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by inglor_cz 1732 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

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