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."

Comments

VolcanoCam

[erick99]

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.

links

[zobier]

why dont people just link to Google news?

http://news.google.com/news?q=MOUNT+ST.+HELENS

Re:VolcanoCam Archives

[Alien54]

There are archives in the volano cam site. they even made them into movies.

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.

Re:Forest fires?

[StaticEngine]

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.

To be expected

[jd]

Mt. St. Helens has been blowing steam for the past couple of days - not, apparently, as "eruption events" but more as a boiling of the glacier. It's a pretty good indicator that magma has been getting close to the surface for a while.

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! :), that is probably a wise decision.

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.)