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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."

7 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.
  2. Geoscientists? by Not-a-Neg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought they were called Geologists?

    --
    -==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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?