fossilesquecheckmate, big geology!!
MotoAshOh I get it! If you stack rock on the hot rock, you can stop the hot rock from moving the rock with more rock!
… Unironically, this DOES work … sorta’. Though it’d be dumb to do by man, because a ‘rock plug’ is exactly what forms at the top of many volcanos after the magma cools. It’s why many volcanos have flank eruptions where magma pushes through some side crack, or build and build until the rock plug pops catastrophically.
Of course some volcanos don’t have the right mix to form rock plugs, and any non-dormant volcano can pop them, but the point is it does have an effect that can delay and redirect eruptions.
If humanity doesn’t kill itself off soon (bad news on that front), I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we’re building megastructures around volcanos specifically to manage them instead of being subject to them.
NeatoIf we were really ambitious could we harness geothermal energy to such an extent as to prevent major eruptions if we could predict them?
I think there are much easier ways to get massive amounts of power than try to interface with such an incredibly chaotic and unpredictable system.
An even bigger problem though is that most of the time geologists really have to aggressively make the case to anybody that their work is valuable when it isn’t directly contributing to finding oil or evaluating groundwater reserves.
Studying volcanoes, even in places with lots of volcanoes, is considered kind of a dubious practice by most people and taxpayers. Yeah sure, Mount Saint Helens goes off and all of a sudden people will take volcanoes very seriously for a bit, but generally people don’t give a shit about geology even if they haven’t been infected with “the earth is only 10,000 years old!” brainworms.
I mean, geologists will give a warning like “well, we could all die with no warning anytime from now through the next 50,000 years so we are very very due for a catastrophic eruption and we need to prepare!”.
Like yo, we can’t even agree to fucking give universal healthcare to people in my country…. sigh.