Can’t fight Mother Nature
A hurricane FAQ (from the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory) explains why we can't use nukes to stop hurricanes ('cause, y'know, the first thought that apparently comes into some people's heads when faced with an immensely destructive natural phenomenon is "Let's nuke it!"):
The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate ... equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy ... a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.
[Also,] the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems.
The article is a good reminder of just how far humanity is from being able to control this stuff—so much for weather-control rays and the like from old science fiction. But it turns out that if the Yellowstone Park supervolcano explodes, hurricanes will be the least of our problems:
Only a handful [of supervolcanoes] exist in the world but when one erupts, ... the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. It could push humanity to the brink of extinction.
Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards ... at University College London, says that America's Yellowstone Park is one of the largest and most dangerous supervolcanoes in the world. ... "It has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago, so the next is long overdue. ... [If it were to explode, almost all life within] a thousand kilometres ... would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. ..."
Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, ... explained: "... It's really not a question of if it'll go off, it's a question of when...."
And we in California thought the prospect of The Big Quake was bad.
Hmm—it looks like that article borrows extensively from a BBC special on the subject from a few years back; that show apparently coined the term "supervolcano."
The USGS Yellowstone volcano FAQ provides a less alarmist view of the situation, noting that it's hard to call three regularly-spaced eruptions a "regular eruption cycle," and that trying to generalize from a sample space of three to saying that another one is now "overdue" doesn't necessarily make sense. That USGS site also says, contrary to what the above-quoted article says, that there has not been increased activity at Yellowstone lately. So perhaps it's nothing to worry about.
Especially since apparently there's nothing we can do about it.
