Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Deep Magma Chambers Seen Beneath Mount St. Helens (sciencemag.org)

Posted by samzenpus on from the under-the-mountain dept.

sciencehabit writes with news that scientists have imaged the magma chambers responsible for the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. From the Science story: "Geoscientists have for the first time revealed the magma plumbing beneath Mount St. Helens, the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest. The emerging picture includes a giant magma chamber, between 5 and 12 kilometers below the surface, and a second, even larger one, between 12 and 40 kilometers below the surface. The two chambers appear to be connected in a way that could help explain the sequence of events in the 1980 eruption that blew the lid off Mount St. Helens."

24 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Big Trouble by khr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mt. St. Helens's 1980 eruption was the biggest thing I ever got in trouble for. Really...

    Early in the morning, everyone was asleep and the house started shaking, and my father yelled from the other room "quit jumping on the bed!" and I yelled back "I'm not!" and the rumbling didn't stop, the blinds clattering against the windows and he yelled "Dammit! I said quit jumping on the bed right now!" and I yelled, "but I'm not!"...

    I was in big trouble... They grounded me practically for life, for not stopping jumping on the bed and lying about that.

    Fortunately later that evening we watched the news and I was vindicated... It really wasn't me.

    1. Re:Big Trouble by funkelectric · · Score: 5, Funny

      So you jumped on the bed, caused a huge frigging volcanic eruption and managed to get away with it all. Nicely played.

    2. Re:Big Trouble by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Heh, nice. I believe it was a Sunday morning, and our family was up and about already. We heard the explosion a few hundred miles north, much further away than you, apparently. My dad joked "well, there went Mt. St. Helens", since it was in the news, and people were anticipating some sort of event. We all chuckled, just figuring it was a sonic boom from the Whidby Island naval air base or something like that.

      We were shocked to learn later that day that what we heard was actually St. Helens erupting. Ash got spread thousands of miles away, but we never got anyone of it, since we were north and the wind blew everything east.

      About a year later, we got a chance to see the blast zone, which was still mostly barren, at least of large-scale life. It was absolutely a surreal scene, as though a person had swept their arm over a forest of matchsticks.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:Big Trouble by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I'd just gotten out of the military and was a combination of drunk and high when we got some ashes all the way on the East Coast. It wasn't a whole lot but the sky was darker than normal and the sunset was rather pretty for a couple of days, as I recall. I only recall one person dieing from it. Some researcher or another. There might have been a second one, a journalist? I don't really remember. I think that was the most interesting thing for me, I'd expected more doom and gloom.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    4. Re:Big Trouble by Nethead · · Score: 1

      57 people. http://www.olywa.net/radu/vale...

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
    5. Re:Big Trouble by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I don't remember them making the news. :/ I do remember the one guy and I think there might have been a journalist who was mentioned. Interesting link - still doesn't job any memories. ;-) I was, shall we say, celebrating at the time.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    6. Re:Big Trouble by Nethead · · Score: 1

      I was moving from Yakima (Eastern Washington) to Seattle that morning and wondered why the sky was so black to the south going over the pass. Didn't know until I got unpacked and Walter Cronkite was telling me that the town I grew up in and left that morning was now covered in several inches of volcanic ash. http://media.kimatv.com/images...

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
  2. Image? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The hand drawn diagram in the article hardly constitutes imaging. IT is no much different than the cross section pictures of stratovolcanoes we've been looking at for 50 years. It would be far more interesting to see the migrated (processed) seismic image for ourselves.

    1. Re:Image? by Jhon · · Score: 4, Funny

      They couldn't show you the REAL images. You would have seen an entire abandoned Dwarven community. And that big red blob? Balrog city, of course.

      The 1980 'event' was a fantastic battle that destroyed the Elves living in the forest on the mystic Mt. St. Helens.

      The surviving Dwarves moved back to Italy to rebuild under Mt. Vesuvius.

  3. Geoscientists? by Not-a-Neg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought they were called Geologists?

    --
    -==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
    1. Re:Geoscientists? by idji · · Score: 1

      i imagine a geologist looks at rocks, a geoscientist thinks about how rocks change and their chemistry, and a geophysicist thinks about how rocks move and transfer heat.

    2. Re:Geoscientists? by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      They want to keep up with the climatologists - er, climate scientists.

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    3. Re:Geoscientists? by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      They got tired of Sheldon Cooper deriding Geology, so changed the name of their field to hide their origin?

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    4. Re:Geoscientists? by ananamouse · · Score: 1

      The change came from the Oil and Gas Sector where the geologists got tired of putting up with being paid less than engineers that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.

    5. Re:Geoscientists? by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      i imagine a geologist looks at rocks, a geoscientist thinks about how rocks change and their chemistry, and a geophysicist thinks about how rocks move and transfer heat.

      Why wouldn't you just call them a geochemist then?

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    6. Re:Geoscientists? by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      For the same reason we don't call a car mechanic who specializes in engines an engineer.

      It may be more appropriate to the word meaning in a strict sense, but less useful to the general conversation.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    7. Re:Geoscientists? by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Wasn't there a term invented for the people who are really good at one thing, but they generalize that proficiency into other areas they aren't competent in?

      I find that common in engineers. "I can design a flow valve, so obviously, I can run a computer" So the engineers at the oil company I dealt with were the IT department. And they had an IT department. The IT department spent more time cleaning up after then engineers than everything else combined. The first VM I ever saw was an engineer's machine who got a DOS VM something I don't know, and was running Win95 under it, because he could buy DOS, and modern machines still support DOS (some varieties) even to today, but the machine was too new for Win95. But the program he wanted to run was Win95 only. Rather than finding a machine that's capable of running Win 95, he hacked together win95 in VM on DOS. It ran for a while, hidden under his desk. But when he had left, someone who depended on it found it not working. So then there was an issue of fixing it, when nobody even knew what "it" was. The final fix was to update the software to a newer version that ran under modern windows. Turns out, the new versions ran fine, but the original engineer just hated a feature of the new version, so he did all that work to avoid an upgrade.

      Engineers, worse than lawyers, but still not as bad as doctors.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
  4. All this evidence points to one thing by JudgeFurious · · Score: 2

    Balrog. Gotta be a Balrog.

    --
    Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    1. Re:All this evidence points to one thing by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      Naa, it is a Fire Elemental community.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  5. Kilometers? by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

    Come on... I need this in either football fields or minutes...

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    1. Re:Kilometers? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      I noticed that too. Pleasant surprise from the fluff that's usually posted here.

  6. Dr Evil's Lair by mu51c10rd · · Score: 2

    Anyone else had a natural inclination to read about liquid hot magma in Doctor Evil's voice?

  7. Re:Wait for it.. by Coren22 · · Score: 1

    Naa, Matt Damon is either stuck on a planet covered in ice, or stuck on Mars, depending on which recent Science Fiction movie you believe.

    --
    APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  8. Oblg. video of man trapped at eruption by Spinalcold · · Score: 1

    This man was hiking, he video tapes the eruption and then has to escape it on foot. If you want to see his life and death part skip to 2 minutes where he says "I honest to god think I'm dead." Cause he can't breath. He does survive though.