Latest news with #MountStHelens
CBC
20-05-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Trump's manufacturing plan + Mount St. Helens will blow again
About That host Andrew Chang joins the National to break down why Donald Trump's vision to bring back U.S. manufacturing is almost impossible. And, 45 years after its deadly 1980 eruption, scientists warn Mount. St. Helens will blow again.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Photos show the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the worst volcanic disaster in US history, 45 years ago
When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, it caused enormous devastation. The eruption triggered mudslides, an explosion, and plumes of ash that did enormous damage. The death of 57 people led to large changes in how the US monitors and prepares for eruptions. On May 18, 1980, Don Swanson placed a frenzied call to his wife to let her know that he was OK. "That's nice," she said, unconcerned. She had no idea her geologist husband had spent the morning in a plane flying by an erupting volcano. At 8:32 a.m. Pacific Time that day, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake had shaken Mount St. Helens, leading to its eruption. Its conical top collapsed into a horseshoe crater, sending rivers of mud and rock down its side and an enormous blast of heat and gas to the surrounding forest. Ash clouds wafted for over 930 miles, all the way to central Montana. The devastating natural disaster killed 57 people and was the most destructive volcanic eruption in US history. It leveled trees, destroyed bridges, and caused more than $1 billion in damage. Just a few years before the eruption, The New York Times described Mount St. Helens as a "relatively little known volcano 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon." Its eruption forever changed the way volcanologists, geologists, and other scientists perform their jobs. To commemorate the anniversary of Mount St. Helens' eruption, here's a series of photos that captured the immense devastation it caused 45 years ago. Years earlier, scientists predicted Mount St. Helens would violently erupt. In 1978, the USGS issued a report stating that Mount St. Helens had the potential to violently erupt before the end of the millennium. The last known eruption had been in 1857. Over the past few centuries, its recent dormant periods lasted an average of 123 years. It was only a matter of time. By the spring of 1980, Mount St. Helens had been trembling for weeks. Thousands of small earthquakes in March and April caused cracks in the summit. On March 27, steam started pouring out, turning the snow an ashy gray. "That's when it becomes this multi-agency response because now you have to prevent people from getting too close," Liz Westby, a geologist with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, told Business Insider in 2024. "It could possibly erupt, but that wasn't a for-sure thing." Meanwhile, people climbed on their roofs to take pictures of the steaming top. "Everyone really wanted to catch that glimpse of Mount St. Helens," she said. When the earthquake hit on May 18, its northern side collapsed. That triggered a debris avalanche, forcing down enough rock, dirt, and snow to fill a million Olympic swimming pools. Some of it traveled as far as 14 miles away. Ash-filled plumes rocketed 650 feet into the sky. A super-hot mix of rock, gas, and ash caused incredible destruction. The avalanche sheared off part of the cryptodome, a magma-filled bulge that had swollen part of Mount St. Helens' north side by about 450 feet. Rapidly expanding gas then caused a devastatingly powerful blast that exploded sideways instead of up and formed what's called a pyroclastic flow. The mixture can reach blistering temperatures of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. "That is such a hot, thick, gas-rich flow that it essentially kills everything in its path," Westby said. The heat, force, and high-speed debris can all be deadly. It knocked over trees, leaving them stripped and looking like toothpicks. Moving at 300 miles per hour, the flow traveled faster than the debris avalanche, covering roughly 230 square miles, an area nearly the size of Chicago. "Then you see this plume rising up," Westby said. This one, full of ash and rock, rose as high as 80,000 feet. The eruption lasted nine hours. Melting snow and ice mixed with rocks and ash turned into mudslides. Mount St. Helen was still snowcapped in May when it erupted. The scorching heat turned ice and snow into gushing water that took rocks and soil with it. Known as lahars, these 100-mile-per-hour volcanic mudslides ripped up trees, destroyed over 200 houses, and took out bridges. Millions of tons of ash traveled hundreds of miles, closing highways and canceling flights. Westby was at Eastern Washington University, not far from the Idaho border, when the volcano erupted. What looked like an ominous line of dark clouds drifted in the sky above. "I thought, wow, that's the weirdest thunderstorm I've ever seen," she said. It turned out to be ash. Wind blew roughly 520 million tons of ash and volcanic glass to eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana. It was dark enough to obscure the sun in some cities. It settled on everything, leaving trees with a dusting of what looked like snow. "This ash, it's fine like baby powder," Westby said. Driving through it would stir it back up into the air. For days afterward, authorities closed highways and canceled flights because of the poor visibility and the ash's potential to damage plane engines, Westby said. The eruption killed 57 people, including USGS geologist David Johnston. One of the first USGS geologists at the volcano was David Johnston. He had been closely monitoring Mount St. Helens during its many earthquakes. On May 18, Johnston was only 6 miles from the volcano. As the eruption started, he radioed a final message to a nearby Washington city: "Vancouver, Vancouver. This is it." After that, Johnston's death would have come within a minute, his fellow geologist Swanson wrote. "It hit home to us as geologists, as volcanologists, how important it is to have monitoring up at the volcanoes and to install sensors before unrest so that we don't have to have people up there in harm's way," Westby said of Johnston's death. Leading up to the eruption, experts created safety zones around the volcano. Only essential workers could go to the red zone. However, the majority of the 57 people who lost their lives were outside the red zone, NPR reported. Many were killed by the lateral blast, Westby said. It ended up being more powerful than anticipated. "It still gets me a little bit, thinking about that," she said, "but that really influences how we feel about hazards today." Now, she said, hazard maps are much more accurate and take into account a range of an eruption's possible outcomes. The eruption destroyed trees and killed wildlife, but many species survived. Over a week after the eruption, researchers from the USDA Forest Service started looking at the ecological impact. Ecologists were shocked by what they saw at Johnston Ridge, about 6 miles from the summit. They had expected to find nothing. Instead, there were still carpenter ants, frogs, pocket gophers, spiders, and other signs of life. Thousands of large mammals like elk and bears didn't survive, but other species of plants and animals were buried in snow or sleeping in their dens. The blast zone where a hot flow of gas toppled trees is now known as the pumice plain, named for the porous rock that volcanoes create. Initially, nothing survived in this area. It was two years before researchers saw the first plant, a prairie lupine. The purple-flowered perennial is known to be resilient. It took four years following the eruption for new greenery to shoot up in the "ghost forests" where the volcano left broken and dying trees. A few gophers had a remarkable impact on the volcano's recovery. In 1983, scientists realized not much was growing on the lava-scorched regions of Mount St. Helens. They tried an experiment. They flew a few northern pocket gophers to the volcano and put them in enclosures for about 24 hours. They did what gophers do, digging holes. Burrowing into the soil helped aerate it and dispersed bacteria and fungi that promote plant growth. "They're often considered pests, but we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where recovery would occur," University of California, Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen said last year. Little did they know the lasting, positive impacts the gophers' tunneling would have. After six years, 40,000 plants had sprung up where they'd turned over the soil. The other areas stayed bare. In the decades since, the environment has drastically changed. A new ecosystem has slowly emerged on the volcano. In the absence of larger predators, their prey thrived. The smaller animals and dormant plants that survived the volcano's destruction are still there, and bears, cougars, elk, and mountain goats have been spotted, too, The Seattle Times reported in 2020. That doesn't mean Mount St. Helens is back to normal, ecologist Charlie Crisafulli told the Seattle Times. With the pumice plain area starting from scratch, ecologically, what's happening there now is unique. The eruption spurred changes to how the US monitors and responds to earthquakes. In addition to ecology, Mount St. Helens offers opportunities for other kinds of scientific research. Two years after the eruption, the USGS established the Cascades Volcano Observatory to better monitor the volcanic range. The Observatory, which was dedicated to David Johnston, is one of only five in the US. It's become a kind of laboratory for volcanic research and monitoring. It's also helping to train what could be the next generation of volcanologists. Every summer, Westby and the Mount St. Helens Institute run a camp for middle school girls called GeoGirls. "We treat them as though they were our field assistants, to give them an idea of what it's like to work on volcanoes," Westby said. Mount St. Helens could erupt again. Mount St. Helens continued to have smaller eruptions through 1986 and then had more between 2004 and 2008. "They are active volcanoes," Westby said of the Cascades, the volcanic arc that runs through several states and Canada. "They've erupted in the past, and we know they'll erupt in the future." Of all the Cascade volcanoes, Mount St. Helens is the most active and most likely to erupt again, Westby said. But the technology to predict eruptions has vastly improved. In 1980, Mount St. Helens only had a single seismometer, Westby said. "Now we've got 20," she said. These newer devices are more sophisticated and can detect smaller earthquakes that could signal an impending eruption. GPS data can also alert scientists if the ground is deforming. And software can help them process the data more quickly. In the 1980s, scientists were making the calculations by hand. As the sensors help geologists keep an eye on what's happening beneath the ground, Westby says people should feel free to enjoy the volcanoes. "They're safe to be around right now," she said, "but you never know what happens in the future." This story was originally published on May 18, 2024 and was updated on May 18, 2025. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Never lost her love for Grandpa Truman'
May 18—Harry Truman became a modern folk hero 45 years ago for his steadfast refusal to leave his lodge in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, even as experts warned that the volcano in southwestern Washington might erupt. Reporters covering the rumbling mountain in the spring of 1980 often turned their attention to Truman, describing the 83-year-old business owner and former bootlegger as gruff, stubborn, funny and, above all, fiercely independent. And those depictions were more or less accurate, said Dan Plute, a Clarkston Heights man who is Truman's grandson-in-law. "A lot of people used the word crusty," Plute said last week. "Hard working, hard drinking — full bore, no matter what he was doing. There was no idle with him." Plute was married to Judy (Burnett) Plute, who was Truman's granddaughter. Judy died of brain cancer at 75 in February 2024. Dan Plute, 71, said his wife was quite familiar with her grandfather's cantankerous side; she and her brother, Barry, worked at Truman's Mount St. Helens Lodge when they were teenagers in the 1960s. "My wife never lost her love for Grandpa Truman," Dan said. She was also protective of his legacy. Judy generally kept off-color stories about Truman to herself and wouldn't tell new friends about her famous relative — it was usually Dan who brought it up. Mount St. Helens started showing ominous signs of life in March 1980, with earthquakes and pyroclastic flows. That's when Truman started brushing off requests, followed by orders, to leave the area, and when the legend of the stubborn man of the mountain started to grow. Depending on the day, Truman doubted an eruption would happen, and if it did, the effects wouldn't reach his lodge, which was 7 miles from the mountain and protected by snow, the tree line and Spirit Lake. He also claimed he had a mine shaft on his property he could duck into. And he occasionally seemed at peace with going out in a blaze of glory with the mountain. "He dug himself a hole so deep he couldn't get out of it," Dan said. "He played the rugged mountain man, independent guy so hard that, even when the professionals were telling him, 'You need to get out of here now,' ... he couldn't do it. He had played that role so long, I don't think he could have backed down." Ultimately, Truman and the mountain went out together May 18, 1980. A tremendous landslide on the north side of the mountain, followed an instant later by the eruption, sent an unbelievable amount of ash, gas and debris toward Truman's place. It's thought that he and his 16 cats died instantly. Daily headlines, straight to your inboxRead it online first and stay up-to-date, delivered daily at 7 AM ------ Truman first built his lodge in the 1920s and became a well known local character. He often hosted celebrities, including Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In its heyday, the lodge had a main building with hotel rooms, freestanding cabins, a restaurant/bar and a boat house. When Judy worked there, she would clean the cabins and Barry would tend to the boathouse. Judy, whose mother was the product of Truman's first of three marriages, brought her new husband Dan to the lodge a few times in the 1970s. At that point, Truman's third wife had died and his business had become less vigorous. The first time Dan visited the lodge, Judy's young son came with them. He had a cold, and when Truman saw the boy was ill, he told the young family to leave. "I don't want any snot-nosed little kid getting me sick," Truman said, according to Dan. The next time they visited, Dan spent a full day splitting firewood with Truman. When evening came, Truman swigged his signature drink — Schenley whiskey and Coke — and he tried to goad Dan into keeping up with him, which Dan didn't care for. Dan and Judy were among the family who worried about Harry prior to the eruption, but they also realized there was no talking him down from the mountain. After years of living and working in Seattle, Dan and Judy retired and moved to the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley in 2012. Dan had spent part of his youth here and often brought Judy back for vacations in the decades before they relocated. And no matter where they lived, Dan and Judy would reminisce about Harry every time May 18 rolled around. "He enjoyed playing the role — for sure," Dan said. "We all build little personas for ourselves. And take nothing away from him, he was rugged and independent for sure. But once you start advertising it, it's hard to back away from it." Baney may be contacted at mbaney@ or (208) 848-2251. Follow him on X @MattBaney_Trib.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The day the sky darkened: Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State 45 years ago
On May 18, 1980, the United States experienced the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in its history. After more than two months of rumbling, Washington State's Mount St. Helens erupted with a force equivalent to as much as 50 megatons of TNT. The massive blast and subsequent landslides, flooding and ash cloud killed 57 people, caused more than $1 billion in damages, destroyed at least 200 homes and was heard more than 200 miles away. The resulting scorching ash cloud reached as high as 16 miles into the atmosphere, darkening the sky and causing homes and businesses as much as 300 miles away to close. A massive wave of melted snow, ice, ash and pumice raced down the sides of the mountain, reaching up to 60 miles away and crushing homes, forests, bridges and roadways in its path. Once known as the Mt. Fuji of America, the eruption came after the majestic cone-shaped volcano had lain dormant for 123 years. The eruption, observed in detail by hundreds of geologists, volcanologists and ecologists, added immensely to human knowledge about vulcanism, a silver lining to the devastation it caused. It led to better preparation in volcanic areas, significant new scientific study and awareness of volcanic systems and the creation of five USGS volcano observatories in volcanically active portions of the United States – Alaska, California, the Cascade mountains (Washington, Oregon, Idaho) and Hawaii. Here's how the eruption unfolded: Scientists observed magma building inside the volcano, creating a visible bulge on its northern side. A series of small earthquakes began on March 16, reaching several hundred by the end of the month. On March 27, the volcano experienced its first major eruption since the mid-1800s. A steam explosion blasted a 250-foot wide crater through the ice cap on the summit, covering the snow-clad southeastern portion of the mountain with dark ash. A 15-miles radius around the area was evacuated and roadblocks put in place. By April 22, more than 10,000 earthquakes had occurred on the mountain and the northern flank bulged out by 450 feet, growing six-and-a-half feet per day, as molten magma rose up inside the volcano. At 8:32 a.m., a magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook the mountain, setting off an enormous landslide on the volcano's northern flank. An estimated 3.3 billion cubic yards of material sloughed off the mountain, the largest debris avalanche in Earth's recorded history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. With the loss of all that material, the boiling, highly pressurized magma underneath was released. As NASA put it, "When the mountain collapsed, it was like uncorking a bottle of champagne: hot rocks, ash, gas, and steam exploded upward and outward to the north." Within 15 minutes, a cloud of tephra (ash, rocks and cooling magma) rose more than 15 miles into the atmosphere. The blast, avalanche and pyroclastic flows destroyed more than 230 square miles of forest. A total of 57 people died, most from asphyxiation after inhaling hot ash. They included locals who refused to leave despite warnings as well as residents, volcanologists and journalists who thought they were observing from a safe distance. Avalanches of hot ash, pumice and gas as well as volcanic mudflows from all the melted snow and ice spread for miles, destroying 27 bridges, more than 200 homes, 185 miles of roads and 15 miles of railway. River valleys were smothered and the path of the Toutle River was altered. To this day it remains full of sediment. The area was so completely devastated that when viewing it, then-President Jimmy Carter said, "Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the moon looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there." Communities hundreds of miles away were covered in ash from the eruption. The corrosive ash, composed of rock, mineral crystals and volcanic glass, snarled air travel, closed airports, shuttered schools and businesses and damaged machinery and automobiles. People wore bandanas over their mouths when outside to avoid breathing it in. When they tried to wash it off their cars, it scraped the paint. Within two weeks, the thinning ash cloud had circled the globe. A new lava dome, recorded by USGS and NASA, began to rise in the middle of the crater formed by the 1980 eruption. Earthquake activity renewed in September. Swarms of small earthquakes shook the mountain and small steam and ash explosions were observed in 2005. By 2008 millions of cubic yards of lava had erupted onto the crater floor, refilling about 7% of the crater. By the end of 2008 the mountain had once again calmed down. The aftermath of the 1980 eruption continued. Warm weather and melting snow led to a landslide of volcanic debris that washed out the Spirit Lake Outlet Bridge and damaged portions of State Road 504 in Washington, blocking access to the Johnson Ridge Observatory, which remains closed. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mount St. Helens erupted 45 years ago: Here's what happened
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Canadians recall blast, fine ash from 1980 volcanic eruption at Mount St. Helens
Sandy Santori remembers the dark cloud that covered Trail, B.C., beginning May 18, 1980. It filled the sky with a colourless gloom, as fine ash fell to the ground. "It was just no sunshine. It was just gloomy, grey, black. It was scary," he said. Santori was 26 years old, and first learned of the situation when his mother called him out of the house. There was a scene on the street. His neighbours, mostly Italian Canadians, were hurriedly covering their freshly planted gardens, unsure where the fine, dusty ash was coming from. "Everybody at that time thought there was a malfunction at Teck Cominco and that they were emitting something out of the [smelter] stacks that we'd never seen before," said Santori, who would later go on to be mayor of Trail, an MLA and B.C. cabinet minister. Before long, word spread through the community that the ash was coming from Mount St. Helens, a volcano that had erupted with tremendous force that morning, more than 450 kilometres away in Washington state. The May 18 eruption is considered the worst volcanic disaster in U.S. history. It killed nearly 60 people and altered landscapes in Washington state. In Canada, the effects weren't as lethal, but they were still felt across southern B.C. Blast wave strikes Vancouver It began on B.C.'s South Coast, as the blast wave from the eruption bounced off the upper atmosphere and returned to earth in Metro Vancouver and southern Vancouver Island. A CBC News story that aired a year after the eruption described the blast as being "slightly smaller than the strength needed to knock out every single window" in Vancouver and Victoria. Ian Thomson was a 27-year-old geologist at the time. He was at his parents' home in West Vancouver when he heard the blast. He had been closely following the Mount St. Helens story, as the volcano had been increasingly active in the months leading up to the eruption. But the sound still came as a mystery. "All of a sudden I heard a huge bang," he said. "Something must have exploded." Thomson thought maybe trains had collided in a nearby rail yard, or that his sister might have driven a car into the side of the house. Within five minutes, he said, there was a radio news bulletin explaining that the volcano had erupted. "My second thought was, 'Gee, I bet you this is not good,'" he said, thinking of the tragedy that was unfolding in Washington. Falling ash After the blast wave came the ash. The fine particles took hours, and even days in some places, to make its way from the volcano to communities in southern B.C. where it blanketed the landscape. Santori's community of Trail was close to the concentrated plume of volcanic ash and smoke, which mostly drifted northeast from Mount St. Helens over places like Creston, Fernie and even Lethbridge, Alta. Further north, in Kamloops, B.C., Paula Kelley, a then 22-year-old bookkeeper at the local newspaper, witnessed the ash arrive. It had been a sunny day with clouds, before it began to appear. "I was downtown in the city, so you could just see it falling everywhere and you would see it on all the cars. Everyone was having to clean their windshields and everything and it's just, like — we were all thinking, 'like, this is so far away,'" said Kelley. "It was really odd." She described it as sort of dystopian, though nobody appeared to be wearing masks or anything to protect themselves from the volcanic ash. Within a week, the city, which is more than 500 kilometres from the volcano, had gone back to normal, with little trace of the ash, Kelley said. Researching the ash Britta Jensen, a geologist and associate professor at the University of Alberta, is part of a team that has been researching the way Mount St. Helens ash spread in Canada. She said before her team began its work in 2019, little was known about the subject — dispersion maps stopped at the Canada-U.S. border. "Most places in B.C. — even high [ash] accumulation rates — it probably wouldn't have actually been much more than a thickness of a credit card, maybe two, so maybe two millimetres, one millimetre or so," said Jensen. Santori remembers having to hose off the car and driveway, washing the ash into storm drains. He says it wasn't like wildfire ash — but much finer, like a dust that turned to mud when it got wet. Jensen's team surveyed about 400 people who remembered the ash, even hearing from people as far away as Edmonton and Yellowknife with evidence of a fine dusting. "A lot of people mentioned how it just darkened things. Like everything was so much darker and I can imagine how apocalyptic it would feel if you were sitting there and it was a beautiful sunny day and having this massive cloud come in and block the sun," she said. Jensen, who has examined Mount St. Helens ash deposits across Western Canada, says the 1980 eruption was on the smaller side compared to what took place during the prior 4,000 years. "Mount St. Helens has this incredible history of erupting and erupting a lot," she said. "She builds herself up and then she blows her top. We look at the record from her and I could see another eruption happening in our lifetime, but maybe it's going to be 200 years from now, we don't know."
