it was 30 years ago today.....

[danger boy]

hard to believe it was 30 years ago today that Mt Saint Helen's blew up.

[bobman1235]

I thought it was when Sgt Pepper told the band to play.

[Keiko]

I thought it was when Sgt Pepper told the band to play.

That was 20 years ago, today. :D

http://taz4158.tripod.com/sgtpepper.html

[TNRabbit]

I've seen a documentary on that event. Most of the nation, outside WA state, don't realized how HUGE it was. It TOTALLY destroyed about 50 square miles. There is a photography who was 5 miles away when it happened & got sequential pics of the cloud coming at him. He barely escaped with his life. Some of the pics show house-size rocks chunks being tossed a mile away.

Before/After pic:



Here's a good site for info: http://eiu.edu/~cfrbj/parks/MSHE/MSHEstrat.html

[TNRabbit]

Some satellite photos of the aftermath:

[TNRabbit]

[TNRabbit]

The eruption of May 18, 1980 sent volcanic ash, steam, water, and debris to a height of 60,000 feet. The mountain lost 1,300 feet of altitude and about 2/3 of a cubic mile of material stream downward from the center of the plume and the formation and movement of pyroclastic flows down the left flank of the volcano.

[TNRabbit]

After the May 18, 1980 eruption, Mount St. Helens' elevation was only 8,364 feet (2,550 meters) and the volcano had a one-mile-wide (1.5 kilometers) horseshoe-shaped crater. View here is from the northwest. Pits in the foreground are phreatic explosion pits within the debris avalanche.
USGS Photograph taken on September 16, 1980, by Tom Casadevall.

FYI, the mountain started out at 9,677 feet...

More devastation pics downstream:

[TNRabbit]

[TNRabbit]

Iimages courtesy of USGS/Cascades Volcano Observatory

[Tony M]

That was quite an explosion and cudos for the people who studied it and warned everybody about it.

I can't believe 30 yrs. has passed..

I guess if you live long enough, alot of things will happen in that lifespan that are major events and when reflected upon, we can't believe that much time has elapsed...:(

[markmarc]

I remember washing the ash off of my car in Denver for several days.

Since I've lived in Portland for the last 12 years I've heard all sorts of stories including people cleaning the ash off of their roofs with snow shovels, then pushing it into the street where it was scooped up or hosed away with water.

If I dig into my yard a few inches from time to time I come across a thin layer of ash.

[danger boy]

those pics are cool.. thanks. some of them I have never seen.. esp the satellite pics.

[cfrizz]

Wow, unbelievable. Thanks for posting those pics.

[George Grand]

I was in Honolulu operating out of Hickam AFB when it blew, They made us stay there an extra 5 days because of that ash cloud. Shame. I was still single then and AIDS hadn't been invented yet. Double shame. And Honolulu still belonged to the US.

[Midnite Mick]

Even though I would have been 10 years old at the time I have no recollection of this event....but then again I remember very, very little of my childhood.

Mike

[danger boy]

makes all other active volcano's quite small by compairson ;)

[sucks2beme]

I saw that they are predicting that there will be the big one at Yellowstone
sooner or later. The last time was hundreds of thousands of years ago,
but it was big on a level we can't hardly imagine. It would dwarf anything
in recorded history. Mother nature can really deliver the goods when she
wants to.

[cambir]

I was pretty young and living in Yakima at the time St Helens blew. I remember that day vividly. The sky turned black and it began "snowing" warm ash. We got inches of ash cover.

We visited the mountain the following year IIRC (maybe a couple years after), and the destruction was incredible. The pictures posted are exactly as I remember it. No plants, no wildlife, just black and gray landscape with a few ground plants beginning to grow. Amazing it has been 30 years!

[mhmacw]

i remember when st helens blew. we were on the bridge on I5 and all the cars were stoppong in the middle of the road. we lived on columbia street then. i remember well the masks being worn, the ash on top of the pickup and my dad shoveling the ash off the walkway. the whole place was dark like a really close eclipse. i remember the news crews showing the tapes of harry truman not wanting to leave the mountainside saying"i was born here and ill die here". i remember the footage of the station wagon being engulfed by the pyroclastic flow and all the cars being every wich way in the river of ash and mud. what a mess that was. i still have a jar of ash somewhere around here. my granddad and i used to fish at spirit lake when i was very young. i think most of all i remember the cloud.... it was like a building was on fire but it just kept getting bigger and bigger until you couldnt see the top. it seemed like it was right over you even though it was 50 miles away.

[Fongolio]

It's about 400 miles by air from St. Helens to where I live in British Columbia and we had gray skies and light ash fall for several days after the eruption. Very surreal even that far away.

[obieone]

I remember it. It took a week for the dust cloud to reach the N.E.

[Hawkeye]

I was stationed in Lemoore, California when it blew. Sounds kinda lame now but we had a volcano party and were glued to the TV in the barracks :o One of the guys was from around the area and just sat there stunned at the damage. Two weeks later he went up there and returned with babyfood jars of dust for all us barracks rats. I think I may still have it laying around somewhere.

Gordon

[zingo]

[cnh]

Interesting photos, I was just talking about this eruption in China a week or two ago and describing its destructive capacity and aftermath. I toured the area about 23 years after the explosion and it was like it had happened just yesterday...it will take 1000s of years for that area to regenerate. Sounds like a great argument for not firing off nuclear weapons at each other in the future! Its QUITE SOBERING.

Incredible pictures.

cnh

[HB27]

I remember it well.
Me and a couple of buddies from my USMC squad took a road trip just to check out mother natures force.
It was almost 6 weeks later when we were able to get up there. There was still ash and dust 3-4 feet deep off the roadways.
The destruction we observed was unimaginable. I've seen a lot of man made destruction in my day. Man's ability to destroy is nothing in comparison.
Mother nature rules all. She has the power boys and girls.
I'll never forget it as long as I live. I've never felt so insignificant and powerless as I did when I saw the damage she did.
The amazing part of it was....We were still 10 miles away.
I doubt any of us in that truck said a word for an hour or so. We were in awe.
We finally got as close as they'd let us go. I guess we were still a mile or so away from the volcano itself. There was no describing it. We just stared and were silent.
Harry

[TNRabbit]

Mt. St. Helens and the Cascade Volcanic Arc: Iceland in America

By Mark Sappenfield / May 18, 2010

The 30-year anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens arrives today as both a moment of reflection and a poignant reminder.

Mt. St. Helens struck a nation that – at least in its 48 contiguous states – often sees volcanic eruptions as exotic events on civilization’s fringe, the narratives of Hawaiians and Icelanders and (more recently) Europeans stranded in shuttered airports.

Yet America has its own Iceland, in some respects. It is called the Cascade Volcanic Arc, running from northern California through Washington State, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980, was just a taste of what it can do.

The dynamics of the region’s tectonics make the Cascades and Iceland different. The Cascades, for one, are far less active. But each Cascades eruption has the potential to be far more explosive – as was demonstrated by Mt. St. Helens.

Mt. St. Helens vs. Eyjafjallajökull

The reason is that, geologically speaking, Iceland is set to simmer. New earth is constantly bubbling up through the rift that runs across the island and separates the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The function of Iceland’s volcanoes is essential to perpetually replenish the earth’s crust with new magma, which cools into rock.

Beneath the Cascades, however, the opposite is happening. The San Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is actually sliding beneath the North American plate and melting as it is driven into the earth. The melting rock then rises and occasionally explodes with tremendous force through the volcanoes of the Cascade Volcanic Arc.

Mount St. Helens and its Cascades brethren are, in effect, the release valve for the pent up forces of tectonic cannibalism.

As if to send a small reminder of this fact, a swarm of small earthquakes recently hit Oregon’s Mount Hood, suggesting the subterranean movement of magma. “These swarms are relatively common, but still worth watching,” writes geologist Erik Klemetti on his Eruptions blog.

Mount Hood is only one of the Cascades’ several iconic stratovolcanoes – symmetrical cones that tower above the landscape and dominate the horizons of the American Northwest.
The big one: Mount Rainier

Most prominent among them is Washington State’s Mount Rainier, the hunched shoulder of snow and rock 54 miles southeast of Seattle. It is a potential Mount Rainier eruption that poses the greatest threat to the Northwest, say scientists.

Atop the 14,411-foot peak lie 26 major glaciers, making it the most glaciated peak in the Lower 48 states. That is significant because the greatest threat posed by volcanoes in the Cascades is not so much the eruption itself, but the slurry of ice and rock that it sends hurtling down its mountainside. These lahars are the consistency of wet concrete, scalding hot, and on the steep slopes of Mount Rainier, could travel at highway speeds.

Indeed, Mount Rainier provides the perfect runway for these massive mudslides. From base to summit-top crater, Mount Rainier is taller than the K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, which gets a huge upward boost from the Himalayan plateau.

In one Mount Rainier eruption more then 5,000 years ago, these flows traveled with such speed and force that they ran into Puget Sound, reshaping the geography of the bay.

The last major eruption in the Cascades before Mount St. Helens, however, was at California’s Lassen Peak from 1914 to 1917. Ash from the most forceful eruption, in 1915, landed in Nebraska.

Another California stratovolcano, Mount Shasta, apparently erupted last in 1786 – an event reputedly was seen by the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse from his ship in the Pacific, though some historians doubt this account.

[TNRabbit]

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/...framework.html

[hearingimpared]

I remember it. It took a week for the dust cloud to reach the N.E.

Yep and it messed up the weather for weeks. I wonder it that is what kicked off the global warming craze?:D