Defending human civilization from supervolcanic eruptions (2015) [pdf]

https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

97 88 5 years ago

scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov

milliams• 5 years ago

This seems to be from 2015. That's not to say that it's out of date but when it starts with "There has been a significant effort over the last two decades", it's good to know which "two decades" it's talking about.

dang2• 5 years ago

Year added above. Thanks!

lmilcin3• 5 years ago

The best idea that comes to my mind is to go vegetarian and to learn to distribute food better.

We are already producing way more food that people need. If we just stopped feeding it to cows, pigs and chicken, readjusted production for more vegetarian diet.

ebiester• 5 years ago

Maybe.

If crops fail, it's going to depend on what crops fail. We won't have the option of radically reapportioning our crops on the fly; while a pre-emptive move to vegetarianism might help, that's a radical solution for a problem that may happen every 20,000 years.

So, consider what happens. If crops like alfalfa end up more resilient, we probably won't eat those past their sprout stage. However, if they can feed rabbits, it may be incredibly valuable as an option.

However, we would absolutely be looking to prioritize vegetables that can be processed for either human or animal consumption, even if they're not particularly palatable. I think the real problem, however, is the calories that would be available from such.

I think it's fair to say that if the food dries up, we would cull herds early and prioritize the most efficient food sources. We would likely be eating much less meat, if at all. We would not have room to be picky with our food.

saalweachter• 5 years ago

We would likely be eating much less meat, if at all.

In the short term, we would probably end up eating a lot more meat -- most of the hundreds of millions of cows, pigs and chickens we could cull wouldn't be slaughtered at the optimal time, being too young or too old, but we'd still be insane not to preserve as much of the meat as possible.

We won't have the option of radically reapportioning our crops on the fly...

We can't turn alfalfa into wheat or rice, nor grow rice or wheat in all places we now have pastures, but we will have the option to redirect the corn and soybeans we use for livestock feed. These feeds are produced to lower standards -- for instance, there are higher limits on residual pesticides -- but in a catastrophe it's better than nothing.

FredPret• 5 years ago

OK, if you can eat the hay that is currently fed to the cows I eat, have at it

lmilcin3• 5 years ago

You aware that most cows do not live on nice farms when they get to wander around and eat grass?

Grass-fed cows are slow to bulk up. That's why they are fed with much more calorie-rich food like grain.

scottlawson• 5 years ago

How exactly will this defend humankind from supervolcano eruption?

lmilcin3• 5 years ago

Humankind does not need to be defended from supervolcano eruption. A bunch of people will survive and continue "humankind".

On the other if you are in to save actual human lives, lack of food is going to be your biggest worry.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

go vegetarian

Hmmm… In The Road they used the complete opposite strategy.

kleer0012• 5 years ago

You mean a mycophile diet? Mushrooms will save humanity. High protein, doesn't need the sun for energy, lives off of refuse, can remediate waste, some have medical properties, etc...

rednerrus• 5 years ago

Mushrooms and snails will be on the menu.

abecedarius• 5 years ago

There ought to be serious R&D towards ways to survive a global agriculture outage at scale (supervolcanos aren't the only threat) -- maybe mushrooms could save humanity then, I don't know.

dboreham2• 5 years ago

Note: "a supervolcanic eruption has not occurred in the Holocene (past approx. 12,000 years) and, therefore, modern human civilizations have not witnessed such an eruption."

Geee10• 5 years ago

Bitcoin mining has been suggested as the solution for incentivizing the effort without massive government subsidies. It might be economically impossible to fund the effort if there is not enough electricity demand in the local area, resulting in huge costs without returns. I.e. Bitcoin mining could be more profitable than selling electricity to local network, and make the whole effort actually profitable.

pphysch4• 5 years ago

Putting the energy output of this highly expensive engineering project to waste unscrambling numbers is certainly not a way to make it economical.

Geee10• 5 years ago

The heat is waste. The problem is how to make profit from it to finance the project, not to make moral judgements about the use of electricity. You could build energy-intensive data centers too, if that makes you feel better.

fallingfrog• 5 years ago

Ugh, we probably deserve to be blown up, don’t we

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

Fascinating to see some of the research put toward inward-looking events like supervolcanoes. Part of me wonders why bother since the Yellowstone one has such a low chance of erupting, but then again, same can be said about an asteroid impact, and that seems like it has slightly higher awareness in the public sphere.

Also, is there a reason why this is an effort from NASA, and not, say, the USGS?

kiba2• 5 years ago

They are low chance but potentially civilization destroying if not existential.

The asteroid problems should partly be solved with the advent of cheap space launch.

imglorp• 5 years ago

USGS does study it but NASA looks at planetary effect. And It's cyclical so there's a /high/ chance of it happening.

The question for us is /when/: during our civilization, or after?

https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/summary-eruption-...

teslabox• 5 years ago

The year 1816 was known as "The Year Without A Summer" because it was 3°C cooler (in France) than normal. Crops failed, and there was much misery throughout the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Scientists later determined that the 1816 temperature anomaly was caused by volcanic eruptions in 1815 and 1814, which sprayed volcanic ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, thereby shading the oceans and preventing them from storing the usual amount of heat over those two years.

Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average once-a-millenium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on account of our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for our sustenance.

From the linked article: "In fact, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated the 2012 worldwide food storage to last for 74 days." (pg. 9)

Grains are useful because they store well. Storage is not economical, but it is essential for reducing the suffering which would result from an 1816-like scenario in our modern world.

Edit: the 1816 anomaly is classified as a volcanic winter [1]. Solar minimums have also resulted in years/decades with cooler summers than normal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

mlinksva• 5 years ago

Periodic reminder to support https://allfed.info/

est313• 5 years ago

Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average once-a-millenium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on account of our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for our sustenance.

I think it's more robust than ever, because of our ability to ship food around the world. Second, most of our food is grown to be eaten by animals that we then eat. If we ate the food directly, you could feed way more people than through the meat. So if there is a reduction in capacity through such an event, unless it's too extreme, we'll still have lots of food left.

dexwiz2• 5 years ago

Corn raised for feed is not the same as corn raised for human food. You could probably eat it wafted some form of processing. But judging by our slow response to the pandemic, I doubt we could pivot fast enough before it rotted.

mrbungie• 5 years ago

To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is not as easy as it sounds. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, is that our global food supply chain is a complex beast.

Also, just a reminder to those lucky enough to survive this pandemic: a marginal increase in food prices (plus inflation) due to supply chain disruption might leave poor people with less foods on their tables.

https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/food-suppl...

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-se...

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

Try to eat corn or grass used to feed animals. It's not going to end well.

And a global supervolcanic eruption would disrupt the production of food worldwide, not just in a single continent.

Therefore, I doubt we are not "more robust than ever", as you claim.

gojomo• 5 years ago

Does the example of the world's recent adaptations to COVID-19 give you confidence that "we" would make the necessary adjustments to redirect livestock feeds to humans in an emergency?

I doubt that for any famine of the last 200 years, including those that killed tens of millions, the problem has been, "not enough food in the world". The problem has been, "failed institutions don't put the food where it's most needed".

Vaccines are even easier to ship than food. Are they getting to where they're most needed?

qaq• 5 years ago

Well global worming is protecting us from that scenario

DantesKite• 5 years ago

I do agree that polluting the planet is bad and we should do everything we can do reduce our impact on the environment.

But I do think it's funny global warming is universally condemned as being bad.

I think a more honest assessment would be, "There are unknown risks to warming the up planet and we don't want to tinker with that."

Russia, Canada, and parts of norther Europe would benefit quite a bit from it.

dang2• 5 years ago

Past threads about 1816. Others?

Tambora Erupts in 1815 and Changes World History (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853116 - Oct 2020 (8 comments)

Year Without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400480 - Feb 2020 (131 comments)

The Year Without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18477459 - Nov 2018 (1 comment)

How a volcanic eruption made 1816 the year without a summer (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949772 - Sept 2018 (1 comment)

1816, the Year without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768951 - Nov 2017 (14 comments)

How a Volcanic Eruption in 1815 Darkened the World but Colored the Arts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10118706 - Aug 2015 (4 comments)

The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619876 - May 2015 (2 comments)

Tambora – The Volcano That Changed the Course of History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564442 - April 2014 (3 comments)

1816: The Year Without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779911 - May 2013 (1 comment)

jvanderbot3• 5 years ago

TFA says that heat flux out of the supervolcano is the main mitigating factor in build-up of explosive potential inside the caldera.

Therefore, increasing heat flux by 35% would (we think) prevent Yellowstone (e.g.,) from ever erupting again, based on current heat influx and the perceived rate of eruptions (n=3).

So, inject more water to cool it more quickly, and, bonus, use the hot water to create power at $0.1/kWh, up to 20 GW.

What's terrifying is how quickly we're drying up the water elsewhere in the country, and the existing water in Yellowstone is the primary method of cooling the magma [tfa]. If we dry it out, it's boom time a lot sooner.

They have a whole section on this, but I'm fairly certain this is the next environmental movie disaster plot: Increasing water use dries out the only heat sink preventing a volcano that destroys life on the Western Hemisphere, and causes a near-extinction in humans everywhere else.

irrational2• 5 years ago

That is very interesting. I live in Portland Oregon, recently we were driving out to a park and looked over and saw a mountain we had never seen before. It literally took us 5 minutes, looking at google maps, to realize it was Mount Hood - a mountain that we had seen hundreds of times before. But we didn't recognize it because it was snow free. In 21 years we've never seen it without it's cap of snow/ice and couldn't recognize it. It was shocking to say the least and really hit home what is going on with water in the region.

elihu2• 5 years ago

As a side tangent, Oregon is a part of the world where volcanoes do just sort of spring up practically overnight, geologically speaking. Mt Bachelor was formed between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago, according to wikipedia.

They can also disappear literally overnight. Mt Mazama erupted about 7,700 years ago and is now Crater lake. There were a lot of eruptions around Newberry caldera around that same time, and there've been eruptions as recently as about 1,300 years ago.

NortySpock• 5 years ago

Nice, digging into the article now...

Only 20 GW thermal? In my head nuclear power plants emit roughly 4GW thermal which is converted to 1GW electric energy, so cooling Yellowstone seems well within our technological capabilities... with open cycle water cooling.

To save water, I wonder if you could use another system like air shafts or a closed-cycle water system, similar to how nuclear power plants have primary and secondary coolant loops -- the primary loops being closed and the secondary loops being "mostly closed" or have some other mechanism of discarding heat.

jvanderbot3• 5 years ago

Yes, the cooling aspect is what TFA says is doable. It's the heat transmission / drilling part that's hard (It's 400C or worse and 1+km down).

They have some reasonable solutions. We'll never do it. Environmental conservation groups would see it as a capitalist cash grab, and the right would see it as a waste of money and energy based on alarmist scientists getting too much press. And anyway, we'll drain all the water out of the west coast in 50 years and there'll be nothing left to set up a pump / capture plant.

pitspotter2• 5 years ago

Often it's the reaction to external threats which proves decisive. A rotten civilisation doubles down on its rotten values, fearing to try something effective.

But in the case of supervolcanoes our recently improved ability to grow food in vertical farms under LED light might be of great help. Ideally backed by nuclear fusion since solar would be less effective under the attenuated sunlight. Obviously, we don't have that power source yet, but, hey, there are a dozen high quality fusion projects out there, what are the chances they'll all fail?

There may be trouble ahead But while there's starlight and music and truth and romance Embrace the future and dance!

cossatot• 5 years ago

I'm a geologist who has worked a little in Enhanced Geothermal Systems and (independently) in volcanology though I am a specialist in neither (I mostly work on earthquakes, and probabilistic seismic hazard analysis). I think this paper is quite interesting but the caveats are briefly noted though actually enormous.

A key one is here: Beyond human intervention, huge pulses of heat energy into the magma chamber may at times precipitate eruptions, with brief periods where the heat flux is so large that engineering solutions would be impractical. If heat flow were sufficiently massive then it may be impossible to mitigate supervolcanic eruptions.

From what we know about more well-studied volcanic systems (which are volcanic arc systems like the Cascades in the US or Mount Fuji in Japan), the heat flux into the upper magma chambers comes in the form of episodic injections of extremely hot basalt from the deeper magma plumbing systems (5-20? km depth). The size of these injections likely scales with the size of the volcanic system, so for a mantle plume they may be enormous. The heat flux is not steady state and the shallow crust/ upper magma chamber does not just heat up linearly with time until the eruption threshold is reached. We definitely have no control over the deep basalt plumbing systems and can't drill anywhere near that deep and hot (Deepwater Horizon, which by most metrics is the deepest well drilled, reached 12 km depth in cold crust, not getting above 120 deg C [1], but in the Yellowstone area this would be almost certainly well above 500 C (perhaps 900-1100 C)...

Additionally the failure mode for hydrothermal cooling of the volcano is really bad. Explosive eruptions are basically triggered by the release of volatiles in magmatic systems (expanding gases in a magma froth as H20 and C02 come out of solution). As is stated a few times, the increase in temperature with depth above the magma chamber basically follows the increase in boiling point of water, so the system is essentially on a critical threshold. Perturbations to this can be quite bad because any volatilization of fluids in the system can cause a small phreatic (partially hydrothermal) eruption that could remove some shallow mass, which decreases the confining pressure at deeper depths and causes further volatilization due to decompression, leading to a runaway cascade of larger and larger eruptions culminating in a major magma-chamber-emptying eruption.

They mention this here: in any realistic system there is a possibility that, as we artificially extract heat energy out of the magma chamber, we could cause phase changes (e.g. volatiles coming out of solution) that would reduce the overall density causing expansion and cracking in the overburden, possibly opening a channel to the surface and precipitating an eruption.

Now also consider that n=3 over 2.1 million years. If this is a Poisson process, then the probability of an eruption in any given year is ~1.4e-6, or 1 in 1.4 million. Though the most recent 3 events are quasiperiodic (mean 0.7 M years apart, stdev 0.075 M years), before these 3 eruptions, the eruptive center was in a different spot farther to the southwest, and there was a 2.3 M year quiescence between events[2]. I don't think there is any clarity over whether the next major eruption would occur in the same magma chamber as the previous several events or would form to the northeast towards Red Lodge, MT. So even in a periodic, geographically stationary system, which is sort of the most dangerous scenario, we could say that we're 90% of the way to the next eruption which therefore has an annual chance of happening of 1 in 140,000.

I think that any sort of mitigation efforts are still going to try to address a rather low probability event with uncertain technology, possibly in the wrong geographical location, and could trigger the event we are trying to forestall. At a certain cost of billions (pocket change w/r/t the costs of an eruption, sure), and the major modification of the first and probably most famous National Park (and therefore the permanent slandering of otherwise promising geothermal technology in the eyes of environmentalists). Not sure what the value proposition of all of this is but maybe our efforts could be spent elsewhere...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42496-0 [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/summary-eruption-...

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Filing this under: They were warned.

YokoZar• 5 years ago

Additionally the failure mode for hydrothermal cooling of the volcano is really bad. Explosive eruptions are basically triggered by the release of volatiles in magmatic systems (expanding gases in a magma froth as H20 and C02 come out of solution). As is stated a few times, the increase in temperature with depth above the magma chamber basically follows the increase in boiling point of water, so the system is essentially on a critical threshold. Perturbations to this can be quite bad because any volatilization of fluids in the system can cause a small phreatic (partially hydrothermal) eruption that could remove some shallow mass, which decreases the confining pressure at deeper depths and causes further volatilization due to decompression, leading to a runaway cascade of larger and larger eruptions culminating in a major magma-chamber-emptying eruption.

Why not just drill further away then, along the periphery? Shouldn't any additional geothermal exploitation necessarily help cool the thing? Yellowstone is a growing fever, and if it's not safe to put coldpacks on the forehead we may as well put them on the arms and legs.

jvanderbot3• 5 years ago

I worked in Brian Wilcox's section, at JPL. He reviewed a couple of my concepts and of course dismissed them as silly.

My impression of him as a classic polymath is reinforced by the fact that he wrote seminal texts on both volcano defusing and rover wheel diameter optimization, both of which have come up in recent discussions.

He has the signature "first principles" approach of using mostly physics with some clever choices of approach to make it work out nicely.

Quality JPLer.

tomohawk• 5 years ago

Not sure what the big deal is - we'll just lock down and wear masks.

If that doesn't work, we'll resort to name calling and finger pointing.

shawndrost• 5 years ago

"Of course the intentional hydraulic fracturing of rock near the magma chamber of a supervolcano is a risk factor that must be carefully evaluated."

Defending human civilization from supervolcanic eruptions (2015) [pdf]

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