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Mount St. Helens Alert Status Increased
DarkHand writes "Mount St. Helens has become even more unstable in the last few hours. The U.S. Geological Surveys Cascades Volcano Observatory has increased the volcanic alert around the volcano to level 2 and released a press release: 'Over night, seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has accelerated significantly, which increases our level of concern that current unrest could culminate in an eruption. We are increasing the alert level to the second of three levels [...]. Earthquakes are occurring at about four per minute. The largest events are approaching Magnitude 2.5 and they are becoming more frequent. All are still at shallow levels in and below the lava dome that grew in the crater between 1980 and 1986. This suggests that the ongoing intense earthquake activity has weakened the dome, increasing the likelihood of explosions or perhaps the extrusion of lava from the dome.' The most recent readings at the SEP seismograph stationed on the lava dome itself are totally saturated. The ground is now literally constantly rumbling."
"Get outta there, it's gonna blow!"
.. if only to shout "Leonard Bernstein" at this point.
All of these hurricanes, tornadoes earthquakes, floods, and now volcano eruptions...when do the plagues and locusts start happening?
Memo to self: Don't live anywhere near an active volcano.
KABOOM!
USGS earthquake info for Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument area (wide view)
USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory Mt St Helens seismic observations
Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network Mt St Helens home page (earthquake list)
I'm sick of all these damn hurricanes, honey. Where else can we live?
I want to get as far away from this place as possible. How about Washington?
Works for me, let's go!
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Hmm. I was hoping to see a live volcano eruption here, but it seems
not to be broadcasting now. Anyone knows why/what's happening ?
Can anyone who knows more about Earth Science help me out here?
Seismologists are expecting anywhere from nothing at all (not uncommon following an earthquake swarm, happens at Kilaeua from time to time), to a moderate event.
By comparison, the 1980 blast was a catastrophic event. A medium strength earthquake caused the entire north face of the mountain to crumble in a massive rockslide, which also uncorked the pressure on the magma underneath, resulting in a huge lateral explosion through the rock slide. Imagine a wall of rocks coming at you at 300mph. It's doubtful that something like that will happen again in our lifetimes.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
By an interesting coincidence, I was born near Mt. St. Helens during the first eruption. Yes...as I was delivered from the womb, the city was covered with ash and filled with the sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth *cough* I mean, sweeping and washing of streets.
Maybe with this next eruption, instead of merely being born, I'll actually get a life.
Have we positively ruled out terrorism as a cause of this seismic activity at this point?
There will be a big white flag coming out of the crater reading "BOOM!" any minute now...
Google 'Yellowstone volcano.' In one of the two or three times I favored my intro to geology class with my presence, my professor explained that much of Yellowstone National Park is the caldera of a giant volcano, according to him the largest on earth, hence the geysers and sulfurous springs. If it were to erupt again -- fortunately it does so rarely, about once every 600k years -- it would cover most of the Western US in ash and if it did so without warning, would kill millions of people.
Always a godfather; never a god. -Gore Vidal
Here is a fairly large panoramic we took that day. You can see Johnston Ridge Observatory on the far right. The trail actually takes you across the ridges on the left and then drops you down in to the flats at the base of the mountain:
http://home.pacifier.com/~richmond/Helens.jpg
One of the more reassuring things about St Helens blowing is that it has already done so. It has a nice crater to keep things fairly contained and no glaciers. Mt Rainier is another story, however. It is also a volcano, has the most permanent glaciers on it of any mountain in the continental US and if it blows, the true danger is what happens to those glaciers at eruption. It's known as a lahar.
I read something similar to this once: To get an idea of a lahar, imagine a 30 ft wall of mud, boiling in temperature with the consistency of wet cement traveling at speeds up to 60 mph or so. If you go driving through the river valleys of Washington State (Carbon Rv, Puyallup Rv) that are fed by the Rainier glaciers, you'll see Lahar evacuation route signs everywhere. Not only that, but I believe recent evacuation simulations have been abysmal. Scary stuff.
Ahh, may have found the article that I read.
Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. -Hawking
When discussing vulcanology, one should avoid using as one's primary reference a movie in which Pierce Brosnan successfully drives a pickup truck over several meters of red-hot lava.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I did Hurricanes Camille, Agnes, and Hugo on the East Coast. I've done tornadoes and blizzards in Michigan. I was in LA for huge brush and forest fires, the Rodney King riots, and the Northridge Quake. I now live in Portland, OR. Yea.
On the "harbingers of doom" ratings scale, hearing I'm moving to town is like running into Jim Cantore in a hotel lobby.
I was ten years old living down in Vancouver, WA back in 1980. We had a pristine view of the mountain from our back yard and would constantly have "eruption barbeques" at the house.
;)
During one of the many ash-falls that used to regularly dust us, my brother and I ran out one morning to play in the new ash before our parents woke up. There was about 1-2 inches coating everything, like new snow, and it had just rained making all of the ash into an interesting clay-like consistency.
Kids being kids, my little brother and I ran out to the driveway and started writing our names with our fingers into the ash covering my dad's brand new 1 day old VW Scirroco in the driveway. It started out with "Hi" and "Cool" and progressed to "Van Halen kicks ass" and "KISS rules" and liberal scrawlings of "dork", "shit", "Tony sucks dick", drawings of boobies and penises, you get the idea.
Well, we got into a hell of a lot of trouble when my dad saw the car when he had to wipe all of the ash off to drive to work. Our trouble later escalated when he discovered that, after going through a car wash to rinse off the rest, everything that we had written on his car was now premanently scratched into the paint and windows of his car, ash being a fine gritty silicate. Our dad's co-workers ribbed him endlessly about his "custom paint job" as it took him several weeks before he could get his car repainted and the windows replaced.
All told, a few thousand dollar "oops" for us kids
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
It's unlikely that even the most massive eruption from Mt. St. Helens could have threatened the plant. The incredible first lateral blast only travelled 25km and IIRC the pyroclastic flows only extended about 20km. Ashfall would not have been a problem for the plant, and the quakes associated with vulcanism are (Hollywood aside) fairly small.
In the event, they had a pretty good idea that Mount St. Helens was going to erupt through its side. The area that bulged was called Goat's Roack and was actually the result of an earlier eruption through the side of the cone.
What no one had predicted was that the whole side of the mountain would slide off. Instantly a huge section of the magma below the mountain depressurised - like a champagne cork blowing off. And that did the damage.
What we have now is young magma pushing up under the mountain. We'll probably see a series of small eruptions as the dome is built, extended and then blown apart. We could have centuries of this sort of activity ahead of us.
The eruption was too bad because Mt. St. Helens was a perfect cone before the eruption. It looked like Mt. Fuji in Japan. Now it looks like a million-seat football stadium: a big hole with a circular ridge around half of it.
You're not thinking long-term - the cone of Mt. St. Helens was only a few tens of thousands of years old, it will rebuild itself in the next few millennia. In the meantime, sit back and watch the mountain heal itself.
Best wishes,
Mike.
First of all...the Trojan nuclear reactor was not built on a volcano, it was built near one. In fact, it's about 75 miles away (an estimate, I don't have a map in front of me). As someone else noted, the shockwave was only significant for a radius of about 25 km. The pyroclastic flow went north (the wrong way) for about 20 km, following the low ground. Trojan is on the other side of the Columbia River in the middle of a big plain. Debris from the eruption is simply not a threat. Additionally, the containment building is designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner without threatening the integrity of the core or the heat exchanger. That probably really means something like a 1% chance of breach, but it still shows you that it's well built.
Additionally, the Trojan reactor was not shut down due to the proximity of a fault and fear of earthquake damage, but due to an aging coolant system that would have cost $billions to rebuild. Admittedly it is an older design and there are safer options now, but my point is Mt. St. Helens does not threaten us with a nuclear disaster.
The spent fuel rods are still there because some crazy people are convinced that they are safer sitting in a pool a couple hundred yards from the Columbia River than converted into a ceramic, encased in steel and concrete, and buried under Yucca mountain.
I wish I could go hike up there, but other people tell me that would be stupid and now illegal, so I guess I'll have to settle for looking out the window.