the caldera.
Problem solved... maybe they will manage to completely destroy all the people who were disatisfied with the lack of warning last time?
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In the case of a supervolcano eruption I would like to think the locals would have better things to do in their remaining minutes of life than file lawsuits.
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In the case of a supervolcano eruption I would like to think the locals would have better things to do in their remaining minutes of life than file lawsuits.
I think you may have some rather high expectations on this one...
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Re:In Italy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually they won't. They'll be digging out from under 20+ feet of ash.
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If there is one species that is more resilient than cockroaches it has to be lawyers.
I can easily foresee lawsuits from neighboring countries, especially those downwind of the eruption.
The various airlines might see an opportunity as well.
Re:In Italy? (Score:5, Informative)
We are all downwind from super volcanoes.
Re:In Italy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:In Italy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no geologist, but drilling into volcanoes to relieve the pressure seems like a good idea to prevent impending eruptions.
I think it depends on how and when you relieve that presure. Inducing a large volcanic eruption now instead of say, 10,000 years from now, might well be beneficial to those future inhabitants, but it would happen to us.
I think a better approach is to sap the heat of the volcano via massive geothermal energy. Our society really does use up a lot of energy (and it's growing considerably over time), and over geological periods of time, we probably could shut down most of the more dangerous volcanoes on the planet with very aggressive geothermal harvesting.
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That sounds like a rather brilliant idea actually.
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You think stopping the tectonic renewal is a brilliant idea?
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For me, my children, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, and their great grandchildrent, and many many more... yes.
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I'm skeptical that we can do anything to change the course of a supervolcanic eruption. If the Earth decides it want's to erupt somewhere I think it's going to happen. At best we might put it off for a few years or force it to erupt in an adjacent area.
Re:In Italy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
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I doubt it that the energy to melt the crust over the whole Yellowstone area concentrated into Lake Yellowstone just turns out as 10-20 times the solar constant, area-wise.
Over a few hundred thousand years. Don't forget the time part. You might still be right about the zeroes.
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Don't anthropomorphize the Earth, it really doesn't like it.
(And you sound like a dumbass)
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It depends on if you can relieve the pressure, perhaps by letting the magma out of the dome before it can build up enough pressure to blow what's above it.
To do that, you'd have to put vents in the dome, drilled all the way into the magma so it could get out. But the kind of magma that causes supervolcanoes has superheated water and other gases in it that have the potential to expand explosively. It would be a tricky process, probably more difficult than capping an undersea gusher.
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Wouldn't that be a good thing, though? Humans are like parasites.
If they were, then getting rid of a mere 60% of humans would be of no consequence. They'd just breed back.
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You sound like a sicko; yes, there's lots of bad (or ridiculously dumb) people out there, but there's a lot of good ones too, and disasters don't discriminate. But just to entertain your line of thought, it wouldn't take long for 40% of the present population to breed back. The current population doubling time is probably something like 30-60 years, so we'd be right back where we started within two centuries. The way to solve the population problem is through eliminating poverty, improving education, and
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Super volcanoes, if they erupt, can reform the entire face of the planet.
Name one that has. We have trouble discerning supervolcano eruptions that are more than a few million years old. And they aren't that profound. For example, the Yellowstone hotspot has generated somewhere over 100 caldera eruptions, one which was the third largest known supervolcano eruption of the past 26 million years. So what has it done? Dump a lot of ash and make the US state of Idaho a great place for potatoes. That's not what I'd call reforming the face of the planet.
Even the far larger basalt flo
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The outpourings of the Columbia River Basalt Group turned hundreds of miles of land into an even, flat, black smoldering mass for a while. Between various groups we see brief sedimentary layers, some fossiliferous, so they didn't permanently extinguish life on even a local level. No extinctions are correlated with them, either. They did outgas a great deal of CO2, resulting in a spell of warmer/moister climate, laterizing the basalt in the process - hence the red soils you see here and there in the Willa
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(Yeah, now you have to decide if you think I'm serious or just making jokes. Good luck with that; I'm not entirely sure I know the answer to that question myself.)
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Is this the same country that sued scientists over not predicting natural disasters last year?
That's the sensationalist headline, but it's more a lesson on how scientist should present their theories. Say'n stuff like " no reason to suppose a sequence of small earthquakes could be the prelude to a strong event", probably should have instead been something more like: it's unlikely that small earthquakes are are prelude to a strong event... Sure it sounds weasly, but is probably more representative of how science really should be presenting information to make it more resistant to politician-tele
Re:In Italy? (Score:5, Informative)
It's been done before, accidentally:
"Monday December 22, 2008
Big Isle well strikes deep lava chamber
Magma flowing into a shaft was the first seen in its “natural habitat”
By Rod Thompson
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
HILO Geologists around the world are perking up at the news from San Francisco last week that magma flowed a short distance into a Big Island geothermal well during drilling in 2005, revealing an unusual mineral.
Geologists on the Big Island are taking the news more calmly since they were informed months earlier, and a much more dramatic case of magma in a geothermal well took place in Iceland in 1977...."
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Geologists on the Big Island are taking the news more calmly since they were informed months earlier, and a much more dramatic case of magma in a geothermal well took place in Iceland in 1977...."
Yeah. So you're basically saying we have ~30 years before it begins to cause problems?
-- joking.. really.
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Is this the same country that sued scientists over not predicting natural disasters last year? Who gets sued if / when the Volcano erupts (regardless of the cause- natural or drilling)?
At that point, does it matter?
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Is this the same country that sued scientists over not predicting natural disasters last year? Who gets sued if / when the Volcano erupts (regardless of the cause- natural or drilling)?
No, they sued a person responsible for warning people in case there are signs of trouble, they sued him because he went in front of cameras and told people to IGNORE earthquakes because there was NO WAY a big one was coming, and on the next day there were 150 dead people, people that would exit their homes when earth started to shake like they used to for years if they didnt listen to that retarded "scientist".
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, geologists from Naples saw a wild dog outside their lab. In order to see if it was rabid or not, they decided to poke it with a pointy stick.
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Turns out the dog wasn't rabid, so they went on with their plans of drilling into the supervolcano in order to see whether it is active.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mother Earth doesn't like premature eruptions.
Bad Idea? (Score:2)
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Never mind an eruption, they could cause a vent to open that spews lava for years to come. Wasn't there a place they did this in the Philipines somewhere? Very runny lava spewed out for years and years covering and destroying a large surrounding area, like a big very flat volcano. But I suppose it relieves the pressure and could build some more islands or something if they want that.
Re:Bad Idea? (Score:5, Informative)
That wasn't lava, that was mud. It's still active and it's in Indonesia.
Sidoarjo mud flow [wikipedia.org]
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This Lot won't last long!
(it's going to be covered over)
Smokin' Deal!!!
(no, really)
Scenic Mountain View
(coming soon)
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That sounds like a great way to prevent a volcano from erupting, if you do it just right. Lava spewing out for years and years is far preferable to having an actual eruption. And if you can direct the lava into a nearby ocean, you can create more land, which in a place with a land shortage can be very useful.
Of course, there's the possibility of screwing up and causing an early eruption. That would still probably be better than a natural eruption (it'd be a lesser magnitude, and you might have more contr
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I suspect drilling into this area is about as likely to cause an eruption as sticking a hypodermic needle into your butt is likely to cause you to bleed to death. Unless the magma chamber is extremely shallow it will most likely solidify and plug the borehole long before it hits the surface.
Pop goes the brady? (Score:2)
So the area has an issue with bradyseism, wouldn't that be a sign that perhaps they may accidentally pierce a magma chamber?
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That's what MARCIA said! ;-)
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JOHN, JOHN, JOHN...
Whirring noise (Score:4, Funny)
At a press conference held in the drilling facility earlier today, a chief engineer responded to questions by leaning into a microphone and stating "Don't worry. Everything will be fine. We have put in place extra safety procedures, and we have everything well under control." Interestingly, as he completed his sentence, a strange whirring sound could be heard coming from a hallway full of steam pipes leading off from the room where the microphone stands had been placed. A junior engineer returned a few minutes later, sighting no sign of damage, but noting that a tall blue crate with a light on top was sitting by access grate number five, and nobody could remember bringing it in by forklift.
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At a press conference held in the drilling facility earlier today, a chief engineer responded to questions by leaning into a microphone and stating "Don't worry. Everything will be fine. We have put in place extra safety procedures, and we have everything well under control." Interestingly, as he completed his sentence, a strange whirring sound could be heard coming from a hallway full of steam pipes leading off from the room where the microphone stands had been placed. A junior engineer returned a few minutes later, sighting no sign of damage, but noting that a tall blue crate with a light on top was sitting by access grate number five, and nobody could remember bringing it in by forklift.
That was a police box.
If something goes wrong.... (Score:1)
even minute, the Italian government can arrest the engineers and scientists, just like they did to the seismologists who failed at correctly predicting an earthquake that killed hundreds of people.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/27/italian-scientist-charged-manslaughter-failing-predict-earthquake/ [foxnews.com]
Eh (Score:5, Informative)
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If a single borehole into a magma chamber were all it took to trigger an eruption, we wouldn't have supervolcanoes, as they would have all bled out their pressure long ago. You might get a tiny earthquake, or an explosion large enough to collapse the borehole, but the it is very unlikely that anything worse than that would happen. If something that small could cause it, it would have been triggered naturally.
My thoughts exactly
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True enough. If that was the case then you'd have terrorists aiming to take out the USA buying drilling equipment and smuggling into Yellowstone to trigger the supervolcano there.
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Hmm, I seem to remember seeing this on an episode of Warehouse 13...
No boom. (Score:2)
I wonder (Score:2)
despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion
How much risk is actually behind that statement, versus making such a statement only to avoid ending up on manslaughter charges like some other Italian geologists... See what happens when you mix politics and truth?
syfy likes rip off big moves now days (Score:2)
http://www.imdb.com/news/ni27835210/ [imdb.com]
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How does Asylum make money with those crappy movies anyway? No one watches them, and they're rated as poorly as (or maybe worse than) Uwe Boll's movies on IMDB.
I suspect they're involved in money laundering somehow.
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They get them on to store shelves at the same time that major film is still in theatres. This way they can play off the big movies advertising with little expenditure of their own, and they used to have a deal with Blockbuster that guaranteed every store would buy x amount of copies but I doubt that is still going.
I have also seen them on VOD / PPV before SYFY asw (Score:2)
I have also seen them on VOD / PPV before SYFY as well.
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Holy crap, they can really sustain a movie-making business that way?
I look forward to teaching my grand kids (Score:4, Funny)
where Italy was~
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where Italy was~
That's pretty optimistic.
Have you started building your shelter yet? In all likelihood, you won't be around to see them, since the
intra-generational gap will spread in the post-apocalyptic world. But a shelter would increase your chances.
-AI
The right project manager (Score:1)
We can only hope that a capable administrator like Hank Scorpio is running this project.
Sidoarjo Mud Flow (Score:4, Interesting)
It is expected it to flow for the next 25 to 30 years.
In case of pyroclastic flow (Score:5, Funny)
Duck and cover. The thousand degree cloud of gas and ash will pass harmlessly over you.
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The lead scientist... (Score:1)
Supervolcano Drilling Plan (Score:2)
By any chance.. (Score:2)
Has one of the scientist involved suddenly adopted a child with a striking resemblance to the fair folk? [wikipedia.org]
start date (Score:1)
it would be our luck drilling will start on december 21, 2012 - I wonder how the mayans knew.