VolcanoCam Back On The Air

Cyberherbalist writes "Over a year after the camera went on the fritz, the Mount Saint Helens VolcanoCam is finally back on the air. It's just in time to catch the famous firework as its earthquake level rises dramatically. All MSH climbing permits have been cancelled due to the danger of rocks and such flying from the lava dome inside the crater. If the weather holds, you may get some good views if the volcano continues ramping up its activity."

Comments

What about jpegs?

[Sir Haxa1ot]

Enough of this pseudoscience. Give us a story on the latest JPEG virus, what's going on with that?

Possible eruption

[Profane MuthaFucka]

There's an eruption possible in the near future, but it won't be as big as the last, according to news I've read.

Anyone living up in that area see anything with the naked eye that they want to report? I think if I lived up there, I'd leave town for a while for someplace safe and quiet. I hear Florida is nice this time of year.

Re:Possible eruption

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're sitting in the crater, you're probably someplace safe and quiet. The last eruption, to my knowledge, was a fairly small (as these things go) effusion of ash in 1990.

Right now the likelihood of various things happening goes something along these lines:

Likely -- nothing happens but the earthquake swarms diminish

Less likely -- there's a steam explosion in the crater that blasts some rock to other parts of the crater.

Rather Unlikely -- magma reaches the surface and some ash erupts or minor dome building occurs.

Basically UnbelievableAt This Point -- a significant eruption capable of disrupting anything on the lower flanks of the mountain or beyond occurs.

Re:Possible eruption

[flyboy974]

I'm looking at it from near Portland, OR. I'm waiting for a big "Poof" and for all of our TV stations to be interrupted. The erruption will probably be steam and some more lava pouring onto the surface helping to rebuild the cone. It's happened a few times since 1980.

The "fear factor" report on the news today was that the dam built to hold up rocks and trees was already overloaded after 8 years but was intented to last 50 years. They followed that up with all the fish hatcheries on the Columbia River are going to be destroyed because of small sediment going downstream from a single river. And then they followed that up with a shooting in North Portland.

Be afraid.. be very afraid.. of what you are told.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is rocks falling INTO the volcano a bad thing?

I would be more worried about them shooting OUT instead...

wrong to cancel permits

[r00t]

It's my right to get a Darwin award if I please.

I damn well should be able to climb the mountain,
and even wander around in the crater. There just
needs to be a notice that no rescue operations
will be provided. "Enter at own risk!" will do.

Re:wrong to cancel permits

[gl4ss]

well... if you want to toy oppose naturs authority then you should have no problem going without permits and offending some mere humans.

Re:wrong to cancel permits

[Artifex]

It's my right to get a Darwin award if I please.

Maybe so, but there are always negative externalities to events like that.

What if you were a stupid parent of a kid who would have grown up to cure cancer, and you dragged him along with you on your stupid hike up the mountain?
Just so you can't claim the kid has bad genes anyway, let's say the state was careless and let you adopt...

Re:wrong to cancel permits

[Anonymous Coward]

> I damn well should be able to climb the mountain, and even wander around in the crater. There just needs to be a notice that no rescue operations will be provided. "Enter at own risk!" will do.

Since when has such a disclaimer ever stopped a wrongful injury/death lawsuit?

Re:wrong to cancel permits

[Anonymous Coward]

So, do it.

Better view out my window

[iamlucky13]

Either the camera is down again or it's moving at warp 9. I just got grey fuzz.

From my house there wasn't anything to see. It's about 60 miles east of me. I suppose if I got closer it might be possible to see some steam rising from the crater, but a small amount of that is really quite common. Don't hold your breath folks...similar activity was recorded in 2002 and 1998, if I remember correctly, and quite a few more times since 1980. It'll probably pass quietly

Re:Better view out my window

[BigT]

or it could be that it's showing grey fuzz because it is dark outside...

Re:Better view out my window

[CaptainCheese]

Hell's teeth, man! Why does someone always have to come up with a crackpot conspiracy theory.

If it's not the CIA or illuminati it's some sort of mythical "darkness". When will people learn that occams razor indicates the camera has probably been stolen by aliens. or crackheads.

Re:Better view out my window

[introverted]

Either the camera is down again or it's moving at warp 9. I just got grey fuzz.

Well whaddya know. We slashdotted a volcano!

Mt St Something-Something

[mike_sucks]

Which is great, but where on earth (quite literally) is Mt St Helens?

I can't seem to see it out my window.

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[G-funk]

Somewhere in the states... Washington, I believe?

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[Cyberherbalist]

Click on one of the bloody links and you might find out. It's in the US, in Washington state.

You might or might not remember that in 1980 it blew up and killed 67 people, destroyed a couple hundred square miles of forest, and in general caused quite a fuss. It was one of the most destructive volcanic events ever recorded in recent history, so naturally everybody's forgotten about it in favor of tripe like jpegs that capture your computer or some such rot.

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[mike_sucks]

Oh come on, you don't actually expect me to RTFA, do you?

Besides I did, saw static and came back here. I wonder if it has erupted already.

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[Cyberherbalist]

oops, ya made me laugh. RTFA, indeed.

Nah, it didn't blow yet, somebody just forgot to pay the danged energy bill and the lights got shut off! Otherwise known as sunset. It would take a darned big Klieg light to make it visible under those conditions, too.

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[Anonymous Coward]

Mt. St. Helens is in SW Washington state, about 50 miles north of Portland Oregon. It is a member of the Cascades mountain range, a line of active, dormant, and extinct peaks extending from Northern California, to Southern British Columbia. The next major volcano to the north of Mt. St. Helens is Mt. Rainier, and the next major Cascade volcano to the south is Mt. Hood. All three mountains are volcanoes that we can reasonably expect to erupt again.

The Cascade volcanoes are formed by the subduction of the Explorer, Juan De Fuca, and Gorda oceanic plates beneath continental North America. Subduction is the process by which oceanic lithosphere (crust, the surface of the earth, plus a layer of the underlying mantle that moves with the crust as a rigid unit) slides underneath the continents and back in to the deeper mantle. The Cascadia subduction zone, where these plates subduct beneath the Pacific coast of North America, is notable (among other reasons) because it has no observable trench. This is in part due to the youth of the hot, relatively low-density lithosphere subducting there, and partly because the Columbia River dumps a huge volume of sediment off the continent in to the ocean where a trench might otherwise form. The location where the subduction zone starts (where a trench would normally sit) is a ways off shore beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Interesting aside: The subduction zone, besides producing volcanoes, also has the potential to create very large earthquakes just offshore. The subducting plates don't readily slide past one another, and are currently locked tightly together. When they break free a huge amoung of energy is released in the form of seismic waves. The last time this happened was about 350 years ago, and researchers have identified a recurrence interval for these quakes at about 500 years. In other words, we can expect one any time. California might have more earthquakes, but the strike slip faulting of the San Andreas fault simply isn't capable of producing the stresses that can build up in subduction megathrusts, so Oregon and Washington can expect a truly enormous earthquake someday soon.

As the plates descend in to the mantle, at a depth of around 100 km to about 150 km the descending slab of oceanic lithosphere induces the formation of magma in the overlying mantle. The fairly narrow depth at which partial melting occurs leads to a narrow trace of volcanoes on the earth's surface above the descending slab. Since the subducting slab formed the surface of a sphere, as it subducts the trace of its volcanoes forms an arc. Thus these volcanoes are known as arc volcanoes, and they occur all around the Pacific Ocean, albeit generally due to the subduction of plates other than the Explorer, Juan De Fuca, and Gorda. (A really nice view of this arc shape is visible in the Aleutians). The Cascades aren't long enough or formed by a large enough subducting plate to form a very distinct arc on a map.

The young active Cascade volcanoes do, however, form a very narrow line of peaks, and these peaks are superimposed on the eroded roots of older Cascade volcanoes. Besides Mt. St. Helens, other volcanoes in the High Cascades (as this sharp, distinct, line of young or recently active volcanoes is known) include: Mt. Bachelor, a popular ski resort; Mt. Hood, just east of Portland OR; Mt. Rainier, which threatens Olympia Washington with volcanic mudslides when it erupts again; Mt. Jefferson; Mt. Shasta, a massive mountain in Northern California; Mt. Lassen, which last erupted 1915; and Crater Lake, also known as Mt. Mazama, which emptied nearly 50 cubic kilometers of material during its climactic eruption; and many other mountains.

Geologically speaking, in the short term the entire High Cascades range can be considered active. Eventually, however, the Cascadia subduction zone will probably die out. There are major transform boundaries between the Pacific plate and North America to the north and south of the the Cascadia subduction zone, and over many millions of yea

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[bestguruever]

ever recorded in recent history

I've always loved this phrase, at least since I first heard it yesterday.

Re:Mt St Something-Something

[Cyberherbalist]

Yeah, I had fun with it, too. I first wrote "ever recorded in history", then I thought to myself, "wait a minute, was Krakatoa bigger, or not?" Yeah, it probably was. Then I wondered if the explosion of the island of Thera/Sanotorini in the Aegean sea might have been even bigger --- although nobody actually seemed to have recorded that, as few records survive from that time. Hard to say. I finally settled on the phrase you liked so well. But it is very lame, as phrases go, isn't it? I should have left the "ever" off, at least.

Oops. A jpg!

[Fallen Andy]

Same here, just noise but when I looked it was 22:09
there so I guess you'd just get noise.

It's a trick

[jamesh]

Dont't click on the link. There's probably a JPEG behind that link just waiting to infect you.

They laughed at me when I installed lynx. Who's laughing now?

Re:It's a trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone still is.