Stuff You Should Know - Selects: When Mount St. Helens Blew Its Top

Episode Date: January 25, 2025

Mount St. Helen's is a lovely sight to behold, but was a pretty scary thing to be around in the Spring of 1980. Listen in to the harrowing story in this classic episode!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our January 2023 episode on the Mount St. Helens eruption. Seems like just last year. It's a really good episode that's packed with science, action, adventure, heroics, life and death, danger. It's got it all. It's one of my favorite episodes, so I hope you enjoy it as well. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. A production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry today is our great friend and

Co-producer Dave C. And the C stands for cool. Say hello Dave. Hi everybody. That's a really great Dave impression. He's a troll. Yes. I always hear him as, Dave is great. I wish you all knew him, but we do, and so he's ours. You're going to have to take our word for it. That's right. Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to all the people who don't know much about Mount St. Helens, prepare to have your socks knocked off.

Or your lid blown. Or your skin seared off of your muscle. Yeah, this is a good one. This is, I mean, this is so bread and butter stuff you should know. It is. I don't know why it took us almost 16 years to get to it. And none of that margarine stuff or low fat, it's like full milk fat butter, bread and butter stuff you should know. Salted butter even.

You like salted, huh? Depends on what you're using it for. I like just plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece of bread with butter. Mainly with baking and cooking, that's when it matters. Yeah, I got you. What's your brand? Oh, boy, it depends. I mean, I love to get the, I hate to be that guy, but I do love to get the local butter when we go to our farmers market and get it from our CSA. What's wrong with that? Well, I don't know. Can't just say parquet, can you? Right, you must be a social justice warrior.

You buy local butter. I do like that, what's the stuff, the Irish butter in the grocery store? That's my brand. Kerrygold. Kerrygold, that's good too. Like I've researched it, like I've literally researched butter, because I wanted to get the most bang for my buck,

and it is at the top of basically every list. It's good. Of like any butter of any kind. It's really, really good butter. Yeah, I totally agree. I love Kerrygold. I take that stuff camping. Yeah, I carry it around in my pocket.

Well, I like that you can get a tub. It's a smaller tub, but I do like a spreadable tub as opposed to a stick. I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because we have a cute little butter dish that we use so we have we use the sticks So anyway back to Mount st. Helens the episode today I was four years old when this happened so I mean I didn't know what was going on But I imagine you were like holy cow. This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on my TV Yeah, I was nine and I remember it being a big deal, but it's funny when I was researching

this and then watching, there's a really, really great thing on YouTube that I recommend that A&E put out years ago, it had to be, it was called Minute by Minute, colon, the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Really gripping stuff as A&E used to do. You know, they probably still do that kind of stuff. But all of the media around it, I was thinking like, man, and I don't know if it was more regional or if it truly was nationwide, but I remember the eruption, but I didn't remember like the six weeks leading up to it, which was a very big deal. Yeah.

Although I think it was more of like a, yeah, a regional thing for the lead up. And then also if you were a geologist, a volcanologist, a seismologist, anything that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then it would have been a big deal to you too. And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And because there was so much warning, and it was able to, by it, I mean, Mount St. Helens was able to kind of draw to it like a magnet. All of these amazingly well-trained researchers, they were there when it went off. And it's probably the most best documented volcano in history because of that. Yeah. I mean, because like you said, Mount St. Helens is basically saying, it's coming,

everyone. Would you like to document this? Yeah. I'm telling you, again, it's coming. Yeah. And I'll show you in lots of different scary ways that it's coming. And people left, people stayed, people came there. People laughed, people cried.

I mean, that's seismologists. Like tourists came to see this thing. For sure. So, let's get into it. Okay. So, just a real quick refresher. We've done volcanoes, and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that sounds like us. Yeah, 2010 was volcanoes, 2017 was super volcanoes. Okay.

So, we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in those episodes So if you want to know a lot more in depth go check those out But just as a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that Mount st. Helens is it's a strato volcano And it's created when one younger plate is Subducted under an older plate and as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of the earth, all the rocket carries with it gets heated up. Same with water, too. And that stuff travels upward

because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle down below. And as it gets closer and closer to the crust, it wants to pop out of there, but it can't necessarily. Sometimes it can, and when it can, it just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that builds the volcano in kind of a cone shape, which is what Mount St. Helens was up until May 18, 1980. Yeah. It's a part of the Cascade Arc arranged there in the Pacific Northwest, and all of

this happened, geologically speaking, pretty quickly. It happened over the course of about 40,000 years in the case of Mount St. Helens, which is pretty speedy. And Ed helped us out with this. We did a great job on this article. And Ed points out that in the Pacific Northwest, that's why you see so many sort of coney mountains like that, is because of this cascade arc and how these mountains were formed, you know, not too long ago.

Right. Yeah, 40,000 years ago, maybe less. 40,000 for St. Helens and I think the whole arc is less than 100. Right. So, the whole thing that's driving Mount St. Helens and apparently also there's some other, I guess, volcanic mountains in the area, like Adams, I think Mount Adams is one as well. Yeah.

There's a magma chamber somewhere under there, I think possibly miles and miles below the surface. But under normal circumstances, like I said, when a stratovolcano is formed, the lava just kind of is able to find cracks in the crust and like it's released through there and it builds the mountain up slowly and slowly. But if there's not a crack in the crust, as in the case where Mount St. Helens is, that magma starts to back up. It hits the crust and it starts to back up below. And all of a sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens.

Yeah, this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is, well, is and was quite large. And like you said, it's looking for a place to go, but if it doesn't have a place to go, what will happen? And as you'll see, this is what happened in the case of Mount St. Helens, is it starts bulging. And like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting to see this happen, even though it's very scary and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountain start to bulge out in a direction,

and we're talking, you know, hundreds of feet of bulge over the course of a pretty short period of time, then it's pretty like, it's a pretty notable thing and that's exactly what was happening in the case of the magma chamber there in Washington. Yeah, like this pressure is building up so much, it's causing a boil on the mountain. The mountain grows a goiter basically and that's just full of pressure and magma just waiting to go off. It doesn't always go off.

And in fact, Mount St. Helens had two bulges, also called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome, from previous volcanic eruptions. One was called Goat Rocks Bulge, and then the other one was called the Sugar Bowl Bulge. And they just never, like the magma found its way out other ways, but the bulge was left. This is a new bulge and like you said it was growing I think about six feet a day.

Every day it kept growing another six feet which is really fast for a mountain to grow. And that was one of the big signs initially that that something was going on. And one more thing before we start to get into Mount St. Helens itself, Chuck, I think we need to say like, Mount St. Helens was big. It was a big eruption, but it was not the biggest eruption Mount St. Helens has ever had.

Apparently the biggest eruption it's ever had came just about 4,000 years ago, which is within traditional like folktale memory. Yeah, I mean, it had been an active volcano for 40,000 years, within traditional like folktale memory. Yeah, I mean, it had been an active volcano for 40,000 years, but the big one before 1980 was, yeah, like you said, I was trying to look at a specific year, but let's just say 4,000 years ago. Because once you get back that far, you know.

Who cares? Who cares? But it became, like you said, part of folklore, the indigenous people there, especially the Puyallup people, called the mountain Lewitt, L-O-O-W-I-T. And there was a Lewitt Brewing Company. So I wanted to shout them out. This is one of those things where I thought, I wonder why, because there's been such a

push to change names of things over the past decade or so. This is one that seems so like, sort of egregious that we should call it Luit and not Mount St. Helens. I'm pretty curious. I'm sure there's been pushes over the years to get it changed, but the Europeans, of course, named it Mount St. Helens in 1792 after Captain George Vancouver, if that name rings a bell, it should, gave the name of it because of a diplomat named Alan Fitzherbert. Didn't call it Fitzherbert Peak or anything like that because his noble title was Baron St. Helens.

Thank God. But here's the rub is that Alan Fitzherbert never even saw Baron St. Helens. Thank God. But here's the rub is that Ellen Fitzherbert never even saw Mount St. Helens, the mountain named after him. So like, I don't know, maybe let's call this one Lewitt. Yeah, I think that's a great idea actually. And the reason they call it Lewitt, she was named after a famous volcanic fire tender woman.

She was named after a famous volcanic fire tender woman. And Lewitt and a couple of other men who fell in love with her and fought for her. Lewitt became Mount St. Helens, or Lewitt if you want to call it that. And then the other men who were fighting for her became Mount Hood and Mount Adams. They were smited by the creator God and turned into mountains for fighting. And there's legends not just from the Puyallup, but other indigenous tribes around the area that something really big happened and it looks like what it is is a geo myth,

which we've talked about before. And I think the great floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation that describes this enormous eruption 4,000 years ago. Pretty good stuff. Yeah, for sure. And it was a big eruption too.

There's just one other thing. There's a layer of tephra, of basically volcanic ash and debris and stuff, that is so thick and so wide it goes up into British Columbia. And 62 miles away from Mount St. Helen, it's still 20 inches thick, almost two feet thick of ash, 62 miles away. That's how big that 4,000 year ago eruption was. That's huge. And all this to say that Mount St. Helen's, which has an S by the way, did you know that?

Yeah, I did. You keep saying Helen, I just wondered. I'm being short because I don't want to take up too much time talking about certain things. That's good. That reminds me of the guy in college who fell on the sidewalk and his books splayed out and then he acted like he was reading. Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.

All this to say is that Mount St. Helens had a long history of activity. So it's not like anyone ever thought, well, that thing is done and it's never going to happen again. No, definitely not. Because also in the 19th century, there was a lot of eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist named Paul Kane, who painted an 1847 eruption. So, I mean, starting in the 19th century, Mount St. Helens was documented pretty clearly, scientifically too, as being an eruptive volcano, a disruptive volcano, you could almost say.

All right. Shall we take a break? Yeah, that's a nice prelude. I think so too. All right. We'll be back right after this. Can you hear it? It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this.

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radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers. Okay, so we got a nice background on Mount St. Helens. It had been very active for about, or on and off active for 40,000 years, including, I believe the last sort of big one was in 1857. Not too long after that, in 1908, about a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest, which was

hence renamed Gifford Pinchot or Pinchot, I never know how to say that. The Bronson Pinchot National Forest. National Forest, and that was in 1949, and Mount St. Helens is inside that National Forest. All this is sort of a long way of saying it wasn't like super populated, it didn't have – wasn't surrounded by neighborhoods and suburbs and stuff like that. But there was something, or is still something called Spirit Lake there near the base of the mountain, which is they have like youth camps there. People had cabins here and there.

There were recreational activities that all over the place. So it's not like no one was there, but it wasn't heavily populated. Right. Well put. So the whole thing starts, actually even before the whole thing started, and I saw in 1975 that two volcanologists published a paper saying that it was very likely Mount St. Helens was going to erupt in the 20th century at some point, like a big one. Yeah.

And five years later, on March 20th, 1980, the whole thing was kicked off by a 4.0 earthquake, which is nothing to sneeze at. And it was at the mountain, like this earthquake took place at the mountain. And all of a sudden, within five days, there were quake storms. There was 24 quakes of 4.0 or greater within eight hours. When a volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when the geologists come running from far and wide. Yeah. So, they, you know, the word gets out and they did come running from far and wide

and they, you know, set up camp there at various places. Other just sort of, as I learned from watching this A&E special that there are like volcano chasers even that they hear about this stuff, they're fascinated by it. I guess just sort of amateur geo-enthusiasts. And people started kind of coming in there because they got wind that something may be brewing at Mount St. Helens, including, and this is, you know, there are all kinds of people we could feature story-wise, but one gentleman we are going to feature, his name was David Johnston, and he was a volcanologist at the USGS, the United States Geographical Survey, and he was one of the, there were some great interviews with him in this A&E special. He

was, he's a very young guy, super excited to be there, and he was one of the, there were some great interviews with him in this A&E special. He was a very young guy, super excited to be there, and he was one of the ones kind of sounding the alarm along with his partner and this guy named Don Swanson about, hey, like, you know, the S is getting real here, everybody. And it looks like people need to start leaving. Yeah, like the thing is, is there were the people who did live on the mountain were not the kind of folk who listened to like, you know, the government, pencil neck college boys, or the government to be told like, leave your home. And then also there was those youth groups that were like, you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake. There was also Weyerhaeuser. They're hoping to get the first base. Exactly. It's like a roller rink over there. And then there was

Weyerhaeuser who had a contract to be able to log on the on the mountain. They definitely didn't want to have to shut down operations. So there's a lot of pressure, a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you would think, to keep the mountain open. And David Johnston and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like, you really can't do this. And they managed to convince the governor of Washington that it was the right move. And then later on, as we'll see, there was even more pressure to reopen, because things

didn't go as fast as everyone thought. And they managed to push that back as well. And as a result, David Johnston is frequently credited for saving thousands of lives potentially, which is pretty cool. I mean, and everything I've seen about him, he was a genuinely great person and also like a really great pioneer in volcanology too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they did eventually set up what they called a red zone.

And a lot of people did evacuate. There were some notable people who didn't. Certainly, we need to mention Harry Truman, obviously not the president, but he was this old codger who ran the lodge there and he became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his nose and stayed and said, you know, I'm a part of this place, it's a part of me. If the mountain goes, I'm going to go with it. Art Carney played him in the movie version. He got a lot of media attention along with

this 16 cats, which is the only part of the story. Like, hey man, I'm all for people evacuating and keep people safe, but I'm also like, some old mountain man wants to stay up there and go down with the volcano. Like, that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't say like, I'm gonna go down and kill these 16 cats at the same time. Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like, you know,

medieval times and having your live horse buried with you. Yeah, I just, I don't know, man. Once I heard about the cats, because I was all into this guy. Right. And then I heard about the cats, I was like, oh dude, you should have at least set the cats away. Yeah, no way.

Not a lodge codger. No. So, Harry Truman will come back in. This is Harry R. Truman, by the way. Everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him. He'll come back in later. So the last thing that happened on the mountain, March 25th, in eight hours, there's 24 4.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes, and that brought everybody running.

This whole thing was so perfectly planned that on the day of the eruption, there was the mineral and gem show in Yakima, like I think less than a hundred miles away from Mount St. Helens. So anybody who had anything to do with geology just happened to be in the area or was purposefully in the area or was purposefully in the area. And then on March 27th, it's just getting more and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right? Yeah.

So, this was, I mean, compared to what eventually ended up happening, you could call this sort of mini eruption, even though it sent, it made a big boom. Apparently, it was a pretty cloudy day, so it wasn't super visible, but the ash column went up 6,500 feet into the air. That's nothing to sneeze at. And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew to about 1,600 feet wide. So it was a major thing. There was another one on the 28th, again throwing ash into the air. And this is like basically from that point through the big one in mid-May, it was just

constant warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches, craters growing, and like the mountain is saying like, it's going to happen people, this is not a false alarm. Until things calm down, and that's what you were talking about earlier, like things kind of settle down on, what was that like? May, around the 15th. Yeah, around the 15th of May to where the people got antsy that were evacuated and said, hey, listen, we want to go back and check on our stuff. And the governor eventually

was like, all right, I think it, you I think at the time, and I think Washington still is a little bit of one of those like not quite live free or die, but you know, like, all right, listen, these people pay taxes, they want to go back to their homes, sign a waiver that you're not going to sue us, and let them go back there. And that's what they did. There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three-piece suit, handing people a pen and being like, sign here. It's really hilarious. But they did. Some people started to trickle in. And that's actually why there were, you know, I think we ended up with 57 casualties, 57 people died. And that was one reason why it was actually that high. Could have been less,

but people were allowed to trickle back in. They still kept like a perimeter, but I think it was kind of porous. If you wanted to get through, you could get through. And there are stories in that minute by minute episode of people, there's this one backpacker who is probably hilarious at parties because he makes like a funny voice for the police when the police is talking, when he's recreating a conversation he had.

Yeah, it was funny. He's stuck through with friends. There are a lot of people on the mountain that otherwise might not have been had they kept it closed. But they did open it up a little bit. And it was because nothing had happened for a little while. And then about three days later, everything happened. You said S was getting real. This is when the S hit the fan. Yeah. Well, I mean, just prior to this, I guess, let's back up one half second and let you know about what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had moved

happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had moved from their initial base at Coldwater 1, which is about, I think, eight or nine miles away, to their second station, which was called Coldwater 2, which is about five to six miles from the mountain. And notably, it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to be the wrong spot to be. But you know, these guys knew what was going on. They know it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping, taking shifts. And Don Swanson got the call from Johnston and he said,

hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow. If you come and relieve me the next day. And then on May 18th, 1980 is when Johnston was there when everything went boom. Yeah, and I think there have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around Cold Water too. And Johnston sent them away. He's like, this is outside the red zone.

It's still potentially dangerous. There's no reason for more than just one of us to be here at a time. So you guys go. So at 8.32 a.m. on May 18th, 1980, Mount St. Helens like blew up. And there's like a typical idea that people have of a volcano going off and most of the time it's shooting like a huge thing of ash and magma straight into the air from its top. But that is not what happened with Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens was a very specific and unusual type of eruption

because it didn't go out of the top. It came out of the side. And it came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption. Yeah, so, you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is building up a lot under the surface. There's a lot of moisture down there. Some of it was, like you mentioned from that initial plate subduction,

that's called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular old groundwater from rain and snow and everything because it is the mountains. That's called meteoric water. And all of that stuff is just heating up. It's got pressure from below because it's heating. It's got pressure from above

because all of that weight of the rock, it's heating, it's got pressure from above because all of that weight of the rock is just pushing it down. And all of this magma is just boiling under there. I know we talked about this before, I guess it was in one of the volcano episodes, but it's not allowed to turn to steam because there's no room for it. Steam is expansive and it can't expand. So it's just this superheated, beyond the boiling point level of liquid that's just distributed all throughout the upper half and notably sort of the north side of this mountain.

Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by about six feet a day. That was what the bulge was. It's so scary. It is, because like it's as violent as you can imagine that a bulge, something that could make a bulge on the side of the mountain would be. And so under other circumstances, a plinium eruption where a volcano explodes out of the top like you typically think of, that pressure, that magma is going to basically force the

top of the mountain open, and that that magma is going to basically force the top of the mountain open, and that's how it's going to explode. This is not what happened with Mount St. Helens. That kind of, I guess the hump was on one side, it was on the north flank, wasn't it? Yeah. So it was on the north flank, and the thing that kicked off Mount St. Helens eruption wasn't the volcano, it was actually an earthquake in the volcano. And that earthquake caused the largest landslide in recorded history on earth.

More than half of a square mile of Mount St. Helens suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped off the north side of the mountain. Yeah, and it's like, you should really go check out the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen. Just to see this mountain and then especially in the A&E thing to see people interviewed describing, seeing this with their eyeballs, it was just like, it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like, a mountain that large and part of it just going away immediately.

Yeah, and one of the reasons they were able to witness it, and we have such great documentation, because at 8.32 a.m., a pair of geologists, husband and wife geologists, happened to be flying in a plane because they'd hired a plane to go look at Mount St. Helens because they'd heard that, you know, there's some stuff going on. And they happened to make one more pass right as the mountain, that earthquake dropped the side of the mountain. They were like right above it in a plane, as a matter of fact. Yeah, where's your quote? Should we read that?

Yeah. This is Dorothy Stoffel in 2019. She said, the whole north half of the mountain that we were flying just 500 feet above began churning and a mile long fracture shot across the mountain. Faster than our minds could absorb, the north half of the mountain just became like fluid and slid away. Amazing. I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper opening along the mountain.

Yeah. And, you know, there were amateur photographers around for some of this stuff. Some of these hikers, like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story in Funny Voices. And volcano chasers, like they got some, like, one guy got like 22 pictures in a row and this is when it eventually blew. The other guy got like six or eight pictures. There was a family camping with their two young daughters. Oh man.

And that guy, they were on the north side, well below it, but within the range. And he was like, speaking to how it didn't blow from the top, he said, it looked like somebody shot a shotgun out of the side of this mountain pointed at us. So ash was raining down, but it was raining like at people and less down from the sky.

Right, exactly. It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain. Yeah. And the reason why the north of the mountain was so dangerous is because that's where that hump had been.

That's also where the earthquake moved a good portion of the mountain, which meant that all that pressure that was keeping that pressurized superheated water from boiling under the mountain was suddenly exposed. It was that pressure was gone. And so all of that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam. And when that happens, that expands. Like you said, the reason that one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation is because it's too expansive. When it does have the chance to expand, it does so with incredible force.

And that's what happened. That's why Mount St. Helens blew out the side rather than the top because there had been a weakening in the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out and blow out it did. Yeah, I mean, it was, if you look at it, it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something.

It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast that you might think of in your head. It happened kind of all at once, and it was a 24 megaton blast, which I know everyone always tries to compare it to, like Hiroshima, it was 1,600 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Good Lord.

But I mean, that's what it would take to move 0.6 square or cubic miles of mountain all of a sudden too, you know? Yeah. And that blast, Chuck, that 24 megaton blast, it was described as like a fast moving cloud of heat and stones moving at some points pretty close to the mountain, 300 miles an hour, heated to like 660 degrees Fahrenheit, I think that's like 380 degrees Celsius, just blowing northward away from the mountain. And everything within eight miles of that, of the mountain was in that blast zone. And if you'll recall correctly, David Johnston's Coldwater II camp was within about five miles.

Yeah, he obviously didn't make it. They found, I think they found pieces of his trailer like a decade later. He had time to send out one signal, which was over his radio, Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only person to pick that up was a ham radio operator nearby. And they renamed that area Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously Harry Truman perished along with those 16 cats. And he was close enough to where I saw that they said that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized. Like he wouldn't have felt anything. It would

have happened, his death and vaporization would have happened in like less than a second. Yeah. I have the impression the same thing happened to David Johnston and also that ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it. He documented David Johnston getting covered up. He said, gentlemen, the camper in the car that's sitting over to the south of me, he was talking about David Johnston, is covered, is going to hit me too. And that was Jerry Martin, that ham radio operator, and that was his last transmission. He was vaporized as well, essentially. Everything, everything north of the mountain within eight miles was just destroyed, just destroyed. Like entire hundred foot trees that were like 10, 12 feet in diameter, just completely flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way as well. And this was just a

blast. The landslide that was created from the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption, that had some incredible effects as well. Yeah, because what you've got, you know, beyond this avalanche happening is you've got all of a sudden all this heat happens in a place where there's a lot of snow. So that snow melts, all that glacier ice melts, and you have flooding and you have mudslides. And you have a word that I had never even heard of before Ed included it in here, which was lahar, which sounds like just a mudslide on steroids. Yeah.

Like a mudslide carrying ammunition with it. Right. And this is just raining down everywhere and like causing a path of destruction that hasn't been seen in like modern times in this country. Yeah. It was like it had so much power, Chuck, that slide did, that one part of it was carrying chunks of rock as big as 558 feet or 170 meters across. Wow.

That's as big as a 50-story building. It was moving rocks that size, just fast as you can imagine down the mountain, into the valleys. And I saw it described as if you were watching it from a ridge, as some people were, like far away, you would see the cloud or the debris starting to come at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then all of a sudden it would come up over the ridge and keep going.

It was just filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's just, it's unimaginable trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier that some people were actually there watching this happen. Crazy. It is crazy. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the After Effects right after this. Stuffed with Joshua and Shal's stuff you should know. Can you hear it?

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Obviously, Spirit Lake, which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the base of the mountain, has a very strange effects on bodies of water. It did two things. It made the lake larger, but it also made it shallower because it just flooded all this water down there and raised it such that the outlet was basically dammed up. And so the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced its depth by about 80 feet. I think five years later, they built a spillway tunnel to control the depth of the lake. Two

hundred homes and cabins and about 200 miles of road and railways were completely obliterated. Yeah. I also saw that lake was now 200 feet higher in elevation than it had been before. As if, like, there was so much debris, it, like, raised the lake 200 feet, even though it also made it shallower. It's nuts. And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount St. Helens, right? Yeah. I can't remember. I think by like 600 meters or something like that, some ridiculous amount of height just blown off. And that was another thing too, like the after effects of it. If you look at Mount St. Helens today, or especially like right afterward,

it turned into like an amphitheater. Yeah. Like the north side was blown out and the other sides were kind of curved around. And what was neat is one of the huge after effects of Mount St. Helens, one of the more positive ones, is I saw it described as like a crash course for volcanologists and seismologists and everybody who are now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in. And the eruption, because it was a lateral blast, opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain that they could study now its past history from the

inside out, which I thought was pretty neat. And a young Trey Anastasio said, one day I shall play at the base of that amphitheater. Oh, did he? And bore people with noodling on my guitar. Did he? Did they play there? No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there.

I was just kidding. Oh, wow. That was just completely made up. Oh, yeah. I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish. I'm with you. So ash is raining down and out. It literally darkened the skies.

When this ash, if you were close enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. If you're far away, it can just create a lot of problems. Everything from just equipment not working, electrical outages and blackouts and brownouts. Visibility is obviously terrible. As far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out by this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them did a little bit better because they just got a little bit of the ash and ash will help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well. Yeah, that was surprising.

I also saw there was a lot of devastation. Any big game animal in the blast zone was, I said big game animal, by the way, was in the blast zone, was killed without question. But they were very surprised. Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found there were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and plants, microbes, fungi, that had survived just fine. And we're among the first to recolonize, and we're part of the reason why Mount St. Helens' ecosystem started to

rebound so quickly. I mean, that's what will happen, right? If the earth ever just burns up into a fiery ball, that'll just become a big mushroom field, right? Probably. And then the animals that lived underground will come above ever just burns up into a fiery ball that'll just become a big mushroom field, right? Probably. And then the animals that lived underground will come above ground and say, it's our time, baby. I look forward to that day for some reason.

What else happened? Oh, I saw that the ash cloud that blew finally out of the top, we should say that the lateral blast was followed by a Plinian blast. And that shot, like, you know, that was the money volcano shot that everybody was looking for. A plume of ash and smoke rose 80,000 feet into the air. And it was moving so fast that it circled the globe in 15 days. Came back to square one in 15 days. And of course, that was like affecting air traffic.

Do you remember that Icelandic volcano that affected air traffic in Europe for like weeks? Weren't you stranded by that or something? No. Okay. I don't think so. Okay. Like they knew what to do in part

because of how Mount St. Helens affected air travel. At the time they were like, this is brand new to us. But it helped lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for, how to deal with that kind of stuff later on. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to point out too about Spirit Lake was if you look at footage of the lake and now these kind of rivers that were just happening,

and it literally rerouted the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections. But it looks like a logging operation is happening. And you could almost, and may have been able, well, obviously it would have been too dangerous, but it looks like you could have walked over these logs. They were so packed. And these were just trees an hour before.

Yeah. If you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing, you could have probably made it across the lake. But in that minute-by-minute episode, there was a pair of high school sweethearts who'd been camping, and they had a harrowing experience because they both got thrown into Spirit Lake and the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend. It's like the logs were starting to close in on him. He pulled her out from the lake and they were hanging on to logs when they finally made it out and were rescued. That happened. Like that happened to somebody. Yeah, they were in their car. Oh, is that how they got in the lake? They were in their car?

Yeah, they said it just picked them up. They were driving and then they were floating. And they said that they're, you know, she said like my instinct was to get out of the car, but there was like nowhere to go. Right, yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them, right? Yeah, and this is, you know, these are just sort of,

that's what's so cool about the special, is it really brought in the human element of these people that were around there. Right. And they, you know, they all survived because they were being interviewed, obviously. Dorothy Stouffel, who was the geologist that was flying with, I guess, her husband, Keith, or was that her brother? Her husband, Keith.

Okay. They survived that plane flight. Like they got out of there. There were stories of people that literally, it was like from a movie, drove, you know, 110 miles an hour, like outrunning this ash debris slide coming at them. Right. Yeah. And some people didn't make it. So, there was one guy who was chronicled in that that was driving as fast as he can and the blast just caught up with him and buried him in the ash.

And he probably died pretty much instantly. But like, again, that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a house just flowing down like a newly engorged mudslidey river, moving so fast that you probably could have towed water skiers from the house, essentially. It was moving that fast just down the river. So, I mean, again, it was one of the most documented volcanic eruptions of all time. So, there's really amazing footage on there, or just on the Internet is what I mean. But that wasn't the last time that Mount St. Helens has erupted. I think it erupted a few times between 1980 and maybe 1996, I think. And then the biggest one recently was between 2004 and 2008.

Yeah, it started sort of getting a little more active again. This time though, you know, one of the things that, to the benefit of the surrounding area, when a volcano blows like that, is that pressure is released. And it's going to take a long time to build back up to that level again, kind of depending how it reforms on top of it. But this time, apparently, there are more ways for this pressure to be released. So, I think it's just sort of the pressure is being released a little more gradually since 2004. That's my impression too.

But they do say that like, oh no, like it will happen again. Like things are, there is a new lava dome growing and the pressure is going to build up and it could be in a thousand years or it could be in ten years. Yeah, we just don't know. No, but they are studying it. Like there's a lot of active research and study going on at Mount St. Helens now. Yeah, I believe, you know, the eruption was such a big deal that they've opened, the USGS opened a research station nearby. And also that 2004 activity basically ran from 2004 to 2008.

Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely. So there's amazing time lapse footage of those four years. And it's astounding how fast and how big Mount St. Helens just grows from that eruption activity. It's called Time Lapse Images of Mount St. Helens Dome Growth. It's on YouTube. And I recommend checking that out as well. Yeah, I would just be careful when you Google dome growth. Right. Or bulge growth.

Oh, boy. So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we? Sure. And by we, I mean me. No, me too. But like we said, Mount St. Helens bounced back, Spirit Lake opened back up, and the Coldwater 2 station has been renamed after David Johnston. And there's an amazing memorial too.

I saw in some TripAdvisor post that somebody said was like the one of the best like not welcome center but you know information centers that the person's ever been to so I would like to go there some cookies are unreal you got anything else I got nothing else all right we'll go forth and research Mount St. Helens with the Ness and you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak. Since I said Dante's Peak, it's time for listener mail. This is following up on an email that you particularly liked from our Spooktacular. Okay. Hey guys, thoroughly enjoying the most recent Spooktacular. The accents are comedy genius.

Meagal, do you want to pop in and say hi? Hello! Perfect. I'm gonna bring Meagle back every now and then, by the way. Just want to prepare you and the audience. Okay. I wanted to address a couple of 1800s diction issues that cause some puzzlement. When you guys talked about toilet, it's basically what Josh said. I've always thought of it as a refreshing, as freshening up in the bathroom and washing your face and hands

When first waking up or going to bed I double-check with Merriam-Webster though, and it's more generally dressing and grooming Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, sure on the other hand the strangers in the beverage from the toll house is a lot more puzzling Yeah, I had no idea what it meant and although Josh's guess that beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't really make sense. Just as a reminder, the sentence is talking about some men drinking tea in an inn and pausing to, quote, discover the sex and dates of arrival of the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the beverage, end quote.

I think I found the answer though, guys, in a dictionary of Scottish dialect. We love this stuff by the way. Yeah this is amazing. Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are considered omens that you'll meet someone new. So these tea leaves are called strangers. If you pick up a stranger and bite it, the toughness will tell you whether the new acquaintance will be male or female. Amazing. Amazing. I'm gonna guess there's also a way to predict the date you meet this person, although I didn't see reference to that.

So that's what the characters are doing, guys, using tea leaves to predict the future. By the way, other omens can also be strangers, like unburned candelwicks or soot on grates. I've loved the show for years, look forward to many more. That is a great email, Nat Jacobs. Fantastic sleuthing, and we are super grateful. Top to bottom, start to finish, wonderful email.

Also, just put so nicely too, not like you big dummies. Yeah. Because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess. I didn't think it was a bad guess. But I mean, that was really hard. Like, that was obscure, you know? Very much.

Anyway, I love knowing that now. That was one of my favorite emails. So thanks a lot, Nat. And if you want to be like Nat and get in touch with us in the best way possible, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. ["I Heart Radio"] Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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