Surviving A Yellowstone Eruption

[All Seeing Eye]

One day Yellowstone will erupt, some believe it's overdue and some believe it will possibly happen in our lifetime.

So just what can we do to stop it causing massive worldwide devastation?

I propose we build a dome over the entire area. One of the major problems of any eruption will be the enormous amounts of ash spewing into the atmosphere. A dome will prevent such a thing from occurring. The ash will be contained and even if the dome is eventually destroyed the ash will settle onto the ground in a much smaller area.

The dome could be ventilated to allow gases and atmosphere through during calm times and then put into lock down when an Eruption is imminent.
The entire roof of the dome could have windowed sections made of thick perspex or something similar to allow sunlight in and out.

The whole idea of the endeavour is to contain the eruption for as much and as long as possible to limit the area of devastation.

 

[Kemaiku]

*sigh*

 

[Iasius]

The current Yellowstone caldera was formed by an explosion which released around 67 million times as much energy as Little Boy (Hiroshima).

And a dome is going to contain that?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

The current Yellowstone caldera was formed by an explosion which released around 67 million times as much energy as Little Boy (Hiroshima).

And a dome is going to contain that?

Contain it or failing that limit the extent and distance of the damage. The main idea is to prevent the ash during the initial outburst from entering the upper atmosphere and getting blown around the globe.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

The current Yellowstone caldera was formed by an explosion which released around 67 million times as much energy as Little Boy (Hiroshima).

And a dome is going to contain that?

Contain it or failing that limit the extent and distance of the damage. The main idea is to prevent the ash during the initial outburst from entering the upper atmosphere and getting blown around the globe.

The non-seismology and non-engineering opinion: you're gonna need a bigger dome.

Specifically, a dome that will withstand the massive forces involved in the initial eruption and massive changes in air pressure if it's going to work the way it will afterwards. Plus one that won't collapse under its own weight, given that such a dome will need to span several hundred square kilometres of land, much of it already under the influence of the significant seismic forces of the Yellowstone Caldera. It would have to have a greater circumference than the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps.

The implications of such a dome on natural life within Yellowstone will also be immense, needless to say - both in terms of its construction (which would take several years and cost billions of US dollars and use up countless resources, manpower and materials) and in terms of its actual presence - by which time of course the thing might have blown its top long before completion of the project, thus saving us the bother of doing any ecological damage that would have happened anyway.


This project is a very big task in our lifetime. Now, I can't organise what happens to me next week, let alone next year, but I think a better solution would be just to prepare contingency measures for when such an event happens, so that the world can ride out the darkness somehow. I think it's no different to the same preparations for a nuclear winter - because the worst case scenario will be very similar to it. And who knows - it may never happen to us, but our children will be ready for survival, rather than relying upon an additionally costly white elephant in north-west Wyoming that may never work.

 

[Silvercrest]

There is no way we can build a dome that strong. If we could, there's still no way to anchor it when the eruption occurs.


How will people feel about an enormous dome flying through the air in a random direction?

 

[sojourner]

It would be more technically feasible to drill a massive shaft to relieve pressure. And that would still be beyond current technology.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

How will people feel about an enormous dome flying through the air in a random direction?

I hear they're used to that in Wyoming...

 

[James Wright]

There's nothing that can be done currently to prevent an eruption of Yellowstone, except dig outand rebuild after it happens!

James

 

[Trekker4747]

One day Yellowstone will erupt, some believe it's overdue and some believe it will possibly happen in our lifetime.

So just what can we do to stop it causing massive worldwide devastation?

I propose we build a dome over the entire area. One of the major problems of any eruption will be the enormous amounts of ash spewing into the atmosphere. A dome will prevent such a thing from occurring. The ash will be contained and even if the dome is eventually destroyed the ash will settle onto the ground in a much smaller area.

The dome could be ventilated to allow gases and atmosphere through during calm times and then put into lock down when an Eruption is imminent.
The entire roof of the dome could have windowed sections made of thick perspex or something similar to allow sunlight in and out.

The whole idea of the endeavour is to contain the eruption for as much and as long as possible to limit the area of devastation.

Much like your equally absurd pyramid to "orbit" idea, a "dome" to contain a volcanic eruption is far beyond our engineering skills. Not to mention the thing would have to be enormous to cover the entire "super volcano" of the Yellowstone area.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It's gonna have to be a "forcefield" dome.

Or at least a tubular "forcefield" extending into outer space like a giant smokestack.

 

[Trekker4747]

It would be immensely more possible to "simply" cut Yellowstone out of the ground and carry it into orbit like Krypton Island than building this humungous eruption-withstanding dome.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

It would be immensely more possible to "simply" cut Yellowstone out of the ground and carry it into orbit like Krypton Island than building this humungous eruption-withstanding dome.

Actually, that might be much harder. You're talking trying to move a huge volume and mass of solid and molten rock off the face of the planet, by digging into a considerable depth through the crust - which in itself might trigger the tinderbox, or other seismic activity - and lifting the thing using something that could require more energy than is stored within the Yellowstone Caldera itself to get it into Earth orbit and beyond by achieving escape velocity. And there's no guarantee it won't come back and hit us, Earth being the second largest gravity well in the inner solar system after the Sun, thus dooming us all with a potentially worse catastrophe.

And if you drop it accidentally on the way up? It could spill all over Kansas.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

Giant magnets. That's the only way.

 

[Iasius]

^^ That, or scrith.

 

[T'Girl]

I wonder if we could drop a small nuke into the "throat" of the volcano after the initial explosion. Detonate the nuke before it gets to the magma chamber and seal the throat (what ever it's called) so ash won't billow in to th air.

 

[JiNX-01]

The crater at Yellowstone is about 1,500 square miles. So the base of the dome would have to be bigger than that.

We'd need a civil engineer to give us an idea how high it would have to be so that the dome could withstand the impact of the blasts when the eruption occurs. And it won't necessarily be a single eruption. It could be multiple eruptions as the volcano "unzips."

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/about/faq/faqscience.php#large

I wonder if we could drop a small nuke into the "throat" of the volcano after the initial explosion. Detonate the nuke before it gets to the magma chamber and seal the throat (what ever it's called) so ash won't billow in to th air.

The magma chamber is very shallow, only a few kilometers below the surface. A nuclear explosion would almost certainly trigger an eruption.

 

[farmkid]

We're talking about building something to contain an eruption that the continental crust can't contain. If a few miles of rock can't contain it, nothing we can build will even come close.

We would be much more likely to be able to drill down to the magma chamber and relieve the pressure, though I think that's still beyond our technological ability. A much better option would be to make sure we're prepared for it in case it actually happens. We can prepare for it by having evacuation plans in place and food stored so we might be able to survive the mini ice age that would follow.

I'm not personally worried about it. I live close enough that I probably wouldn't survive, so I don't really care what happens to the rest of y'all.

 

[Meredith]

I say we just tun yellow stone into the largest Geothermal plant EVER!!!! By Extracting thermal energy from the Caldera it will cause it to solidify and remain intact longer before any eruption, there is probably enough thermal energy there than could be tapped to power the whole United States for the next 100+ years!!!!! Just start drilling into the caldera and extracting the plentiful heat energy and as a side benefit it will prevent the supervolcano from going boom!

 

[Silvercrest]

I think we should enclose the dome, fill it with llamas and use the eruption for a space launch. We can load it up with nukes for additional propulsion. (I just finished re-reading "Footfall", so I have Orion-class spacecraft on the brain.)