Slashdot Mirror
Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly
jd writes "According to the New Scientist magazine, Mount Saint Helens has built in the space of a few months a lava dome larger than one that had been built over the previous six years. The growth rate is about four cubic meters a second. If the dome keeps growing at this rate, geologists expect it to collapse, triggering a major eruption. Surface activity is not the only thing geologists are monitoring. Seismographs of the volcano show dozens of tremors a minute."
Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly
Hmmm... mountain, spewing smoke and ash... that's not odd. Nothing to see here folks!
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I take Pepto Bismol. Check out the Dance Machine on this site. What a bizarre thing to use flash for.
Portland already has liquid sunshine. Now you are suggesting liquid dirt?
This is not funny. This is serious.
In simple terms, Mt. Saint Helen is experiencing a constipation of the decade. Magma is acting like severely dehydrated stool in your bowel (c.f., Mauna Loa is like having explosive diarrhea), trying to get out but the passage is either too narrow or the shit is too viscous to flow out smoothly. Then what follows is tremendous pressure from cumulating [volcanic] gas and bloating by unreleased feces [i.e., magma].
Then there will be two choices for Mt. St. Helen to make: either release the shit little by little (leading to minor eruptions and small quakes) or craptacular ejection of constipated feces out of the system once and for all. Imagine [or take my word for it...] that the newly forming dome is the piece of shit that begins to peek out of an a$$hole. This is a perfect analogy that make sense to all. The lesson is that it all depends on what kind of stool you generate: soft or hard. Mauna Loa, for example, always generates chemically soft stool, whereas St. Helen tends to make hard ones. A long ago I was tutoring geophysics to "poets" and this was the only analogy that they found it easier to relate...(yeah, gross common frame of reference, you may say).
I was watching this damn volcano since it first hit /. the last time: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/3 0/1235218&tid=103&tid=1&tid=14
It was here before us and will be here after us.
THat's a fact.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I'm sure you were just kidding but even joking about it makes me nervous. :)
Not to worry - Microsoft will just release a service pack for it - that will make it stable.
www.eFax.com are spammers
We've got a ditch digger over in Dallas who's been out of work ever since he finished the Panama Canal and then they shut down the Superconducting Super Collider project http://www.hep.net/documents/drell/apendixa.html. I figure it'll take him a couple of days to dig a diversion ditch to channel the flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and mayber another week to stack it all up into a peninsula, then another week to collect a crew and build a suburb of Corpus Christi.
Yeah, bring it on. At least one Texan needs the work.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I mean, to blow the top of the mountain off due to the built up pressure. Maybe this whole build-up, store energy, explode scenario is how this volcano works.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
This isn't anything new. All women behave oddly.
There's some brilliant web coverage of this topic available. Just look at the animated GIF (via CORALIZED link) at
. .. to http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/something..., but this is so well presented they don't deserve a /.'ing, so try the cached version first.)
the site http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090
to see how dramatic this is. For more, including the GIF, see:
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090
(For those who don't know: The above links to an automatically cached version of the pages, as described here. If for some reason the coralized links are don't work, you can try the orignal by changing the link from http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090/something
The day Mt. St. Helens had mud butt?
since there's the dabate about man-made versus geological causes for atmospheric change. We ought to get some data that helps push the argument along. My family (wife, toddler daughter, and I) are flying into Portland in February... Can't wait to see if we make it or have to abandon the trip.
On my puny-human scale of things, 4 cubic meters a second is a LOT.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
I was in the 5th grade when the big one hit the Mountain and had a paper route at the time. Before I was allowed outside to deliver my papers I had to pretty much adorn hazmat gear. My mom had me wear a mask, goggles, overcoat, big hat, etc. After a few days of cooking alive in that gettup while riding my bike on what was worse than dry soft sand My parents asked me if I wanted to quit that paper route, and the answer was an enthusiastic YES!
:P
The ash was kinda fun to watch fall, but it was a four star pain in the butt since it clogs up everything, drains, gutters, lungs, etc.
Oh well I guess it's better than falling frogs
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Don't do it! Dont use that aluminum boat to cross the lake in an attempt to escape!! You wll be melted by the acid! Use the 4WD to drive across the lava flow instead, that seems to work.
I couldn't think of a sig.