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1attice

This is going to sound a little weird, but can we plug those holes?

I'm really not sure I want tectonic plate lubricant leaking out of the crust.

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First thing I thought of was that tweet asking why we can't just fill volcanos with concrete to stop eruptions.

The answer why not is here. [1]

[1] https://www.iflscience.com/yes-you-can-plug-a-volcano-with-c...

What about doing the opposite of this? Like, if you can tell pressure is building up in a volcano just blow a few holes in it or around it. Preferably with nukes because I don't believe in half-assing this sort of thing.

What's worse than a big cloud of volcanic ash? A big cloud of fallout.

Modern nuclear weapons do not have significant fallout. Fallout is lost yield.

That's mostly wrong, particularly in the context of the proposal above. Fallout comes not only from the unfissioned nuclear material of the bomb, but also from the fisson byproducts and from neutron activation of other bomb components, such as the bomb case. And with a ground burst, or worse a bomb buried deep enough to create a very large crater (the above proposal), a huge amount of fallout is created through the neutron activation of the ground itself. This is true even with extremely efficient fission-fusion-fission bombs (e.g. thermonuclear bombs which use depleted uranium tampers), which produce a massive amount of neutron radiation and a great deal of fallout from the fission of the tamper which is caused by the fusion stage.

I think the nukes are going to be a lot more dangerous than the volcano, and now we have fallout and an erupting volcano.

I've heard a suggestion that we aggressively harvest geothermal power from a volcano in order to cool it. But geothermal power can itself trigger earthquakes, and I'm not sure it's realistic we could harvest power at a rate to move the needle on cooling a volcano.

"I think the nukes are going to be a lot more dangerous than the volcano, and now we have fallout and an erupting volcano."

Oddly the eruption might help mitigate the resulting fallout.

> But geothermal power can itself trigger earthquakes

Did not know this and it took me down a rabbit hole, starting at this article from the Scientific American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35561206

Also shown in this documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0757745/

The tectonic plates would just laugh at a nuclear explosion. They have infinitely more pressure and force at work vs. a bomb blast.

Nukes can be comparable to small earthquakes. This fault doesn't even have small quakes, it's locked so tight.

https://www.math.wichita.edu/~richardson/earthquake.html

says a magnitude 9 earthquake is equivalent to 189 MT-tnt, so the largest atomic bomb detonated by mankind would be the energetic equivalent of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake.

But it's not really a fair comparison, since the atomic bomb is fast and probably wouldn't couple its energy into the earth particularly well compared to an earthquake.

Is that really true? Fusion weapons scale well and don't have an upper limit, their primary fuel is extremely inexpensive. I'm a total idiot, but I'm not aware of any reason why humanity couldn't build a thousand mile long hydrogen 'bomb' with a gigaton yield as some kind of mega-engineering project.

Sure, and the sun is technically the biggest hydrogen bomb in our solar system. But practically we are not going to build a bomb big enough to disrupt the tectonic plates beneath us.

Not nuclear, but the U.S. Army Air Corps once tried this in Hawaii: https://www.historynet.com/army-tried-to-stop-mauna-loa-erup...

> Volcanoes like Mount St Helens explode with huge amounts of pressure, making the added concrete a danger to health as it is easily scattered around. "The dust from concrete," YouTube channel What If notes, "would lead to fatal lung diseases and cancer."

Whereas volcanic ash and gas (released in large amounts) is safe to breathe? \s

Would you rather have X amount of carcinogenic material in the air, or X+Y where Y>0?

I don’t think there’s a need to ‘plug the hole’. The article suggests that there’s hot water flowing out from under the sea bed but what’s more likely (and normal) is that there’s a fracture of exposed magma that’s heating the water at the seabed. This heated water is convecting up and mixing with the surrounding sea water, with the hot water mixed to ambient sea temperature before it hits the surface. The methane is normal from such fractures. They’re not normally permanent features and are analogous to magma flows on the surface of the earth.

The whole premise of the article and paper is that the water its self is from the plate boundary. "The seep fluid chemistry is unique for Cascadia and includes extreme enrichment of boron and lithium and depletion of chloride, potassium, and magnesium. We conclude that the fluids are sourced from pore water compaction and mineral dehydration reactions with minimum source temperatures of 150° to 250°C, placing the source at or near the plate boundary offshore Central Oregon."

I kind of agree, but OTOH I don't think I want anyone to be playing around with the limited knowledge we have. Maybe they'd inadvertently trigger the 9+ quake. Whoops.

(I am not a geologist.)

Presumably if the water had enough pressure to punch a hole it has enough pressure to punch another. I'd wager these holes are occasionally covered by underwater landslides and the like.

I'm curious what makes you uncomfortable about it?

>I'm curious what makes you uncomfortable about it?

The same thing that makes them uncomfortable looking under the bed at night.

What makes me uncomfortable is that this shit is the lubricant for the plates, right? And I live on top of the subduction zone? This is pretty straightforward.

Ever had a car that leaked a lot of oil?

So you're thinking that if more lubrication stayed under ground, the plates wouldn't stick together so much, and they wouldn't store tension? (I'm not saying you're wrong, I have no idea.)

The flow rates are estimated at ~500 ml/s. That seems pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things. It really says more about our sensor data that we were even able to detect that small of a leak in a giant ocean.

That's about 6.3 olympic swimming pools a year. Olympic swimming pools are the only true way to measure volume.

I work on inkjet nozzles. One of our drops is maybe 9 nanograms. According to Wikipedia that's about 9e-9/2.5e9 = 3.6e-18.

No problem, we'll start specifying our drop weight in atto swimming-pools.

Be sure to use the metric system! I'd like a half-micropool of beer, please.

Thats about 30870 humans pee in a year.

30870 individual urination events, or the annual urine output of 30870 humans?

I'm going to need that in:

* Libraries of Congress

* Football Fields

Try https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

It is an imperial converter, and lacks most modern American units such as Libraries of Congress. A benefit is that it has some local units: Area (nanoWales - nW), Force (Norris - No), Length (linguine - lg), Temperature (Hilton - Hn) etcetera.

American Football (throwball) or International Football (soccer)?

When you say "Libraries of Congress" do you mean the volume of their collection or the volume of the building?

By volume of the building I guess (I'm not sure if the standard LoC unit of volume has ever been clarified).

ChatGPT says (and thus it must be true!), approximately 27 Olympic swimming pools could fit inside the Library of Congress by volume. GP comment had converted to 6.3 olympic swimming pools, so that means just over 1/4 of a Library of Congress (by volume!).

Especially when you’re already doing it at the bottom of the ocean.

You'd rather that pressure build up and have it blow out elsewhere?

As long as it's not in my back yard.

It's already under the ocean in nobody's backyard lol

The resulting tsunamis, unfortunately, may take out a whole bunch of backyards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake

And what eventually happens to tectonic plates that build up pressure, which this vent is helping to release?

The article says that (as far as they can tell) the liquid pressure helps reduce the plate friction, so leaking actually contributes to stress build up:

> Fluid released from the fault zone is like leaking lubricant, Solomon said. That’s bad news for earthquake hazards: Less lubricant means stress can build to create a damaging quake.

Wouldn't it be better to breach them, or create other breaches elsewhere? (like scoring glass before you break it apart)

It seems like, ideally, we'd be able to redirect the cascadia fault line elsewhere.

The fault lies where the two plates collide. This can't be redirected. At absolute best, over the course of millions of years, you could break larger plates up into smaller plates and make a bunch of smaller faults. I don't know that this would ultimately be beneficial, and I have no clue how humans could do it.

> It seems like, ideally, we'd be able to redirect the cascadia fault line elsewhere.

To Canada!

Only one Vancouver can survive. Sorry British Columbia.

Between the housing crisis and the overdose crisis, it's not like we need any help up here :P

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