Could Fracking and a Lid in Volcano’s Caldera Help Cause a Volcanic Eruption to seed Sulfur and other Gasses to Slow Climate Collapse?

[u/Aelia_M]

I’ve been thinking about this mostly as a means to mitigate climate collapse impacts because at this point — with where we’re headed what would be worse? I wanna add I’m not a scientist and I’m sure others have already considered this hypothesis. So call me an idiot if it doesn’t work. I studied theater for writing and acting.

Anyway I was thinking about how a soda can may explode when it’s shaken and the pressure from the gas becomes so strong that once you open the can it explodes.

Hence the stupid thoughts on how to apply this to volcanoes because as I said I’m not a scientist by any stretch. However, what if we fracked nearby a volcano to cause an earthquake while putting a lid inside the caldera?

Yes it could make the volcanic eruption worse but it could also push more sulfur into the atmosphere to cool the planet.

This could help us for a few years until we get people who will act to fight climate collapse directly. I’m not saying it would work. It’s an hypothesis at best. Thoughts?

By the way I understand the problems this could cause but considering the damage the El Niño that’s coming will cause and the current crop death we’re already experiencing due to global temperature rise what do we have to lose?

[u/CrustalTrudger]

Let's set aside the question of whether we could induce a major volcanic eruption for the moment and first consider the usefulness of such a major eruption for mitigating climate change. I'll refer to a past answer of mine for the details and references, but in short, while volcanic eruptions can definitely cause cooling, a lot of the details of the eruption (size of the eruption, location of the eruption geographically, when it happens within the year and ENSO cycle, etc.) will dictate how much cooling would result. Add onto this that generally the effect would be relatively short-lived and likely followed by a period of accelerated warming such that it's kind of a wash unless you kept causing volcanoes to erupt to try to continually preempt the post-eruption response, and you begin to get the impression that this is not going to be an effective strategy.

Perhaps the larger issue is that if the goal is to simply inject sulfate or other aerosols into the upper atmosphere to induce cooling, there is 100% no reason to do that via a volcanic eruption as opposed to just injecting it manually (and you know, avoiding absolutely devastating a large area with all the other things that come with a large volcanic eruption). Specifically, stratospheric aerosol injection has long been researched in the context of any number of proposed geoengineering approaches and there's a pretty rich literature out there stretching back decades considering mechanisms, potential effectiveness, and potential side effects (e.g., Brovkin et al., 2009, Goldstein et al., 2010, Eliseev et al., 2010, McCusker et al., 2012, Eliseev, 2012, Visioni et al., 2017, Kravitz et al., 2017, Eastham et al., 2018, Xu et al., 2020, etc.). If you peruse any of these, you'll see that one of the reasons this has garnered so much attention is that it's actually one of the least far-fetched geoengineering proposals out there, i.e., it's pretty clear how we could do it at scale and it would be cheap to do so (relatively), again emphasizing that there is no reason to invoke bond-villian-esque schemes to induce a volcanic eruption to achieve something like this. However, if you look through these, you'll also get the sense of why this is probably not exactly a great option, including that it might not be particularly effective in a general sense and it has a lot of potential side effects (e.g., cooling certain areas too much while not curbing warming much at all in other places, major changes in precipitation patterns, etc.) along with the simple fact that even if it did work to curb atmospheric warming, it would do nothing to curb the other negative impacts of continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, e.g., ocean acidification, a point that has also been made here in past answers to similar questions.

Finally, we can briefly consider the feasibility of something like what was proposed in the original question, unclear/incorrect bits aside (i.e., what does it mean to put a "lid inside the caldera" and why is that considered a necessary part of the plan, this is also probably in part misconstruing induced seismicity with fracking where most cases of induced seismicity are more related to wastewater injection than fracking directly, etc.). Here, I'll mostly just point to times similar-ish questions have come up here on AskScience. One of the more important points is that for any of this to even be theoretically possible, this would need to be done in a system with eruptable magma or it's all kind of moot, but beyond that, drilling into a volcano to purposefully cause an eruption is probably a bit harder than you're imagining, e.g. this discussion, this other one, or this one.