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Asked by anon-252584 on 1 May 2020.
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anon answered on 1 May 2020: last edited 1 May 2020 8:19 am
Imagine a tub of water with rafts floating in it, covering the whole surface. That is more or less how the crust of the Earth floats on magma – the pieces of crust are called tectonic plates. When the rafts (plates) collide, they splash water (magma) out – and that is roughly how volcanos erupt.
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Susan Cartwright answered on 1 May 2020: last edited 1 May 2020 8:53 am
If this question means “how do natural volcanos erupt?” then the answer is “in one of about three ways.”
The crust of the Earth is made up of a number of so-called “plates” – as Oleg says, you can think of a tub of water whose surface is completely covered by floating rafts. These rafts move about: in particular, there are areas at the bottom of the ocean (called “spreading zones” or “mid-ocean ridges”) where the rafts are pushed apart, letting the water well up between them. On the Earth, the “water” is the very hot rock of the mantle – the layer of the Earth beneath the crust. Although this is a kind of volcano, it’s usually rather quiet: the hot rock emerges into the bottom of the ocean like big red-hot pillows and just quietly solidifies. However, in some places it’s a bit more energetic: this produces the volcanoes in Iceland and also in East Africa (the African rift valley is a place where a plate is trying to break apart fo form a new ocean).
Because the Earth is completely covered by plates, the creation of new crust at the mid-coean ridges must require the destruction of crust elsewhere. Someties two plates will collide head-on – this has happened to India and Asia, for example, and occurs when both colliding edges have continents on them. This doesn’t generally produce volcanoes, but it does produce high mountains: the colliding continents ruck up into folds (creating the Himalayas where India hit Asia). More frequently, one edge is ocean while the other is continent. In this caase, the heavier oceanic crust dives underneath the continental crust, producing what’s called a “subduction zone”. As it dives into the hot mantle, the crustal rock mels, producing lots of molten rock and therefore lots of volcanoes. Most of the Earth’s volcanoes are of this type, the most famous being the “Pacific Ring of Fire” around the edges of the Pacific ocean.
Finally, there are places in the deep mantle where the hot solid rock of the mantle has, for some reaon, melted. This molten rock rises through the mantle as a “mantle plume”, producing isolated volcanoes far from plate boundaries. The most famous example of this is Hawaii.
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Greg Wallace answered on 1 May 2020:
Do you mean at home in your kitchen? Or do you plan on making an actual volcano erupt in some Bond-villain style plan for world domination?
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If you want to do it at home then the usual way to simulate an eruption is to mix baking soda with something lightly acidic like water with a bit of vinegar poured in: http://www.sciencefun.org/kidszone/experiments/how-to-make-a-volcano/
The idea is that the acid racts with the baking soda to produce carbon dioxide. Lots of it, and very quickly. this causes pressure to build up which can force the water out of whatever container you’ve put it in.
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If you want to make an actual volcano erupt, next to your nemesis say, then you would have to start looking for dormant volcanos near your nemesis. The actual geologists will be more useful here, but we can make a guess as to how likely volcanos are to erupt. Volcanoes occur where the earths crust is thinner, allowing magma to rise up from below. As more magma flows in under the volcano it pressurises more and more, until eventually the pressure becomes large enough to break the rock above it, causing it to blast out in an eruption. you want a volcano that is nice and full of high pressure magma.
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Once you’ve identified a volcano that has lots of high pressure magma in it and is suitably close to your nemesis, you need to trigger it to erupt. Once again the geologists will be more helpful but I know earthquakes can trigger eruptions by causing the rock encasing the magma to crack and weaken, so I reckon a suitably large explosion would trigger an eruption. -
Malgorzata Drwila answered on 2 May 2020:
Answering to Greg: I asked few geologists about possibilities of making a volcano erupt and they agreed, that it is a very hard thing to do. As you wrote, there must be right high pressure, right temperature, enough time, enough material. There is no way of erupting a sleeping volcano, but it is not impossible for an active volcano.
That’s true earthquakes can trigger an eruption and humans can produce earthquakes. With dynamite, nuclear bomb, hydraulic fracturing (pumping water in high pressure underground) or just drilling. But there is always a lot of risk associated with that and many things can go wrong. Also those methods are not always successful, because we cannot fully predict geology (usually goes the other way around, we produce earthquakes where we don’t want to).
Theoretically there is also an option to inject a water to the magma chamber to increase pressure and speed up the eruption. Practically cannot be done, because of the high temperatures of the rocks, so the drilling equipment will melt before reaching the chamber.
Other option is to make a landslide of the edge side of the crater, but this is also rather not possible.
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