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Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

Posted by michael on from the rated-u-for-uh-oh dept.

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."

10 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

      Bye bye, WA! I guess we'll never know who's Governor, now...

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly by drakethegreat · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't appreciate you showing a lack of respect or regard for Washington. I grew up there and I love it. If any state deserves to be removed from the map its Texas.

  2. Liquid dirt? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Funny

    Portland already has liquid sunshine. Now you are suggesting liquid dirt?

  3. Mt. St. Helen consitipated by helioquake · · Score: 5, Funny

    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).

    1. Re:Mt. St. Helen consitipated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Maybe that post was just building up inside him and he had to get it out.

  4. Re:Oh so what! by dankjones · · Score: 5, Funny

    You are obviously too young to remember the last time it erupted.

    We used to have 3 more states.

  5. Re:It would be cool by Babbster · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Yuck, yuck, yuck. We [in Portland] got hit with a bunch of ash during a couple of relatively minor eruptions back in 1980 (the first one had the wind blowing away from us) and the ash was a horrible pain. Besides the necessity of wearing surgical-type masks (unlike snow, breathing in that fine powdery stuff is "a bad thing") while the crap is blowing around, the clean-up is a bitch. Since it doesn't melt, you have to manually clean it out of seams and cracks in structures and cars - just plain awful.

    I'm sure you were just kidding but even joking about it makes me nervous. :)

  6. Re:Oh so what! by HaloZero · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We're not worried about where the volcano/mountain might be going. We're moreso worried about everyone who (perhaps stupidly, albeit) lives on , around, or near it.

    --
    Informatus Technologicus
  7. Animated GIF of what's happening.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's some brilliant web coverage of this topic available. Just look at the animated GIF (via CORALIZED link) at

    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. .. 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.)