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Mount St. Helens Shoots Steam, Ash
Wynken de Word writes "Months after the preliminary signs starting showing, Washington State's Mount St. Helens is sending a plume of steam and ash 7,600 metres into the air as of Tuesday, 17:25 PST. See the U.S. Geological Survey site for more updates and, come daylight, check out the Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam."
This story is just a bunch of hot air.
Well, some people would say steam deserves it, but shooting Ash is just wrong.
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waiterbot.
I live less than 50 miles from St Helens, and I heard about this on Slashdot first.
Woo hoo! I'm watching it right now from my back door! Wait, no I'm not, it's dark here in Seattle.
What use is it if the thing blows at 5:30pm? The local news needs footage, man!
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
my photoblog entry tonight:
p =131
http://www.euphorochrome.com/photoblog/index.php?
These are andesitic volcanos, not tholiitic.
The lavas are viscous. Unless you are in the rim of the volcano or are flying over the ridge with an infrared camera you won't see lava from St. Helens.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
NWCN site has a video the "Take a look inside the crater" http://www.nwcn.com/ link shows... well inside the crater. You have to sign up.
Heh... no picture, just the usual red/green/blue dashes indicating "no signal", i.e. "the camera melted" Doesn't sound fun.
How close is Mount St. Helens to Redmond?
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
This happened before...quite recently in the grand scheme of things. Lives were lost, lives were ruined, towns destroyed. There's a small vial of dust sitting on a shelf in my parents' house.
I'd be interested in hearing about the new technology since then as well as what they plan to do. Detailed info seems scarce on the geological site.
Our volcano is blasting stuff 25000 feet up.
(it sounds more impressive if you use feet)
Probably aren't any yet. Any flow should have been confined to the crater and obscured by ash and steam. The event came just before local sunset. Things may be clearer in the morning.
The Mt. St. Helens webcam sometimes picks up the infared glow of exposed lava after dark. It went offline Friday, but service was fortunately restored this afternoon -- just hours before St. Helens burped. Check to see whatever can be seen here. My site also has some background on the webcam.
KPTV has some impressive stills of the ash plume here.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Not to mention it's currently nighttime where the camera is located. Duh.
We did a video last year for the National Film Challenge which is a good depiction of what we thought an eruption should look like. :)
www.fwstudios.com
It was a fun video to do and we did it in only about 60 hours. (that is, wrote, rehearsed, edited, and produced)
-Luke
Damn Global Warming
You're both wrong. He hates you both. Individually. :|
You're right. Now excuse me while I go off and cry.
Now, if they get consumed by a volcano, I'm just going to say it was random.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
it's blowing red, blue, green and black ash EVERYWHERE!!!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I guess it would work better as a link.
Cascades Volcano Observatory
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
CBC News just reported about 4000 small earthquakes about 200km off the west coast of Vancouver Island, none no more than 5.x on the Richter scale.
They believe this may be related to the growth of a new underwater volcano, and hope to see it's initial erruption. This is almost certainly connected to the eruption at Mt. St. Helens, and I suspect related to the large earth quakes in south-east asia in December.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
No worries, here's an artist's rendition
I was flying home from SEA -> SJC this evening and saw the thing happen from 20,000 feet. The ash shot up and within a few minutes was at the same altitude as our still-climbing 737. Within a few minutes the ash was well above our altitude and the Captain came on and stated that it seemed to him to be well above 30,000 feet. Needless to say, we flew well clear of the plume.
That being said, it was an amazing sight to see this huge jet of ash go so high, so quickly. The late afternoon sun lit it just right and I really wish I had had a camera.
My son went looking for news coverage on CNN because we had heard that St. Helens was erupting.
Nada. This is a non-event for anyone not living in the region (and I do live near St. Helens).
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
There shouldn't be any visible lava flow. The best you will get is possibly a bit of lava oozing out at the surface - probably already crusted over, so it would just look like a rock with growing cracks. It has to do with the lava type. The lava in Hawaii, that flows very well, has much less dissolved gases and is at a higher tempurature than the lava in Mt. St. Helens. The dissolved gases is the really important part that make it more explosive. As a gaseous magma rises towards the surface, the pressure from the overlying rock lessens. Like in a soda bottle when you open the top (thus reducing pressure) the dissolved gasses bubble out to the surface. The gasses in magma have nowhere to go. The surface is clogged with solidified magma and is sealed. So, when the gasses inside the volcano dissolve, they have no volume to expand into. So the pressure goes UP UP UP! (like in a soda bottle, if you shake it.) Eventually, this pressure builds up so high that it goes KABLOOIE! and blows the piece of cooled rock that seals the to of the volcano off (this is called the Plug.) The only lava you'd see is after the plug gets blown off and while the plug re-forms.
This was reported 24 years ago!
Does this mean that Mr. Gates has finally created the One Ring?
If so, I sure hope penguins have furry feet. Fedora Baggins and Samwise Gentoo can save us.
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Eruption04 /Monitoring/plume_in_the_evening_8march05.html
This has some pretty good photos, as well as a picture with (MS Paint?) editing describing what's what.
The photos are taken from a remote camera on the mountain that takes a picture every 2.5 minutes. This is as good as it gets.
That could be hot gas. Look up the words "nueé ardente".
Andesitic lavas have more water in them than tholiitic. That is why volcanos on or near continental margins explode violently and lavas from island chains only shoot ~30 meters into the air.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Enquiring minds want to know: where were the psychics? Did any of "them" see this coming?
I do believe that is the first time I've seen a South Park screen capture modded up as informative.
/. never ceases to amaze me!
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
I live in Portland, Oregon, so I saw the eruption when it was taking place from my front porch.
It really wasn't very exciting. It was just a bunch of smoke and steam, around the size of several a few months ago.
Despite it being the sole story on the local news, nobody is going to die or even be injured. Nobody is going to care after tomorrow.
The volcano is regrowing a lava dome, and the dome is increasing in size. There's no visible lava, or anything more than the normal pickup truck worth of rock that's been added to the dome every second since October.
I don't get what the big deal is. It's a bit of smoke, that's all.
Ok, so for others, not so near... If you stare at the web cam shot long enough -- and try to look sort of past your screen -- you can see it in 3D.
No? Just keep staring...
Hmmm, are you sure you were looking in the right direction?
I live in Beaverton, and while I couldn't see the peak (hidden behind the West Hills), I could tell the plume was a _lot_ bigger than any of the others since it started up again.
Plus, from what I've heard, the dome is growing at the rate of a dump truck load each second (gotta be an order of magnitude more than a pickup truck). If it keeps up at this rate, then the new dome will be peeking above the rim within a few years.
That would be kind of a neat thing to see from downtown PDX...
Is that a typo? There is an impressive mountain range and a whole lotta horizon between BC and Mt. St. Helens. You can, however, see Mt Baker from Victoria, which puffs a little steam sometimes.
Hell yah they are! They will kick your ass!! I saw this one dude got stuck in the lavas and he just fucking melted...
What?
Oh. Nevermind.
Months after the preliminary signs starting showing, Washington State's Mount St. Helens is sending a plume of steam and ash 7,600 metres into the air.
It's incorrect to imply, as the posting does, that the earlier activity is "preliminary", and that now the real action is going to get going. We are, in all likelihood, in a dome-building phase. It will have natural variation, times of activity and times of quiescence, just as the volcanic system has on a geologic time scale. There is no reason to expect a large explosive event in the near future.
-David Hirsch Asst. Professor of geology
USGS Vancouver says it was actually 36,000 ft.
Best joke/cartoon about it was during the 1980s eruptive sequence. A guy is standing in a ticket booth with a steaming volcano behind him and what's supposed to be a ski lift running up one side. The sign says "Mt. St. Helens Ski Area". The caption reads, "Sure we know how to make it stop but did you ever try to find a female virgin at a ski area?"
Oh well, I guess you had to be there.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
What is interesting is that there was absolutely ZERO warning. There had been some minor tremors in the hours before, but nothing that would indicate something on this scale.
Personally, I think someone slipped the volcano some lima beans.
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)
I used to live in Texas... we saw things like this after every Chili cookoff!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
"This is a static image of Mount St. Helens, taken from the Johnston Ridge Observatory." (my emphasis.)
Very funny - now turn the lights back on so we can see the volcano...
Apart from the infrared glow from the lava flows last year, I've only even seen static from the camera in my timezone.
I prefer the White Island Crater VolcanoCam - despite predictions of an acidic death, Dino lives!
I'm glad to hear that Steam got shot. It's a crappy palladium-lite as far as I'm concerned. Maybe now that it'd dead I'll get around to buying Half-Life 2.
But Ash getting shot was great loss. You'd think that if he could survive the army of darkness, he could survive a volcano!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.