As a politician I can assure you that if you vote for me I will put into law that volcanoes will be forbidden to erupt in our wonderful country.
And as a different politician I can assure you that if you vote for me I will fight for the freedom of volcanoes to erupt whenever and wherever they want. In fact, I promise a volcano in every household and quicksand in every sandbox.
Cause this is America. Where land has more rights than people voting.
So... Just turn a blank round into a live bullet...
Maybe we can fire it at the planet that keeps sending those asteroids that nearly hit us.
Why yes, I would like to know more.
Excellent analogy, but now I want the math. Think we could push this past the gravity well? Fuck space elevator, I got ejecto-volcano cuz.
I would imagine very small section might be able to? I know one of jupiters moons has geysers that shoot water into space and out of orbit.
Very rough Google math (mostly because of "fuzzy" answers on the energy required and how you define space) suggests that the 1980 Mt St Helens eruption had enough energy to orbit three billion kilos...
I based that on the eruption being rated at 24MT, which converts to 100b MJ, and a minimum of 30MJ/kg being enough for orbit. Didn't find a straight answer on escaping the gravity well, could be way higher.
That doesn't seem right to me, but that eruption did, in fact, move the entire top of a mountain a pretty silly distance, so as ridiculous as it sounds, it could be accurate? I mean... 500 billion KGs of ash was spit out of it...
That's the most terrifying thing I've ever googled i think. I feel like I don't actually want to know the actual math on this. It's fucking plausible dude.
I'm pretty certain that it would destroy whichever object was launched. The air friction alone would tear it apart.
Or a cheaper space program.
That lava already has to break through literal kilometres of rock to get there. A few hundred (let’s be generous) extra meters of pourable rock ain’t gonna do shit.
But look at the picture, the lava is trapped.
The picture is dumb as hell. The lava would just flow out of the big gaping vertical hole in the front.
I think we can still work with the spirit of the solution. The main issue is that the lava will break the concrete. The solution is pretty simple. If we take some buckets of water we can pour it into the volcano creating a layer of obsidian. Obsidian is much harder and will easily contain the magma.
Minecraft logic
Just get a bucket of water, ffs!
What you mean? Cement stronk!
Not to mention the average normal size of an opening you’d have to plug to begin with. Even if it didn’t just drain down the hole or dissolve the moment it got to lava, it would be a ludicrous amount of concrete just to make a layer a few feet thick. Even if you did manage to make a plug a hundred or more feet deep and it didn’t melt or move, an eruption would likely just blow the mountain apart from around it.
Gonna need to see some credentials buddy. If I don't see volcanoologist, I'm leaving.
Or as the guy at bike shop put it "no you can't put duct tape on your pierced tyre. If a nail got through rubber, its probably gonna also get through tape."
Not that I want to defend using duct tape for this, but fixing a tyre isn't about keeping nails out but closing the hole after the last one.
Better yet - use helicopters to drop chunks of icebergs into the volcano to extinguish it.
Keep fuckin around and you're gonna end up in a Republican cabinet one day.
Is that where they keep their gay whores? Or the piss tapes? Which cabinet? Oh, maybe the cabinet?
M.A.G.M.A.
Once and for All!
But...
I think this could actually be someone impersonating a famous mountain on Twitter, however, the account is verified with a Blue Checkmark, so this must be the real Mt. St. Helens then.
But how could this be possible?
Must be the mountain. People don't just pretend to be someone else on the internet.
Even before twitter introduced these fake verifications, some large landmarks were verified by the managing party (like a national park), so if this were older that could've been the explanation.
Now it's just a dumb musktake.
Clearly, the lava is just the blood of the mountain and now it has enough lava blood flowing to achieve sentience and to access xitter.
Well now you have a very large cannon
Meh, the pressure will do the ball the way into space I bet.
We should launch rockets like this, would save on fuel.
I feel like we need to talk about how much heavy metal rocks.
Just going to need 14 trillion bags of cement from ACME
Block molten rock with wet powdered rock? Wcgw?
Clay, more or less.
Point towards enemy.
Would concrete even hold. I mean lava is molten rock and cement is kind of a rock. So wouldn't the cement melt before pressure could build up?
Most cements melt at a higher temperature than most lava gets to, so it would be solid chunks of cement getting blasted miles out when the pressure builds high enough to erupt
It probably wouldn't melt, but if you heat moist concrete it will spall ans crumble to bits before too long.
Yes. That's the joke.
Yes, there are many levels of stupid in this person’s proposal.
edit: “heavy metal rocks” would likely also meet the same fate.
A depleted uranium cap with a "whistle" pressure release might just be what's needed to solve the issue though
This reminds me of when Trump suggested nuking a hurricane.
It reminded me of him recommanding drinking desinfactant.
I feel like when the volcano does explode it's just gonna launch that concrete plug like popping a pimple.
Tens of thousands of tons of rapidly fragmenting concrete being launched into the upper atmosphere - cos what a major volcanic eruption needs is extra shrapnel
I'd imagine it would just melt...
Concrete is a mixture of rocks , sand and cement which kind of acts like a glue. So, yeah concrete would probably melt.
¿Porque no los dose?
Nobody going to mention that we have a sentient mountain with internet access? Wtf
It's 2023 things are weird now you just gotta accept it
true.
Big problems require big solutions.
Let's test this theory on your colon...
It's concrete, not cement. Cement does fuck all without water, aggregate and sand. Don't forget your tensile strength in rebar. It's like calling ketchup tomatoes.
Even still best case scenario would be like a pimple popping internally. There's still something going on below the surface that is not good.
But there would not be that best case scenario with a volcano. It's gonna blow if it wants to blow. Bonus: flying shards of concrete to compound the death and disaster all around.
I feel like this is a Veratasium video in the making
"Well 'Rods From God' didn't really work out as we'd hoped, but we're feeling good about our new plan: 'Boulders From The Devil'"
The Devil's Boulders is a good band name.
We don't do this stuff because of Phineas Gage.
The source of all that stuff leaking out is the sea which all our mountains float on.
I remember reading an article discussing the difficulties of re-directing a lava flow. One thing they mentioned was they tried dropping concrete blocks into or in front of the flow, and the concrete just floated on the lava.
Does remind me of my ongoing question of why we aren't using volcanoes as generators for geothermal power.
Apparently it can be implemented in a way that deliberately draws heat away from the source that's being used for the power, so why not just stick cooling rods into volcanos and then get free electricity courtesy of the earth being a hot pocket?
Because the electricity wouldn't be free, you'd have to build a ton of expensive infrastructure in the middle of nowhere (people tend not to live near active volcanoes), in an area that is very geologically active (cos of the volcano) with a real risk that everything you've built gets wiped out at some point in the next few decades (volcano).
There are a ton of ways to generate clean electricity, the trick is doing it in a way that is even remotely cost effective $/MWh
“(people tend not to live near active volcanoes)”
[Hawaii enters the chat]
People absolutely live near active volcanoes. They have some of the just fertile soil on the planet. Naples, Sicily, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Indonesia etc. In fact Iceland is almost entirely powered by geothermal energy.
Geothermal use steam to generate power tho, and active volcanoes is quite risky to build a high cost power plant because we wouldn't know when it will erupt. Also active volcanoes might be too hot for the job.
How hot is too hot tho? Doesn't more hot just mean more energy?
Also, could you locate the electricity generating parts away from the volcano itself and just conduct the heat from the hotzone itself far enough away to still draw the heat out of the system without posing an infrastructure risk to the system?
I really wonder about the potential to basically turn volcanic hot zones into batteries and just suck the excess heat energy that makes them dangerous out of them. It seems like the biggest untapped source of power we have at our disposal next to the sun and all the forces it drives.
In the volcano that's about to erupt, there is a geothermal power plant right next to it. Same for the similar eruption in Hawaii, it had a geothermal plant already.
