In the first Austin Powers movie, Dr. Evil steals a 50 kiloton nuclear weapon, straps it to a drill and is going to fire it into the mantle to trigger volcanic eruptions world wide.
My instinct is that, compared to a lot of nuclear weapons in the megaton range, 50 kilotons is not really a lot, and using it to try to move rock (even molten rock) is not going to accomplish his goal. Would it even cause a measurable change in the pressure that far down?
Absolutely nothing.
For reference, here’s footage of a 5 Megaton nuclear device being detonated underground. No global eruptions, and hard for humans to even feel further from the epicenter - although, seismic monitoring by precision instruments is a known way of monitoring for secret underground nuclear tests.
For further reference, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off the coast of Japan - the one that unleashed powerful tsunamis - released a staggering 3.9x10^22 Joules, or around 9.3 million megatons of TNT. While this did cause local devastation, it also failed to meet Project Vulcan’s goal.
Nice try Dr. Evil.
I’ll tell you for
100 billion dollars
That’s a different kind of thing. Yes, they would have buried the bombs, but not that deep. Just deep enough to form a nice, deep and just slightly radioactive crater.
It would have been interesting to behold. There were plans to actually bomb a new Panama channel, several miles wide and without any locks. This would have resulted in a steady stream of water from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side, with basically unpredictable results.
While a lot of posts have touched on the size of the explosion, the real impossible part is getting to the mantle. It was only fairly recently done by digging in the ocean where the mantle was pushed up more than normal.
Tectonic plates slip and release millions of times as much energy as a 50Kt nuclear bomb and those only sometimes cause localized volcanic activity.
It’d be as effective as the “unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism” was.
It’s a comedy movie parodying the stylistic exaggeration that is part of the Bond movies.
It’s going to be a hard math problem to get this bomb to go off near molten lava but not in it. The bomb will probably not be able to generate its full destructive potential if it melts first. Also, there is more atmospheric pressure down there and we didn’t build bombs for that. But even if you accounted for all that, worldwide eruptions sound like a stretch. The shock wave in air of a 50 kiloton explosion would probably be in the 10 mile range. That’s going to be lower in a thick liquid medium and a not insignificant part of that energy would also want to travel back up the drilled shaft. So this will probably affect an area of the world but far from all of it. And there is no guarantee it would work or be instantaneous. Pressure buildups that lead to eruptions can take ages. It’s a bad plan.
No. I don’t have expertise, but common sense tells me that the weight of the earth on top of the magma, miles of earth, couldn’t be moved by even our largest nuclear weapons.
If you found a spot with magma chambers you could bust them open with nukes sure, not the same though. The earth weighs a lot. A lot. And they already have nuclear action down there I presume.
I’ve seen the same question asked about Lex Luthor’s plot to sink California for a land monopoly in the first Superman movie. As others have said, the weapon yields in these movies aren’t nearly powerful enough to do more than register a small local quake, if that. Also, while the mantle (mainly lower part) is fluid in the sense that it moves, it is very dense, so liquid doesn’t always mean easier to move.
That’s about two to three times as large a yield as those use on Japan by the USA. If I am reading this correctly - and there is a great chance that I am not - then a 50 kiloton explosion would yield/release as much energy as little more than a magnitude 5.1 earthquake.
Even if that amount of energy was released inside the mantle, I doubt it would do much. On the surface of the crust, at tectonic plate fissures, where we live, is another story entirely.
Just an educated guess. Funny, 'cause I’m NOT educated within this field. 🤣
Even at a tectonic plate boundary, that’s a trivial amount of energy. There are thousands of earthquakes of similar magnitude every year.
And I feel like it’s important context to also explain that the Richter Scale is logarithmically scaled, so a magnitude 6 earthquake is 10 times more than a magnitude 5.
Edit: 10 not 100
But, these fissures at faults are already under stress. Just fracking is enough to lube them up to go off frequently, mostly smaller ones, but there have been a few big ones, including one in Youngstown Ohio that was pretty big, almost certainly from deep injection wells to dispose of fracking waste, (that have a 15 percent failure rate.)
Drilling waste is class 1 waste because the shit they put in the fracking fluid, and what it picks up underground (radium, arsenic, etc.) and flowsback to the surface with the gas, but they’ve an exemption from dick cheney’s energy bill where bush let the oil majors and their ilk write the energy policies. But that’s another story.
Thanks for the clarification! 🙂 Brings back memories from my time in Japan, where we had regular micro quakes. Just enough to make you go “Huh?! What was that? Meh, probably nothing.”
The nuke would melt before it could detonate if you were to drop it into liquid hot magma.
If you did somehow manage to get it in there without melting, it would vaporize the magma and blow a big hole in the mountain.