Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

jd writes "According to the New Scientist magazine, Mount Saint Helens has built in the space of a few months a lava dome larger than one that had been built over the previous six years. The growth rate is about four cubic meters a second. If the dome keeps growing at this rate, geologists expect it to collapse, triggering a major eruption. Surface activity is not the only thing geologists are monitoring. Seismographs of the volcano show dozens of tremors a minute."

Liquid dirt?

[Futurepower(R)]

Portland already has liquid sunshine. Now you are suggesting liquid dirt?

Re:It would be cool

[Babbster]

Yuck, yuck, yuck. We [in Portland] got hit with a bunch of ash during a couple of relatively minor eruptions back in 1980 (the first one had the wind blowing away from us) and the ash was a horrible pain. Besides the necessity of wearing surgical-type masks (unlike snow, breathing in that fine powdery stuff is "a bad thing") while the crap is blowing around, the clean-up is a bitch. Since it doesn't melt, you have to manually clean it out of seams and cracks in structures and cars - just plain awful.

I'm sure you were just kidding but even joking about it makes me nervous. :)

Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

Hmmm... mountain, spewing smoke and ash... that's not odd. Nothing to see here folks!

Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Bye bye, WA! I guess we'll never know who's Governor, now...

Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

[drakethegreat]

I don't appreciate you showing a lack of respect or regard for Washington. I grew up there and I love it. If any state deserves to be removed from the map its Texas.

Bring It

[TFGeditor]

We've got a ditch digger over in Dallas who's been out of work ever since he finished the Panama Canal and then they shut down the Superconducting Super Collider project http://www.hep.net/documents/drell/apendixa.html [hep.net]. I figure it'll take him a couple of days to dig a diversion ditch to channel the flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and mayber another week to stack it all up into a peninsula, then another week to collect a crew and build a suburb of Corpus Christi.

Yeah, bring it on. At least one Texan needs th

Re:Bring It

[kd5ujz]

I am in corpus, and you can bet your ass the locals would be pissed at this "improvment", hell, they wanted to build sea world here, and they complained. So they built it in San Antonio, No where near the damn ocean. Bass Pro Shop now wants to build a super redneck center here, and they are bitching. Its a bunch of old codgers that dont want to lose their beatiful view of the refinerys, oh well.

Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Oh I agree. We just need to get the Volcano to go along!

Re:Mount Saint Helens Behaving Oddly

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You're missing the big point here:

What large software company lives in Washington?

Mt. St. Helen consitipated

[helioquake]

In simple terms, Mt. Saint Helen is experiencing a constipation of the decade. Magma is acting like severely dehydrated stool in your bowel (c.f., Mauna Loa is like having explosive diarrhea), trying to get out but the passage is either too narrow or the shit is too viscous to flow out smoothly. Then what follows is tremendous pressure from cumulating [volcanic] gas and bloating by unreleased feces [i.e., magma].

Then there will be two choices for Mt. St. Helen to make: either release the shit little by little (leading to minor eruptions and small quakes) or craptacular ejection of constipated feces out of the system once and for all. Imagine [or take my word for it...] that the newly forming dome is the piece of shit that begins to peek out of an a$$hole. This is a perfect analogy that make sense to all. The lesson is that it all depends on what kind of stool you generate: soft or hard. Mauna Loa, for example, always generates chemically soft stool, whereas St. Helen tends to make hard ones. A long ago I was tutoring geophysics to "poets" and this was the only analogy that they found it easier to relate...(yeah, gross common frame of reference, you may say).

Re:Mt. St. Helen consitipated

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You created an account to post that?

Re:Mt. St. Helen consitipated

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that post was just building up inside him and he had to get it out.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Oh so what!

[cyberzephyr]

I was watching this damn volcano since it first hit /. the last time: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/3 0/1235218&tid=103&tid=1&tid=14

It was here before us and will be here after us.

THat's a fact.

Re:Oh so what!

[dankjones]

You are obviously too young to remember the last time it erupted.

We used to have 3 more states.

Re:Oh so what!

[cyberzephyr]

Tell that to Harry Truman.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/mountsthelens/hary 11 .shtml

Re:Oh so what!

[HaloZero]

We're not worried about where the volcano/mountain might be going. We're moreso worried about everyone who (perhaps stupidly, albeit) lives on , around, or near it.

Isn't this how the 1980 eruption happened?

[Drunken_Jackass]

I mean, to blow the top of the mountain off due to the built up pressure. Maybe this whole build-up, store energy, explode scenario is how this volcano works.

Re:Isn't this how the 1980 eruption happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe it's just how volcanoes work...

Animated GIF of what's happening....

[Anonymous Coward]

There's some brilliant web coverage of this topic available. Just look at the animated GIF (via CORALIZED link) at

the site http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090 [nyud.net]

to see how dramatic this is. For more, including the GIF, see:

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090 [nyud.net]

(For those who don't know: The above links to an automatically cached version of the pages, as described here [nyu.edu]. If for some reason the coralized links are don't work, you can try the orignal by changing the link from http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov.nyud.net:8090/something. .. to http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/something..., but this is so well presented they don't deserve a /.'ing, so try the cached version first.)

Re:Animated GIF of what's happening....

[el_gordo101]

Ugh, the animated gif almost gave me a seizure. I had to close the tab in my browser before everything went black...

I'm just glad so many scientista are watching it..

[CodeWanker]

since there's the dabate about man-made versus geological causes for atmospheric change. We ought to get some data that helps push the argument along. My family (wife, toddler daughter, and I) are flying into Portland in February... Can't wait to see if we make it or have to abandon the trip.

On my puny-human scale of things, 4 cubic meters a second is a LOT.

Oh goody, mabye we'll get buried again :P

[Timmy D Programmer]

I was in the 5th grade when the big one hit the Mountain and had a paper route at the time. Before I was allowed outside to deliver my papers I had to pretty much adorn hazmat gear. My mom had me wear a mask, goggles, overcoat, big hat, etc. After a few days of cooking alive in that gettup while riding my bike on what was worse than dry soft sand My parents asked me if I wanted to quit that paper route, and the answer was an enthusiastic YES!

The ash was kinda fun to watch fall, but it was a four star p

Nooo!!

[Uplore]

Don't do it! Dont use that aluminum boat to cross the lake in an attempt to escape!! You wll be melted by the acid! Use the 4WD to drive across the lava flow instead, that seems to work.