Anybody Got Studies on Water Emissions from Volcanoes?

As I’m slowly working my way through these awful Christianist textbooks, I keep running across claims that volcanoes emit lotsa water. They’re very excited about volcanoes and water. When it comes to their BS about volcanoes creating a lot of the Flood water, I think the outrageous heat and acid issues dispose of that nonsense without needing to go in to just how much water is freed from erupting magma.

But there’s another bit I want to deal directly with, and that’s the claim that a lot of the water in a crater lake is from magma. My Google-fu has failed me in this case, and so I turn to you, my geos, for halp: Does anyone have a study that shows proportions of magmatic versus meteoric water in crater lakes? That would be most helpful!

Image shows me leaning against a log fence with Crater Lake in the background.
Moi at Crater Lake. “Creationists Keep Out!”
{advertisement}
Anybody Got Studies on Water Emissions from Volcanoes?
{advertisement}

14 thoughts on “Anybody Got Studies on Water Emissions from Volcanoes?

  1. rq
    1

    Next thing you know, Noah’s flood will have been caused by an excess of volcanic activity in the area all over the world. The same volcanic activity that may or may not have contributed to the extinction of the large dinosaurs, and which no doubt is still somehow contributing to today’s global warming (nothing anthrogenic about it, nuh-uh, not when it’s god playing with volcanoes!).

  2. 3

    This report says the average precipation at Crater Lake is 67 inches a year for the basin and 72 inches for the lake itself.. http://www.craterlakeinstitute.com/online-library/crater-lake-hydrology/crater4a.htm
    The Lake is 20.53 sq mi of a 26.17 sq mi drainage basin. Studies show an average outflow from the lake of 89 cubic foot per second. The average depth is 1148 feet, so with 6 feet of precipitation it would fill assuming no outflow in 200 years. This web site says 250 years. http://oe.oregonexplorer.info/craterlake//facts.htm
    The inflow and outflow are about balanced over time since the lakes level varies by 5 to 6 feet over time.
    So since there is not a lot of steam rising from the lake (and its waters are not heated (like other crater lakes in the world), nor do they show much evidence of sulfur in the water (again see crater lakes in significantly active volcanoes), There can not be much volcanic steam involved. Here is a USGS report on the water balance at Crater Lake:
    http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1992/of92-505/

    Of course if you change the time constant one uses to measure to the formation of the earth in all likleyhood the water came from volcanoes over that time, as volcanoes have been outgassing since the formation of the earth (4 billion years).

  3. 5

    I doubt there is any measurable volcanic water in any lake, so I doubt anyone has bothered to try to study it. The volume change from water vapor to liquid water is 1244;1 (one mole of gas at STP is 22.4 liters, which in the case of water produces 18 cc of liquid), and we know from the hazard those Iceland volcanoes posed to aircraft that volcanoes can shoot plumes of gas many miles into the sky, so how much of that vapor is going to be able to condense and fall straight back down into the crater? Damn little, and what does will land on red-hot rocks and turn right back into vapor again. So you can only start collecting water after the volcano has stopped erupting and the crater floor has cooled to less than 100 degC. Even if by some miracle a bit of water has collected that way, a few hundred years of evaporation will blow away pretty much every molecule of that original water, I’d imagine.
    Maybe the bottom of a mostly horizontal lava tube could contain some actual volcanic water and protect most of it from evaporating away, but I doubt there’d even be enough to go swimming in, let alone fill a whole lake.

  4. 6

    wait, what? Are they claiming that because there is water in crater lake, it all came from magma?

    I really hope I’m misunderstanding this… That strikes me as someone saying because there is alcohol in beer, it’s a great disinfectant (and I think that’s a few orders of magnitude generous…)

    If nothing else, the current volume of water in Crater lake, if converted to steam (and I’m pretty sure any water from magma is going to be steam at surface pressures/temps) would occupy a volume about 1000 times bigger then what it is now…
    I’m getting out of my depth here, but it’s frankly absurd to assume that that volume is going to be limited by the boundaries of crater lake, and even so…
    According to wikipedia; the max height of the troposphere is ~17km, and that contains about ~75% of the atmosphere…
    So, if we assume that all the water emitted from the eruption was emitted in gasseous(steam) form, and went straight up, without spreading, and that gasseous water (steam) occupies approximately a thousand-fold volume that liquid water (water water), then the lake should be about ~23 meters deep.

    wikipedia lists average depth as ~ 350meters

    I can’t see that amount of water coming from a single instance of volcanism. I have trouble seeing anything other then repeated rainfall (or snowfall or whatever) being the primary source of water for a phenomenom like crater lake. It’s high enough up that nothing is really draining into it, and the geology excludes some weirdness like artesian springs. Precipitation is pretty much the only reasonable explanation for water in Crater Lake.

    Creationists are willfully ignorant…

  5. 7

    Dana can correct me me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the YEC’s are saying anything about crater lake — that was just a handy picture of a volcano with water in it. What they appear to be saying is that water for the global flood came from volcanoes, or something.

    AGW deniers are also fond of blaming volcanoes for climate change.

  6. rq
    8

    All I’m getting from all of you is that we’re going to need a heckuvalot of volcanoes to have a flood of Noah’s proportions. Just sayin’.

  7. 9

    Yep. As I understand it, the current scientific consensus is that the water in our oceans was originally bound to the space stuff (asteroids, comets, what have you) that coalesced into the planet, and then pushed its way from the interior to the surface via volcanoes (i.e. cracks in the crust). So, kinda obvious. But the YECs seem to have seized on this as meaning that volcanoes are some sort of faucets for God that can vomit forth world-drowning amounts of water at a moment’s notice. And also sop all that water back up like a sponge too, I guess.

  8. 12

    The previous commenter is quite right about the photo–a really stunning shot.

    I find it interesting that Young Earth Creationists are coming up with a superficially sciency explanation for something that would really require a miracle if it happened. When you have an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator, who planted fossils to test the faith of humans, why would said creator bother to use something as mundane as a volcano?

  9. 13

    When you have an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator, who planted fossils to test the faith of humans, why would said creator bother to use something as mundane as a volcano?

    Your logic is good, but creationists aren’t big on logic. They really prefer to have scientific evidence to back up their claims, they only poo-pooh the evidence when it disagrees with them. Look at how excited the god-botherers got when an ossuary was found that claimed it contained the bones of “James, the brother of Jesus”. Sensible people pointed out that both of those names were very common, but that didn’t stop them from claiming it a tangible proof that Jesus Christ existed. Of course, once it was proven to be a forgery they conveniently forgot all about it. Or how about the Shroud of Turin? They were dead certain it would carbon date to 30 A.D., but when it was dated to the Medieval period they started finding all sorts of reasons to disbelieve the conclusions of multiple labs.

Comments are closed.