"Thirty-five years after Mt. St. Helens blew its top, the landscape is full of stark reminders".
"When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, the landscape changed in an instant—the geologic version of an instant, anyway. It was the deadliest eruption the United States had ever seen, leveling everything for miles north of the mountain and blanketing ash as far as Montana. On the 35th anniversary of the event, the scars still shape the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.
That fact that this particular mountain blew its top wasn’t exactly a surprise; before explorer George Vancouver named it after a fellow Brit, the local Cowlitz tribe called it Lawetlat'la, or 'The Smoker.' It was known to belch steam and had spewed ash as lately as the 1850s. This volcanic activity is a lot closer to the surface than the magma reservoir recently discovered under Yellowstone; that volcano, if it blew, would dwarf the destruction caused by St. Helens. Fortunately, that three-mile-deep pool of magma is unlikely to surface anytime soon.
The weeks leading up to the May 18 eruption were full of signs. More than 10,000 earthquakes were measured around the 9,677-foot peak and steam escaped through a growing summit crater. 'Very clearly it was awake and building toward something,' says USGS volcanologist Seth Moran. 'What happened was more extreme than just about everyone was expecting.'"
Allison Williams reports for Smithsonian Magazine May 16, 2015.
SEE ALSO:
"Mapping Mount St. Helens Magma Progresses, 35 Years After Eruption" (Reuters)
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