
Originally Posted by
John Galt
jjmcane - yes the dissolved gas was a major concern for me. We have inadequate data on how it might behave in any of the various prevention scenarios. We could precipitate an eruption in fifty years that would not have occurred naturally for another five thousand or more.
I am not absolutely saying that we could not cool it. I don't know, That is why I provided a means to calculate if we could get to within an order of magnitude of the desired result. I'm just too lazy to seek out the numbers myself.
With all due respect, number figures beyond the rough type are just educated guesses. With calderas, best of my knowledge, it is the weight of the overlying rock with the depressurization of the gas dissolved in the magma. Like a steam engine, the chamber contracts, but unlike a steam engine, the walls are flimsy, full of faults, and normally quickly rupture in many places, this releasing much remaining C02. The release is not unlike a chain reaction limnic eruption:
Limnic eruption - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which involves Henry's Law.
Calculations are at best subject to review. The favored source is instead those who have most extensive experience in deep rock drilling, that of oil/gas production. Essentially, one is exploring areas for millions of years untouched by living effect (other than microbe extremophiles which normally live down there or sometimes are accidentally introduced when the biocide drillers need to use in preventing complications with microbes gumming up the works). All rock is different, just as the poster above which says that all magma is different. My favorite is Oldoinyo Lengai, which has a very low temperature carbonate lava only a little hotter than roofing tar. Black, it turns white in a few days, glows in the dark but not in daytime.
In short, to play around with this stuff we need direct experience in areas not populated or troublesome like Yellowstone. And since super volcanoes are by their nature very rare events, this becomes a problem, even more than supernova are rare compared to the smaller nova. Number crunching only give theories, and geologists get oilmen angry all the time by wrong projections (One Texas Tech Dean told me in 2009 of a friend of his that was ready to shoot with bullets a geologists that had the nerve to blurt out 'well, at least we know what is down there now' after losing ten million dollars in a dry hole!)
It is simply impossible to accurately tell by surface rocks that layer out what is supposed to be deeper in the geologic basin. It is more so in volcanic terrain, as it is full of all sorts of erratic issues, like Mt. Shasta/Mt. St. Helens literally shoving city blocks of solid rock material to skim across lakes at 500 miles an hour as if a on a boogie board or a skipping stone. Mt. St. Helens in fact made one of the largest water waves known, some 700 feet tall iirc on Spirit Lake northside. The geologic pathway lava goes through normally does not go through the remnants of that, but equally diverse issues, making prediction next to impossible without no profit drilling, and poor even with the profitable drilling of geothermal, oil, gas, etc. Much more complicated than that of a horizontal layer cake geologic basin, and we have huge problems even with simple layering with pressure, gas, etc.