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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
Portland already has liquid sunshine. Now you are suggesting liquid dirt?
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).
You are obviously too young to remember the last time it erupted.
We used to have 3 more states.