Bombs and Walls Might Slow Lava, But Not Stop It

[SheilaT]

1. Unfortunately, in movies they do silly things like that and

of course it works, so average people, who think that everything out of Hollywood must be true, don't understand how things like lava really work.

This past weekend I was at Mile Hi Con in Denver, a science fiction convention, and one of the panels was about stupid geology in movies and on TV. This is exactly the sort of thing that got cited. That and some movie in which to do something or another, the plan was to drop bombs down an active volcano so as to trigger a magnitude 17 earthquake. Clearly the people doing that hadn't a clue what the logarithmic scale of earthquake magnitudes really meant. I forget the details, but essentially if such an earthquake could be triggered, it would cause so much heat that the earth would be vaporized. Or if not vaporized, the shaking would last a really long time, something like thousands of years.

Anyway, getting science from real scientists rather than popular media is a good idea.