[heavyset_go]

> And every gigajoule you take from Yellowstone is one less gigajoule for the next supervolcano eruption.'

What if it disturbs whatever equilibrium the caldera's maintained and causes it to erupt sooner than it would have?

This is a genuine question, I know next to nothing about this.

[inglor_cz]

Yeah, this sounds to me like the "they delved too deep" story of dwarves in Moria.

We are not good enough in vulcanology yet to tickle the sleeping Yellowstone giant.

[rbanffy]

We’ll never know unless we do more research. I don’t think we can make a dent in the amount of energy under Yellowstone either way - if it’s going to blow, it will and there’s nothing we can do.

If we could take enough energy out of Yellowstone to make it less supervolcanic, we’d have a hard problem dealing with whatever waste heat would be left after consuming that much energy.

[_Microft]

The excess power, that is the power that is not reaching the surface by normal processes and that keeps heating up the volcano seems to be in the order of a few gigawatts. This is absolutely possible with cooling measures like they are used for large power plants.

[rbanffy]

This would be to keep temperatures constant. If we want it to be less of an existential threat to humanity, we should cool it down.

[robbedpeter]

This is energy that would be dispersed at the surface anyway, isn't it?

[lostlogin]

I’m nit sure about that.

If a lot of extraction is done, geysers and other surface geothermal activity reduce or stop. Rotorua, New Zealand had these issues back in the 1980s when everyone had a private bore. Blocking them up helped a lot.

https://www.geothermal-energy.org/pdf/IGAstandard/Japan/1997...

[gumby]

I think the orders of magnitude are so large that it's unlikely to make a difference. Much less impact than, say, poking a whale with a 30 ga needle.

You might poke a hole and get something hot and nasty gushing out but that would only ruin some machinery and perhaps the day for a few people.

[runarberg]

There is data to go by that supports that these systems are highly dynamic and human activity around them do feed back into the system irreversibly effecting them. There is a hot spring 10km from where I lived called Gunnuhver. It was a tiny little mud pool that steamed a little, but it was fun watching the mud boil. In 2006 they raised a giant (and really ugly) power plant close by. Now the mud pool is unrecognizable from before. It is massive, it is hard to see the mud under the amount of steam it releases. It is a common believe that the geothermal power plant is the direct contributor to this change.

However there are ways to mitigate the uncertainty. You can start small, observe, and if still stable, expand. I believe that is how most new geothermal plants are done today in Iceland.