Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead

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".

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