Old Mother Nature has pulled another fast one on the insignificant blip called mankind. With all of the monitoring of Mt St Helens and all of the money spent on updated equipment, and the amount of studying that these scientists have had to do, they still are playing guessing games.
Last weekend, they stated that the Mountain would NOT erupt to the extent it did in 1980. Then the earthquakes increased and became harmonic tremor, which is magma moving up the throat of the mountain. They then raised the alert level to a 3 which means eruption eminent, and they evacuated the area within 8 miles.
On Tuesday night, the mountain burped, and the earthquakes stopped. Almost entirely. So on Wednesday the dropped the alert back to a 2, and said that the Lava Dome in the crater had risen 100 feet above what it had been. The 500 foot deep glacier that had been forming there, was melting fast. A lahar warning was issued, and in the middle of the night one hit
A Lahar is a mixture of hot water, and mud, that comes from the crater or the sides of it, and flows down hill very rapidly. In 1980 it was the violent landslide/lahar that caused the most damage, and killed the most people.
The Army corps of Engineers created and built a Dam on the Toutle River, that supposedly would hold back any mud/lahar that would come down the mountain.
Today, the scientists are saying that all bets are off now. As the earthquakes have started again, and the Harmonic Tremors have been identified, and now they are saying that the eruption that will come from the mountain could very likely be as big as the 1980 eruption. The landslide would not be, but the ash cloud would be.
they just don't know any more. It erupted again this afternoon, but it was just ash and steam.
As soon as the molten Magma hits the air, it becomes lava, and starts the earth building process that it has done for 10's of thousands of years. It will not be the explosive aa lava that the Hawaiian volcanoes emit, but it will be the viscous pahoehoe lava, thick and slow, that will cool on the outside and hopefully continue to build the peak of the mountain back to the lovely perfectly formed cone that it was until May 1980.
UPDATE: as I am typing this, the news just said that the "Loaf" next to the Lava dome is what has grown, not the dome itself, and that the magma is pushing the ground up, so therefore they are expecting a big BOOM and straight up blast, as high and as ashy as the 1980, but not as destructive because it will go up instead of out.
So fascinating! And so humbling! I have said it before, but when you are standing next to the forces of nature like that and know that it will be gone someday and will rebuild even better, I feel so very very insignificant. How dare I think that I am someone who can make a difference in the GRAND scheme of things. In my everyday life, yes, but in the timeline of human kind? Blip....Blip....Blip
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