The Yellowstone National Park in the US has a super-powerful?volcano beneath it. And unlike a conventional volcano, it is hundreds of metres deep.
If it ever were to erupt, it could be catastrophic with the eruption shooting a tower of ash in the air and?create clouds that could hide the sun for decades. And with no sun, no life would exist on Earth.?
Reuters
The volcano at Yellowstone has erupted three times in the past 2.1 million years ago, which roughly translates to one every 600,000 years. Oddly enough, it isn't erupting anytime soon, but still, scientists are working out a way to tame this volcano so that it never erupts again.?
Scientists at NASA JPL thought of an experiment in 2015 to cool the volcano down. To the uninitiated, it's the heat of the Earth's core that results in the volcanic eruptions in the first place. Yellowstone produces enough heat to power 6 industrial power plants. However, around 60 to 70 per cent heat escape through hot springs or geysers, while the rest stays underground.?
In the experiment, scientists wish to drill an array of wells around the perimeter of the supervolcano. These would be one of the deepest wells in the world that would go as low as 10 kilometres below the surface.?
Next, they'd pump water through these which with time would form a cool ring of rock near the magma chamber, similar to how a coolant works with the radiator in a car. The water could get as hot as 340-degree Celsius, with a lot of steam, which the scientists plan to use to run electric generators to power the area surrounding the Yellowstone Park for years.
Wikipedia
While this sounds doable, and theoretically it is possible, they will have to extract 20 gigawatts of energy to cool down the volcano to get it to a manageable temperature. This could easily take around 16,000 years from beginning to the end. The second challenge is the cost. It would set back NASA $3.46 billion which is around 20 percent of its annual budget.?
What's worse is that this cooling could actually create fractures near the magma chamber that could result in an even-deadly super eruption, and it'll make all our attempts futile.
However, as mentioned earlier, the volcano isn't erupting anytime soon, so maybe with time we'll have better solutions to take it down.