Could a nuke make Yellowstone Caldera erupt?
When I was a geology student in Bozeman there was a good deal of talk about setting off the Yellowstone hotspot by pumping beer (undergrads!) into the substrate resulting in an increase in pore pressure and a corresponding increase in seismic activity. Good times. Also, Alt and Hyndeman, IIRC, at UM–Missoula did some work on hyperbolide impact volcanism or terrestrial maria. The basic idea there is that the Yellowstone hotspot as well as the Columbia River Basalt volcanism and the Deccan volcanism were initiated via a big freakin’ rock hitting the Earth and excavating enough material that the release of pressure would cause the rock to melt and begin erupting. This process is fairly accepted as having taken place on the Moon, but not so much on Earth. According to my off-the-cuff calculations one drunken night, a medium-yield nuke would release as much energy as the postulated impact. But I *was* drunk. Therefore, in theory you could not only cause Yellowstone to erupt, but you could
A good example to think about is Mount Saint Helens. In that case, a fresh gas-rich magma chamber was sitting in the base of the mountain, swelling one side of the mountain at a measurable rate. This swelling caused the mountain to fail to the north, creating a huge lanslide that buried Spirit Lake under some number of hundreds of feet of mud. Like taking the top off a shaken up pop-bottle, the gas in the magma chamber decompressed, taking a lot of magma with it. So, could the same thing happen in Yellowstone? It depends on the state of the magma chamber, something pretty hard to gauge. In theory were the chamber gas-rich a nuclear explosion that removed enough material could start the decompression of the gas. This is a lot different than decompressing regular rock or mantle as previous posters were talking about.
