Slashdot Mirror
Mt. St. Helens Magma Reaches Surface
daquake writes "Volcanic rock has flowed to the surface of Mount St. Helens' crater, creating a new lava dome after weeks of seismic activity, the bulge had risen at least 330 feet since scientists noticed it September 30. Geologists said there is still a chance of explosive ash eruptions from the 8,364-foot mountain, and the immediate area around the volcano remained closed."
The USDA Forest Service has a live VolcanoCam that refreshes every five minutes. It has produced some pretty neat images over the last couple of weeks. The USDA page goes down fairly often but the image itself is still available so check out this page for image links (including my own) if you ever can't get to the Forest Service page.
http://www.busyweather.com/
why dont people just link to Google news?
http://news.google.com/news?q=MOUNT+ST.+HELENS
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I guess we will need to wait to see if they are in fact right, or if the 55% (KABOOM, ASH AND LAVA) people got it right.
For those that don't know what I'm talking about: the poll
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
Also the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, a parent network to the St Helens area has the daily shots as a loop, with more info here. The earthquake maps plotted out over time are also very interesting.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
UHHH,
1) There are no forests on that side of the mountain. They blew up in 1980.
2) October is NOT dry in WA/OR. Plenty of water here.
3) California is a few states away. If lava flows to California, we're all in trouble.
This volcano is surrounded by miles of ash and rock. The lava isn't that fast flowing. It's not going to set anything on fire.
The lack of major earth tremors in the last couple of days was also a tell-tale sign. Much less resistance to the molten rock, so it was likely heading to the surface much faster than before.
Mount St. Helens, however, is apparently not the volcano the scientists are most concerned with. Sure, it's interesting and all that, but there's no expectation of anything life-threatening or spectacular. The warning level was downgraded a few days ago, and the vulcanologists now largely expect it to quietly build its lava dome in peace.
Apparently, there's a bit more concern over Mt. Rainier and Mt. Hood. Mt. Rainier isn't showing much activity, at the moment, but is expected to be by far the most devastating of all the Cascades volcanos when it does decide to explode. Most of Seattle is built on ash deposits from a prior eruption. An eruption on the OTHER side of the mountain. That thing has absolutely no concern for the environment, whatsoever.
The other volcano getting attention is Mt. Hood. Partly because it is so close to Portland, but also because there's been a bit of activity there the past few years. Nothing major, but definitely signs of life. I've not seen any predictions made as to the sort of timeframe an eruption could be expected, but I think it's not too unreasonable to suggest that recurrent activity means it's likely to be sooner rather than later.
Seattle is apparently spending a small fortune on monitoring the volcanos in its vicinity. Not surprising, given that it IS built on volcanic ash. Maybe someone paid attention when the history class covered Pompeii. Given that the Cascades are part of the so-called "Ring of Fire" (a name to inspire tranquility in anyone!
Even so, volcanos are not to be trifled with and they are (by nature) unpredictable. It's extremely hard to evacuate even relatively small cities on the Southeast coast, whenever there's a hurricane, despite weeks of warning and the fact that these events are so frequent that both officials and residents have considerable experience.
In the worst-possible case, a volcano might give a few day's notice, and the road infrastructure in the Portland-Vancouver-Seattle stretch is not exactly built to handle mass evacuations. It's not entirely clear how many of the bridges in Portland would even be safe, in the event of a mass exodus.
The problem isn't helped by a lack of immediacy. There's no evidence that there's going to be a problem in the near future, so (other than the aforementioned monitoring) there's very little money going into dealing with the problem once it does happen.
(Hey, California's no better. They've not even fixed the damage from the last major earthquake, nevermind made improvements to handle another crisis, even though there's a quite significant risk of another crisis in the comparatively near future. Roads don't build themselves and emergency crews aren't exactly equipt with all-terrain vehicles. Though that would probably not be a bad idea, for high-risk areas.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There seems to be a little confusion among those who didn't actually read the article, so I might as well waste a few seconds:
There is no lava actually coming out visibly. When they say there is magma at the surface, the geologists really mean it's just below the surface. I guess the point of the article is that this is new growth inside the lava dome, as opposed to lava deep down pushing up the whole dome from beneath. Microsoft is still safe baring any truly cool explosions and there's really no danger of forest fires. Any lava would have a lot of crater filling to do before it spilled over the north face. Plus I read somewhere that the lava tends to come out of Mt. St. Helens pretty viscous (thick crust?) so it doesn't flow well anyways.
They also have a seismogram on the southern side of Mt. Saint Helens that directly posts information onto the internet. While many might not understand the significance of reading it, you can still actually see there is quite a bit of activity.
Seismogram is viewable here.
Interestingly enough, they actually had a seismogram that was on top of the lava dome, but it was destroyed in the first steam explosion at the beginning of the month.
I think you have St Helens confused with Mt Ranier.
Have you looked at a map lately? The closest "large" metropolis is Portland, Oregon.
The only people in legitimate danger are the folks living around Spirit Lake, or the Toutle River, or anyone one of the other stupid towns nearby like Cougar or Amboy.
Even though we wish that all of the Microsoft campuses were situated smack dab on the lava dome, the worst they're going to see is a slightly greyer day.
But if you were really from around here, that wouldn't be anything new.
Seems to work for me (OS X). Just make an empty directory, drop this script in it and run. Remember, slashdot mangles posts so go to my blog for the un-mangled script. Cheers!
m shvolcanocam.jpg -O $name.jpg
#!/bin/bash
while (:); do
export name=`date +%m.%d.%y-%H:%M:%S`
wget http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/images/
#sleeps for 15 minutes
sleep 900
done