Mount St. Helens | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Eruptus Interruptus (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine February 2005

Page:

Mount St. Helens
Eruptus Interruptus (cont.)


	Waiting for the big one: volcano watch at the Coldwater Ridge Visitors Center (Photograph by Sian Kennedy)

EXCUSE MY ENTHUSIASM. It's my first actual sighting of the volcano. Like everyone else, I've been watching breathlessly online since she awakened after years of slumber with a swarm of hundreds of mini-earthquakes. On September 26, the U.S. Geological Survey announced a yellow alert. We all saw that Homeland Security guy and his chart—volcanoes use the same colors, duh—and we knew what to expect next. Three days later we got orange, to which the mountain responded with a 25-minute steam emission, and on October 2 we went red. To volcanologists, that translated as "large ash eruptions expected or confirmed, plume likely to rise 25,000 feet above sea level." To the rest of us it just meant Hell, yeah!

In 48 hours, the Forest Service's VolcanoCam Web page got 23 million hits. Meanwhile, the agency evacuated thousands of looky-loos from Johnston Ridge, the observatory named after the young geologist who died in that very spot in 1980, buried beneath millions of tons of debris while radioing his final words to USGS headquarters: "Vancouver, Vancouver! This is it!"

Today Mount St. Helens is the only active volcano in the lower 48. (There are 46 in Hawaii and Alaska.) But until 1980, she'd been sitting quietly for more than a century. Like the 12 other major

Nobody wants to be the Neville Chamberlain who declares that peace is at hand at Mount St. Helens. "If this thing pops like it did in 1980," one ranger tells me, "you might as well have a jar of jelly in your pocket, because you're toast."

volcanoes in the Cascade Range—all dormant, including Washington's Mount Rainier, Oregon's Mount Hood, and California's Mount Shasta—St. Helens sits along the Ring of Fire, a chain of volcanoes encircling the Pacific wherever continental plates collide, as the Juan de Fuca and North American plates do off the northwest coast.

No one alive on May 18, 1980, can forget the day Mount St. Helens erupted. A 5.1-magnitude earthquake triggered the collapse of the mountain's north flank, unloosing the biggest landslide ever recorded and an eruption equal to 500 Hiroshimas. Picturesque Spirit Lake, at the foot of the mountain, was buried under 200 feet of rubble. Melting glaciers swelled rivers, consuming the old two-lane road leading up from the logging town of Toutle in floods of mud and ash. The cloud blew 16 miles into the atmosphere, blanketed the Northwest with ash, and circled the globe in 17 days. It was the largest eruption in the recorded history of North America.

The lead-up back then was similar to what's going on today: In March 1980, a few small emissions—the first since 1857—brought media and rubberneckers out in droves, but after two months of watching the magma dome in the volcano's crater slowly bulge, people lost interest. Nobody, not even the scientists, was prepared for what happened next. As the mountainside collapsed, the eruption blasted not just upward but sideways, instantly flattening 86,000 acres of forest. Anything caught in the blast zone, which extended 17 miles to the north, was incinerated by 600-degree, 300-mile-per-hour winds. In all, 57 people died that morning, most of them suffocating in the falling ash.

This time around, volcanologists think they can better predict what the mountain will do. While we in the live audience inch our lawn chairs closer to the volcano, the scientists hunker down 40 miles away at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, next to some tract houses and a mini-mall in an office park outside Vancouver, Washington. They pore over the latest data from monitors inside the crater and then try to figure out what to tell the reporters.

For today's volcano-side press conference, they've sent over research hydrologist Larry Mastin, all spiffed up in a kelly-green USGS golf shirt and ball cap. Holding his ground against the out-thrust microphones of the volcanazzi, Mastin has the mix of brawn and brains that we demand in a volcanologist. One minute he recounts cruising low in a chopper over the smoldering crater; the next he answers a reporter's question about the size of the mountain's expanding lava dome with "Well, πr2 x h would give you the volume." We all nod and act like we know what he's talking about, scrambling for the winning words to decipher his technical jargon: The thing bulging in the crater becomes the dome, the lobe, the fin, the blister. When something shoots from the top of the crater, it is an emission, a hiccup, a burp, a belch.

But we want hard news, a bankable doomsday prediction—something like "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" or "Hasta la vista, Portland!" Mastin won't commit, insisting that, even with 50 scientists and a zillion dollars' worth of technology, the best volcanologists can do is guess. "It's like trying to predict what a one-year-old child will do ten minutes from now," he says.

If there's one thing scientists do seem sure of, it's that Mount St. Helens will not erupt as violently as it did 24 years ago. On the vaguely titillating Volcanic Explosivity Index, which ranges from "gentle" (1) to "mega-colossal" (8), the 1980 event was a 5: "paroxysmal." It removed the top 1,300 feet of the mountain and a good chunk of the crater's north flank. Simply put, there's nothing to blow off anymore—the cork is gone from the champagne bottle—and what magma emerges will most likely eek out slowly. Scientists have clocked the 2004 activity at a meager 1, and even if the mountain were to reach a "cataclysmic" 4, as they say it could, the eruption would shoot upward rather than sideways, sparing the visitor centers and news trucks.

Still, nobody wants to be the Neville Chamberlain who declares that peace is at hand at Mount St. Helens. "If this thing pops like it did in 1980," one gray-haired ranger tells me, "you might as well have a jar of jelly in your pocket, because you're toast."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.