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?
Maybe not geothermal per se, but something would be possible, with unlimited budget and resources.
Though the problem is just how MUCH energy volcanos have. Heat content is A LOT of energy. The vast (on a human scale) magma chambers contain an insane amount of energy. Rock has a heat capacity less than water by weight, but rocks weigh a lot more than water and can get a lot hotter.
So, it’d have to take away a TON of heat, likely more than humans use in a year for a single small eruption, but I’m too lazy to do the math right now…
Also, many eruptions are fueled by pressure from dissolved gasses in the magma. That pressure will stay present until the magma cools enough to resist it itself, which could require dropping an entire underground lake of lava by hundreds of degrees.
Then there are undoubtedly some eruptions that are driven by tectonics, meteor impacts, and other physical pressures that might not be manageable via heat control at all.
Rad. That’s probably a level of energy harvesting between fusion and Dyson sphere.