Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Mount St. Helens

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

On May 18, 1980, one of the most violent and cataclysmic natural disasters of the modern era took place.  Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano located approximately 100 miles or 160 kilometers south of Seattle, exploded.  The effects of the explosion could be noticed over 1,000 miles away, and it forever changed the landscape of southern Washington State. Learn more about Mount Saint Helens, the explosion, and its future, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp is an online platform that provides therapy and counseling services to individuals in need of mental health support. The platform offers a range of communication methods, including chat, phone, and video sessions with licensed and accredited therapists who specialize in different areas, such as depression, anxiety, relationships, and more. Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/Everywhere ButcherBox is the perfect solution for anyone looking to eat high-quality, sustainably sourced meat without the hassle of going to the grocery store. With ButcherBox, you can enjoy a variety of grass-fed beef, heritage pork, free-range chicken, and wild-caught seafood delivered straight to your door every month. Visit ButcherBox.com/Daily to get 10% off and free chicken thighs for a year. InsideTracker provides a personal health analysis and data-driven wellness guide to help you add years to your life—and life to your years. Choose a plan that best fits your needs to get your comprehensive biomarker analysis, customized Action Plan, and customer-exclusive healthspan resources. For a limited time, Everything Everywhere Daily listeners can get 20% off InsideTracker’s new Ultimate Plan. Visit InsideTracker.com/eed. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On May 18, 1980, one of the most violent and cataclysmic natural disasters of the modern era took place. Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano located approximately 100 miles or 160 kilometers south of Seattle, exploded. The effects of the explosion could be noticed over a thousand miles away, and it forever changed the landscape of southern Washington state. Learn more about Mount St. Helens, the explosion and its future on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment. about rest, and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Mount St. Helens is a stratovolcano

located in the Cascade Mountains in southern Washington State. Prior to its eruption, it was the fifth highest peak in Washington State, with the height of 9,678 feet, or 2,000, 9,950 meters. Mount St. Helens is part of the Ring of Fire, which is a collection of volcanoes that rings the Pacific Ocean. Mount St. Helens is one of several volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains that all share a similar origin, including Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and Mount Hood. These volcanoes are created by the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate in the Pacific Ocean, subducting underneath the North American tectonic plate. Prior to its eruption, it looked like a classic stratovolcano. It was highly symmetric and had a top that was often covered in snow and ice. And because of how it looked,

it was often called the Mount Fuji of America. The mountain had several names given to it by the native people of the region. The Yakima people called the mountain Luwala Klo, which means the smoking mountain. The Jahalish people called it Nashank, which means water coming out, and the upper Chinook called it Akha-ank, which means the snow mountain. The name Mount St. Helens was given to the peak by the British naval officer George Vancouver. On May 19th, 1792, while surveying the coast of the Pacific Northwest on the HMS discovery, he spied the mountain. He named it after Elaine Fitzherbert, first Baron of St. Helens.

Elaine Fitzherbert was a British ambassador to Russia, chief secretary for Ireland, and later ambassador to Spain. The title Baron St. Helens was created for him in 1791 as a title under the system of Irish peerage. St. Helens is a village in County Wexford. In 1801, Fitzherbert was named Baron St. Helens in the British peerage system, and this time St. Helens was named after the village on the Isle of Wight. The title Baron St. Helens disappeared after his death, but was re-established in 1964 as a hereditary barony, this time named after St. Helens Merseyside, a town not far from Liverpool.

As far as geologists can tell, there was some sort of eruption on the mountain around the year 1800, although it wasn't recorded. The Lewis and Clark expedition spotted the mountain in 1806, but reported no volcanic activity. The first documented volcanic activity occurred in 1835. An eruption in 1842 was dubbed the Great Eruption, although it paled in comparison to what happened in 1980. There was subsequent activity in 1845, 1854, and 1857. And after that, Mount St. Helens became relatively quiet. The story of Mount St. Helens can probably be best described by Vladimir Lenin's account of the Russian

Revolution, when he said, there are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen. Mount St. Helens became alive again on March 15, 1980, only two months before its eruption. Several earthquakes were recorded on the volcano, indicating to volcanologists that magma below the mountain was starting to move. There were thousands of these small earthquakes, in addition to steam vents that appeared on the side of the mountain. At this point, it was difficult to determine exactly what was going to happen. However, it was only a matter of days before geologists realized something big was going on. On March 20th, a bulge in the mountain started to appear. On March 27th, steam venting caused a new crater to form at the top, along with a 7,000-foot-high column of ash. On April 1st, geologists detected

harmonic tremors, which are usually associated with the movement of underground magma. This was alarming and caused the governor of Washington to declare a state of emergency in the area. Throughout April, the mountain showed visible changes almost every day, the biggest of which was the size of the bulge on the north face of the mountain. The bulge was growing 5 to 6 feet or 1.5 to 1.8 meters a day. It grew to a maximum size of 400 feet or 120 meters by mid-May. Geologists became concerned that the bulge, known as a crypto dome, could collapse, causing a massive mass. of avalanche, and such an avalanche would then cause a massive eruption. The area was evacuated, but there were a few people who stubbornly remained, the most famous of which was the 83-year-old

owner of the nearby Spirit Lake Lodge, Harry R. Truman, not to be confused with the former president of the United States, Harry S. Truman. Spirit Lake was located right on the slope of the mountain. Truman became a minor celebrity in the weeks leading up to the eruption. He famously said, quote, if the mountain goes, I'm going with it. This area is heavily timbered, Spirit Lake is in between me and the mountain is a mile away. The mountain ain't going to hurt me. Truman honestly didn't think that the mountain was going to erupt, and if it did, he didn't have any sense of how big an eruption would be. On May 16th, much of the visible activity on the mountain actually ceased. This activity resulted in reduced media attention, but it was really nothing more than a

calm before the storm. The geologist's worst-case scenario occurred at 8.32 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, May 18th, an earthquake with a magnitude 5.1 on the Richter scale took place. The earthquake resulted in the large, unstable bulge on the north face of the mountain to collapse in a massive avalanche. The avalanche was the largest avalanche in recorded human history. The sudden collapse of the north face of the mountain resulted in the sudden release of all the pent-up, high pressure steam and gas. Everything burst out of the mountain laterally. The top 1,300 feet or 400 meters of the mountain disappeared in the explosion.

This resulted in a massive pyroclastic flow off the north side of the mountain. If you remember back to my episode on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, a pyroclastic flow is a rapidly moving cloud of superheated gas and volcanic ash. It's so hot that it will instantly kill anything at touch. and so fast that there's no way to avoid it. Everything in a 230-square-mile or 600-square-kilometer area was destroyed by the pyroclastic flow, which moved at speeds over 300 miles per hour or 480 kilometers per hour.

In fact, when it was first ejected, the speeds might have been greater than Mach 1. The sound of the explosion was so great that it was reported to have been heard as far away as British Columbia, Montana, and Northern California. However, there was an odd phenomenon where the explosion wasn't heard in some places. No one in Portland, Oregon, for example, heard the explosion. This was known as the Quiet Zone. The Quiet Zone is believed to have been created by temperature differences in the atmosphere and local topography. While the pyroclastic flows devastated the area immediately surrounding the volcano,

what most people remember from that day is the giant ash column that rose into the sky. Winds carried the ash column in an east-northeasterly. direction. The eruption took place at 8.32 a.m. and by 9.45 a.m., the ash cloud had already reached Yakima, Washington, 90 miles or 140 kilometers away. There, it dropped five inches of ash on the community. The ash fell on Yellowstone National Park, and there were reports of at least some ash falling as far away as Minnesota and Oklahoma. The ash disrupted air travel over much of the country and closed roads in Washington State. Many vehicles had fine particles of ash which clogged their air intake systems. It also caused blackouts in some places when ash caused transformers

to short circuit. Ash removal wasn't like snow removal. Ash doesn't melt. It took as much as 10 weeks for parts of Washington to clear the ash from all the roads. Designated ash disposal sites had to be set up, which often consisted of old quarries or landfills. Many locales just piled it up and then covered it with topsoil so it wouldn't blow away again. In the end, an estimated 57 people were killed in the eruption, including Harry Truman. Truman was believed to have been killed instantly from heat shock when the pyroclastic flows hit Spirit Lake. His remains and his lodge are buried under 150 feet or 46 meters of debris. Many of the dead were geologists and photographers who were observing the mountain when the explosion took place. And there's doubt as to the death toll as several

people went missing, and it can't be proven that they died in the eruption. The total cost of the damage from the eruption was over $1,980. The May 18th eruption wasn't the end of activity on the mountain. On May 25th, there was another ash column that sent ash into Oregon, and there were further ash plumes on June 12th, July 22nd, and August 7th. Activity on the mountain has continued for years, but it's mostly been in the form of building a lava dome on the mountain. Volcanic activity continued until January 2008. In 1982, the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument was established, and today you can visit the mountain and learn the full story of the eruption at the visitor center.

It's taken decades, but wildlife around the mountain has started to come back. You can actually climb Mount St. Helens today, and unlike other mountains in the Cascades, it's more of a hike than a technical climb. In the big picture of world history and geology, the eruption of Mount St. Helens was not even close to being one of the biggest volcanic eruptions. What made it noteworthy was that it happened in a part of the world that was relatively well populated, and it occurred during an era where the event could be recorded with photos and video. As such, it captured the attention of the public and was something that many people still remember. On the volcanic explosivity index, which ranks volcanic explosions on a scale from zero to eight, the explosion of Mount St. Helens only ranks a five,

on a par with the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79, and the 2022 eruption of the Hungatonga-Tonga-Hunga-haha volcano in Tonga. The Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 was almost an order of magnitude larger, and the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 was two orders of magnitude larger. So could Mount St. Helens erupt again? The answer is yes, and in fact at some point it almost certainly will. Given how the current lava dome on the mountain has developed, the current thinking amongst geologists is that the next eruption will be even more powerful.

Basically, the cork on the bottle has been put on even tighter, which will require even more pressure to open it up. Small earthquakes have been reported on the mountain in just the last few years. Another Mount St. Helens eruption isn't even the most worrying thing that could happen in the Cascades. That distinction belongs to Mount Rainier, the volcano which overlooks the city of Seattle. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens wasn't the first such eruption, it wasn't the largest, and it won't be the last. However, for those who experienced it and remember it, it was a landmark moment and something that they will never forget. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

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