What would happen if you dumped
one of the world's coldest liquids
into the boiling, volatile mouth of a volcano?
First thing's first,
if you're planning to put on your protective
gear and dump a bucket of liquid nitrogen
into a volcano,
you're going to be disappointed.
Before you could even get close to the mouth
of the volcano,
the liquid nitrogen would evaporate
due to the extreme heat.
So you'd have to be a little more creative.
One way you could do it would be to
fill a bunch of cannonballs
with liquid nitrogen and launch them
all into the volcano at once.
That would definitely start a reaction
inside the volcano, but
you probably wouldn't want
to stick around to see it.
Now, before you go mixing
these two crazy things together,
let's get to know them a little better.
On the one hand, you have volcanoes,
which are basically giant holes in the Earth's crust.
They're full of boiling hot magma that can erupt outwards in the form of lava.
Actually, "boiling" is an understatement,
because lava can reach temperatures of up to 1,200°C (2,192° F).
On the other hand, you have liquid nitrogen,
the smoky-looking substance that most people have heard of, but
don't know much about.
It can be as cold as -210°C (-346° F),
and when it warms up and becomes a gas,
it expands to 175 times its volume.
If we want the liquid nitrogen to have a noticeable impact on the volcano,
we're going to need millions of liters of the stuff.
No big deal. Large masses of liquid nitrogen can be produced commercially,
and all we'd need to transport it would be
vented and insulated containers to prevent pressure buildup.
The really hard part would come
when you'd try to put those millions of liters of liquid nitrogen into the volcano.
That brings us back to the cannonballs.
The idea is that you'd fill each cannonball with liquid nitrogen
and blast it into the mouth of the volcano.
When the cannonball melts due to the extreme heat,
it will release the liquid nitrogen into the magma.
Yeah, we realize this is getting ridiculous, but hey
you knew what you were signing up for.
Once a few cannonballs reached the magma,
there would be a deadly brew of heated nitrogen gas
floating its way up and out of the volcano,
gobbling up all of the oxygen around it as it rises.
The liquid nitrogen might be able to freeze the surface lava
quickly enough to form a crust,
but that still wouldn't be a very exciting effect for you watching from outside the volcano.
Now, if you were somehow able to line up thousands of nitrogen cannons
and continuously fire copius amounts of liquid nitrogen into the volcano,
then things would start to get interesting.
With this amount of liquid nitrogen,
more than just the surface lava would start to freeze,
and immense pressure would build up underneath.
Beneath the mouth of the volcano,
there would be kilometers of lava slowly making its way to the surface.
Its natural flow would be stopped by the frozen top layer.
All that pressure would need to go somewhere.
The surface lava would, at this stage, look like a crumbling black sidewalk,
slowly being elevated as lava pools under it.
Finally, explosions would begin.
The volcano would erupt, sending jets of atmospheric pollutants skyward,
pollutants that could affect any living creature in the vicinity.
Or the volcano might even explode, causing an earthquake.
Essentially, you'd be creating an induced eruption.
A blocked vent is what causes volcanic eruptions,
but generally, those blocks are natural.
So maybe you should just keep the liquid nitrogen far away from volcanoes,
and put it to better uses, like culinary experiments.
Maybe there's a delicious dish waiting to be discovered
by mixing liquid nitrogen and lava together,
but that's a story for another WHAT IF.