Mount St. Helens: researchers sort the data

Abstract

Despite the undeniable tragedy of lives lost and property destroyed—not to mention the gritty and expensive cleanup chore facing the residents of Washington state—the eruption of Mount St. Helens represents a major opportunity for the community of geophysicists. More explosive and less predictable than the much-studied volcanoes of Hawaii, Mount St. Helens and its counterparts in the Cascade range represent a different set of geophysical and geochemical conditions. Rarely do earth scientists have a chance to study this kind of eruption. Two weeks after the May 18 eruption, the volcano appeared to be shifting from a gas-rich phase—wherein pressurized gas within the magma blows molten rock skyward as fine, glassy ash particles, much as foam escapes from a shaken-up beer bottle—to a gas-poor phase—wherein the viscous lava oozes up like toothpaste and begins to rebuild the shattered mountaintop. While the geophysicists continued to monitor the volcano for signs of new activity, however, ...