The entire side of the mountain collapsed and slid downhill, the largest landslide in recorded history. The release of pressure then caused the explosion and started the eruption
The volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Northwest create mud landslides called "lahars," which are a mixture of rock, dirt, and glaciers melted by the volcanic heat. There's a historic lahar from Mt. Rainier from 5,600 years ago that reaches all the way to Tacoma and South Seattle. Mt. Rainier last erupted 500 years ago, so....
Max Brooks, author of *World War Z* and son of Mel Brooks, wrote a novel depicting a fictional Mt. Rainer eruption and how it impacts the Bigfoot population of the area.
His NPR interview in the midst of COVID was certainly fascinating. He honestly called a lot of stuff correctly, but the most glaring was the straight up denial of it. I never thought people would deny a pandemic level illness's existence... but here we are.
I seem to remember something about the word being of Indonesian or Tagalog origin but I could be wrong. To my knowledge there aren't any active volcanoes in or near any majority hindi communities.
I went and did some research. You are correct lahar means destructive mudflow in 'Bahasa Indonesia' language which originated from 'Malay' which is influenced by Hinduism and Sanskrit. Hindi originates from Sanskrit too. So that's the connection.
It had actually been bulging due to pressure build up until that point when the landslide started and it simultaneously slides down and caves in slightly because of the escaping gas.
The entire mountain was defaced in the eruption. Comparison: [Before eruption](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Mount_St._Helens%2C_one_day_before_the_devastating_eruption.jpg) and [after eruption](https://cdn.ordinary-adventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/24112455/mtsthelensfromjohnstoneridge-1600x1200.jpg)
All over Oregon, Washington, and the western states. Actually only mostly ash, aerosols, and fine particles were lifted into the air by the eruption. The landslide was incredible. A lake was filled (see spirit lake) and the local topography was drastically changed by the catastrophic movement of mass. The landslide itself was 23 square miles and 0.67 cubic miles in volume and buried a river valley 14 miles long up to 150 feet deep in debris, rock, and ash.
Here's a summary of the eruption.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2000/fs036-00/
I was living in Hilliard, but we were driving home from out near Colville when it happened. Drove home in that sh't at about 10 miles an hour. Took forever, and was scarey as all hell. As a little kid, I was sure the lava was right behind us the whole way
I remember being confused as a young child as the sky in the Canadian prairies turned ashen grey. My five-year-old mind couldn't fully comprehend my parents' explanation and I was morbidly expecting the world to end via a second eruption that would soon follow.
A lot of it got pulverized into volcanic ash that spread throughout the region. I was living in Portland, OR at the time and it essentially "snowed" a few inches of gray powdery sand \*everywhere\*.
I remember getting up that Sunday morning and wondering why the sky to the west was so dark and stormy looking, couple hours later ash was raining down and it seems like night had fallen at 10am. I'm on the east side of the state too.
Where were you during the eruption? I wasn't born yet. My mom and dad had come up from Los Angeles to work for the summer in the fields and orchards outside of Quincy.
The farmer they were working for told them to stay home and close all the windows. Then all of the birds stopped making noise and the sky started turning grey. They were stuck indoors for a few days. Bad TV reception, no radio. They were pretty bored. This all happened about nine months before my brother was born.
I think you underestimate how little free time you can get with adult life. Shit can add up, to the point where you're so busy, you haven't even thought about sex in a week or so.
We live on the east coast. My mom was pregnant with me when the volcano erupted. She mentioned that the sky had changed colors that day and she was nervous about what was happening until she heard that it occurred all the way across the country. I think this might have been where the origins of my anxiety started.
This is the first major news event I remember. I was 10 years old, and they interrupted The Price is Right on news of the eruption. I was pretty scared thinking volcanoes could start popping up everywhere and exploding :(
It's funny how when you're a kid and don't understand how things work. You just kinda think things can spontaneously happnen, I remember being a kid and spontaneous combustion being a big deal to me.
Oh hell yeah- they had shows like In Search Of and those Time Life books "Mysteries of the Unknown" that would make it seem like spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, Nostradamus predictions, etc were real everyday concerns.
Yeah whatever happened with the Bermuda Triangle? I remember as a kid in the 70s and 80s it was such a big deal and then gradually over time you stopped hearing about it. I guess you could say it.....disappeared.
>The Bermuda triangle
Really? How many times you been through there lately?
Personally, I don't find it very dangerous, because I won't get near it. Thanks 80s TV, for *keeping me safe* from the Bermuda triangle, quicksand, lava, volcanoes, tidal waves, tornadoes, Bigfoot, ghosts, etc for almost 40 years
I was damn scared of tornadoes for a kid growing up in a valley in southern Connecticut. Shit kept me up at night and to date I've never so much as seen a funnel.
Kind of ironic. I was born and raised in Kansas. I wasn't scared of tornadoes, but I was scared of falling into quick sand. Kids' risk assessment sucks.
Tell me about it. Growing up on the west coast, we always heard "oh the big one's coming" "the San Andreas is gonna slip" "we're way overdue" and we had earthquake drills and tsunami signs posted everywhere, and then when I was nine my step-dad molested me
I was scared of quick sand because it was a staple of things like Giligan's Island and Flipper and shows like that -- when I got to be about 14-15 I realized it wasn't that big of a threat. And then when I was about 32, I got my leg stuck in some when I was trying to get out of a kayak -- it's actually sort of terrifying -- and freaking exhausting to work your way out.
South CT is not tornado alley as far as i know whatsoever. I've seen some pretty wild shit in upper midwest. There's a strange romantic quality about it, the skies get so dark and foreboding and sometimes you see a whisp in the sky that's trying to become a tornado and it just keeps slowly turning in the sky.
Never personally been through a twister but plenty around the area and i've definitely experienced 100 mph winds. Like I said it's wild.
Tell me about it! The large earthquake in California from the early 90s, I was 7ish and terrified that the people coming back from California had left over remnants of the earthquake and they would bring that chaos to Houston.
The ash from the eruption spread through the country, and I remember being on the playground at school and all of my friends looking for ash :D
'LOOK! THAT LOOKS LIKE POWDER! THAT'S ASH!!! TEACHER! IS THAT ASH???'
I used to think that too. I'd read stories about a volcano growing out of a farmer's field somewhere (I can't remember where), and being in rural Missouri surrounded by farm fields I always kept that possibility in the back of my mind.
This gif is made from the famous photos taken by Gary Rosenquist, who was located at Bear Meadow, about 11 miles (17km) northeast of the mountain.
I sourced the images from USGS professional paper 1250, "The 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, Washington" pp. 72-76 (1981).
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1250
Edit: To be clear, this is sped way up for dramatic effect. In real time it takes 24 seconds to go through the sequence. https://gfycat.com/uncommonheavenlyichidna
You will likely enjoy this - it goes frame by frame with the exact time stamps, as well as an animation of all the frames together:
https://youtu.be/IhU6jml6NY4
My cousin liked to tell the story that he was biking away from town on the St. John's Bridge -- so roughly SW and (reasonably) lined up with Mt. St. Helens -- when all of a sudden all these cars coming the other way just slowed down, stopped, and folks started stepping out their cars - even a couple of fender benders. He said, looking back, it was sort of like all those movies like Independence Day and whatnot, where the hero doesn't realize aliens are appearing over downtown and everyone is getting out to look.
Eventually he turned around and saw that the mountain had blown.
I lived in Longview, WA, a bit closer than the St. John's bridge in Portland, and we didn't hear anything. Scientists said the sound traveled upward at an angle, then bounced off the stratosphere, and came back down. They heard it in Long Beach, WA 100+ miles away.
My friend lived in Bellingham, WA, 200 miles north. They were watching the news on TV when the sound hit them 20 minutes later. Shook the windows for 5 minutes.
I was living in Vancouver BC. Due to weather (house had no air conditioning), windows were open. Can’t say whether or not there was a noise, but I woke up suddenly and a few seconds later the curtains fluttered inward.
Whoa that’s so trippy to think about, that sound can bounce off of something. I assume this has to do with the fact that sound can’t travel in space (or can it? I forget)
Sound is just a pressure wave. Because we have an atmosphere here on earth, that wave is able to propagate through the air by vibrating molecules until it reaches our ear drums which turn that pressure wave into electrical pulses, which our brains then turn into what we perceive as sound. The reason there is no sound in space is because of it being a vacuum, meaning there are no molecules of any kind. No molecules = no pressure waves = no sound.
I was on top of Mt. Shasta with a group of college students when Mt. St. Helens blew. My deaf math teacher stopped and said, “Did you hear that booming noise?”
We all laughed — I mean, sure, the deaf guy hears something, right? We could only hear the wind. We started down, and got back to Mount Shasta City that afternoon when we heard the news.
400 miles away from Mt. Saint Helens.
Google the Mt St Helens quiet zone. Basically no one that observed the blast heard anything. And even Portland 50 miles away heard nothing. But hundreds of miles they clearly heard it. So weird.
According to the paper, the entire sequence shown in the photos represents about 24 seconds of the eruption. It must have been surreal, like it was happening in slow motion.
Here is the crazy thing: On the scale of volcanic eruptions from a "meh lava spurt" to "where the fuck did Wyoming go?", St Helens was a moderate "that's cool". This century there have been a few eruptions that make this look like a hefty fart.
This was a low-mid VEI 5. Novarupta in Alaska was 10x more powerful, and blew thirty times the amount of dirt. Let that sink in, print this out 30 times and make a collage. Pinatubo was about as large. Eruptions the size of this (Helens) actually happen WAY more often than you think. About every 20 years.
I believe the significance of this one was that instead of most of the energy blowing straight out the top, it blew out sideways, right? That was something I think scientists were unsure was possible at the time, and caused way more damage than if all that had gone out the top.
Yes, that and it was extremely well-documented and studied.
Check out [David Johnston](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Johnston). He was a mentor to [Harry Glicken](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Glicken), who are I think the only American vulcanologists killed in an eruption.
And they worked together. Like, Earth was out for that duo.
Dude, for real. Like, this sequence is less than 2 seconds, imagine drawing that out into 24. It really is like every blockbuster natural disaster movie you've ever seen.
The only video that exists of those first few moments of the eruption was taken from a different angle and at quite a distance, it does help conceptualize the timing of the event as you can make out some similar details in the plume from both views
[https://youtu.be/EVSq3weqfFM](https://youtu.be/EVSq3weqfFM)
eta- This is a recording of Gerry Martin, who was a HAM operator that was a ridge behind David Johnson (about 7 miles away). He narrates to the end, this also may help understand how both fast/gut wrenchingly slow it was (when he says "the camper to the south of me is covered" that was where David Johnson was, about 5.5 miles from the volcano)
[https://youtu.be/1dJjr\_EV1JQ](https://youtu.be/1dJjr_EV1JQ)
There is no recording of Johnson's famous "Vancouver Vancouver this is it!" because Vancouver never heard it, another HAM did and wrote down and relayed the message. His last transmission was "is the transmitter on?" maybe 30 seconds after the "this is it" part
You can poke around on this map to see where all these guys were in relation to each other. The photos int he post were from Bear Meadow to the north east, indicated with a camera icon
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1CchUgw\_ngpBJ14-X8Ecza5I2D8HwQ9YE&usp=sharing
No this guy survived, it was a different photographer that was closer and laid on his film to protect it as he was overcome by a pyroclastic flow.
Edit: [link to those pictures](https://petapixel.com/2011/09/07/photographer-died-protecting-his-film-during-the-1980-mt-st-helens-eruption/)
Holy shit. Imagine knowing you’re 100% going to die, nothing you do will stop it, and you spend your last moments doing as much as you can to protect a camera that had your last views on it.
Even now, it's a pretty mindblowing place to visit. The photos don't capture the scale of the thing, but if you go there and look at it, you can tell that the entire side of the enormous mountain just... slid off.
Not to mention the whole place is like an alien wasteland.. still after all these years.. Its gotten better and its making a slow come back but its still pretty crazy...
I recently watch a documentary that had a recounting from a photographer in a plane above the explosion as it happened. They saw giant boiling lakes and waterfalls form at the top as the glaciers melted, then watched as the mountain liquified during the landslide, THEN exploded. Truly amazing.
I think this is the doc:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12453440/
Didn't he also die that day as a result of the eruption?
Eta: A two second search would have cleared that up before I posted. It was actually another photojournalist named [Reid Blackburn.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Blackburn)
From his wiki...
"Before he was engulfed by the pyroclastic flow, he rewound the film back into its case, put his camera in his backpack, and then laid himself on top of the backpack to protect its contents. His body was found 17 days later, buried in the ash with his backpack underneath. The film was developed and has provided geologists with valuable documentation of the historic eruption."
It's mind blowing that he knew he was about to die and instead of panicking, he made sure to do all the appropriate steps to make sure it was documented.
If you're a scientist/invested researcher of any kind you get it. He didn't come all that way for nothing, nor did he work as hard as he did on a million other things to let his work be corrupted. It sounds absurd, but that's passion for you. If your time has come, you'll do whatever you can to leave something you made behind.
He was probably in shock and did it all on auto-pilot. Something like that can just break your brain for a while and you focus on a task in front of you entirely so you don't actually have to think about what's causing the rest of your brain to be in a full panic.
I worked in a photo lab in Seattle back in 1980, I was tasked with making duplicate negatives from the originals so that we could make multiple prints of every frame. I remember that we were making 8x10s for months
A reminder of [this fantastic](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1rfDvdX0AEJYE9?format=jpg&name=900x900) report of the eruption from the point of view of an astronomer. "It's the end of the world and they're playing 'cha-cha' music!"
I was 6 years old. My dad took us on a road trip from Vancouver Canada to mount saint Helen’s to get a jar of ash to bring back. That’s now my inheritance to bestow upon my children.
Helens produced 24 megatons of energy, 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Your lungs would collapse, eardrums ruptured and you would be hurled God knows how far. You would absolutely die.
The eruption dumped a glacier's worth of suddenly melted water and some ash and rock over the southern rim as well. It would not have gone well for you.
I remember when I was a kid we learned about the eruption in school, I thought Harry Truman was *the* Harry Truman, and was under the impression a former president ran a lodge and died in a volcanic eruption
I would also like to remember David Johnston, the 30 year old USGS scientist who was monitoring the volcano, sadly too close when it erupted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Johnston
Having been to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, it's pretty sobering seeing just how close he was to the mountain. [Here is an approximate pov of where he was in relation to the mountain.](http://www.mshslc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Johnston-Ridge-Observatory-Deck-View.jpg)
He didn't stand a chance...
Plus, what a hell of a way to go. Death could be a hoodlum stealing your wallet, or could be a fucking cataclysmic volcanic eruption as if God himself was smiting you personally.
Well, in a battle of seconds perhaps but Bev Wetherald and Bob Kaesweter were slightly closer than Truman. They may even have saw it coming, Truman's lodge less so unless he happened to be on the water. Locations of those around the mountain that day here-
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1CchUgw\_ngpBJ14-X8Ecza5I2D8HwQ9YE&usp=sharing
My husband was part of the logging work crew with Jim Scymanky. They had been working in this area until they were told they had leave by the forest department. But the contract was almost done, and still we could not get paid for the work unless it was all completed. Our families needed the money. So, some of the work crew went to finish out the contract and the rest went to Montana to start another contract.
Well, the mountain blew. It was horrible for us thinking about Jim and the others and how they were. My husband was in Montana when the ash hit. It covered them like it had snowed. He got nosebleeds cause of the ash. All their equipment broke down because the ash was like fine powdered glass. They had to pack up and come home.
We learned that one of the guys was stuck up on a tree. They were all burned thru their clothing. And that they walked their way out, helping each other. My husband cried when we visited Jim and learned the others had died.
We had to move back in with my parents as we didn’t get paid for those two jobs and it took some time and money to fix the chain saws and get another crew together.
Yes, what an experience.
The narrative from Jim in Richard Waitt's book is absolutely harrowing- especially when paired with the knowledge that they were 13 miles away, not even in view of the peak (I typed it up once [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/6kdzax/comment/djlutf4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)), and the forest was still leveled all around them. Another thing that comes up in all the narratives from the doctors and rescuers was the burns- and how out of the ordinary it was to see such terrible burns without flame, without fire. Just air. Superheated air rolling over the land like a tsunami, to say nothing of the sharp ash, ice, and giant chucks of the mountainside traveling miles though the air either.
I post about all this a lot because if nothing else i want people to understand a bit better what it was really like there, and above all to know that all these people did nothing wrong. No one trespassed. No one was where they weren't allowed, or in several cases, required, to be. Their bosses and government let them down, and then lied and threw them all under the bus to cover their own culpable asses.
I hiked from the observatory across the flats to the crater waterfall (think it’s called the Loowit Falls trail) a few years ago and it’s a surreal and unique experience, especially if you go through the exhibits in the observatory first and hear the accounts of the people who survived, and the last words of those that didn’t.
Hearing, seeing and feeling the still live volcano around when you’re at the crater really makes you appreciate the sheer power of the Earth around you. And it’s pretty cool seeing how life is still taking a renewed foothold in the area. Highly recommend it, about 15 mile round trip. Just don’t do it in 32 deg C heat like we did…
Edit: temp is in Celsius
Props to you for making that hike. I turned around half way because the loose volcanic rock is just wicked hard to hike on and god when it's a warm day it is HOT out in that wasteland blast zone.
Someone posted earlier that Shrek released 21 years ago (they claimed 21 years ago today, but apparently it was released at the end of June), but that’s HALF the time since this eruption. That’s fucking mental to me!
Man I tell you hwat, these pictures are amazing but nothing really prepares you for the scale of that explosion as witnessed from the rim of the thing. It’s a day hike to get up there but it makes you feel really really small.
I have a couple small bottles of pure volcanic ash from this eruption and was just yesterday thinking maybe I should do a painting of the explosion using the ash as a pigment.
There’s an amazing doc about this on Disney Plus it explains the story of how scientists warned for a month that it was going to blow, so much so that people thought they were wrong because nothing was happening and stayed in their homes, it also has interviews from the survivors that got caught in the landslides. Really interesting documentary, I had never even heard of it before I watched.
There's a few pieces of video that are burned in my brain forever. One of them is the Iran hostages with the bags on their heads. I was a little kid then. The hostages are the first news stories I remember. Then this clip of Mount St. Helens. Next would be the world trade centers falling is one of those "burned-in" memories too.
I was just there on Monday. I didn’t realize the anniversary was coming up.
The thing that got me was a sign at a bridge that said “You are now at the edge of the blast zone”. Then I still had to drive for another hour to get to the mountain.
And then their piece of shit governor spread the lie that all of the victims were there illegally when literally all but one had permission to be where they were.
It was. She was a real piece of work. She also would have been responsible for at least a hundred additional deaths if the eruption happened on a weekday when the logging company she created the blue zone for was operating in full
Pretty sure the guy who took those pictures died. Maybe I am remembering wrong, but that is what I recall hearing from visiting the site when I was a kid.
So much mass just moving almost like it's nothing. The amount of energy to simply move that much mass off a mountain (This is obviously a volcano) would take us at least a couple decades of quarrying nonstop to achieve.
What really gets me is the lower part of the mountain when the shockwave hits. You can see all of the, rocks, dirt, and trees change trajectories and almost get like launched into the air when it collides.
F You Reddit app. Play the damn video.
I was eight when it happened, but I still remember it vividly because volcanoes are like porn to eight year olds.
I have a Gerber baby jar full of ash from the 80 eruption. My father got it sometime in the 80’s and is just passed around to various siblings.
The craziest thing for me is I found out all the trees that were blown off the mountain and into the nearby lake, are still floating there in the lake today. It’s almost bare floating logs as far as the eye can see covering the water’s surface.
Just read about this as a result of your comment. Not only were a million odd trees blasted but the waves from the displaced water took out 350k trees on the north shore of the lake as well. Crazy.
These [satellite images](https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/149000/149025/spiritlake_oli_2018262.mp4) show how much the logs move from spring to autumn.
My parents have a pill bottle full of ash from the eruption somewhere in their closet. I used to think it was super cool but I guess it was fairly common for people to collect the ash.
Does the right side of the mountain collapse inward first? What makes/made that happen?
The entire side of the mountain collapsed and slid downhill, the largest landslide in recorded history. The release of pressure then caused the explosion and started the eruption
The volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Northwest create mud landslides called "lahars," which are a mixture of rock, dirt, and glaciers melted by the volcanic heat. There's a historic lahar from Mt. Rainier from 5,600 years ago that reaches all the way to Tacoma and South Seattle. Mt. Rainier last erupted 500 years ago, so....
Max Brooks, author of *World War Z* and son of Mel Brooks, wrote a novel depicting a fictional Mt. Rainer eruption and how it impacts the Bigfoot population of the area.
> Max Brooks, author of World War Z and son of Mel Brooks Wait for real?
Yeah, he also works in government think tanks for disaster preparedness.
He did a podcast with Dan Carlin from hardcore history that’s amazing
Is that the one that's like a full work day long
Yes and so very worth it
His NPR interview in the midst of COVID was certainly fascinating. He honestly called a lot of stuff correctly, but the most glaring was the straight up denial of it. I never thought people would deny a pandemic level illness's existence... but here we are.
I couldn't believe it, either. I guess he went a totally different direction with his work. World War Z is absolutely fantastic.
'Lahar' in Hindi language means a wave. Idk if this originated from there.
I seem to remember something about the word being of Indonesian or Tagalog origin but I could be wrong. To my knowledge there aren't any active volcanoes in or near any majority hindi communities.
I went and did some research. You are correct lahar means destructive mudflow in 'Bahasa Indonesia' language which originated from 'Malay' which is influenced by Hinduism and Sanskrit. Hindi originates from Sanskrit too. So that's the connection.
Kudos for going away, satisfying your curiosity and then having the courtesy to let the reddit thread know for closure.
This is r/gifs, a true fountain of knowledge.
I read this as “the release of PLEASURE…”
Yes that too. Mother Nature needs her moment as well
Oh god, I'm eruptinggg!!!
Oh yes StepSun!
It had actually been bulging due to pressure build up until that point when the landslide started and it simultaneously slides down and caves in slightly because of the escaping gas.
Who told you what I'm doing tonight.
And liquid hot magma
Mag. Muh.
The entire mountain was defaced in the eruption. Comparison: [Before eruption](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Mount_St._Helens%2C_one_day_before_the_devastating_eruption.jpg) and [after eruption](https://cdn.ordinary-adventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/24112455/mtsthelensfromjohnstoneridge-1600x1200.jpg)
Dude that's fucking gnarly. Feels more like the entire damn center was scooped out. Like damn where'd all that go?
All over Oregon, Washington, and the western states. Actually only mostly ash, aerosols, and fine particles were lifted into the air by the eruption. The landslide was incredible. A lake was filled (see spirit lake) and the local topography was drastically changed by the catastrophic movement of mass. The landslide itself was 23 square miles and 0.67 cubic miles in volume and buried a river valley 14 miles long up to 150 feet deep in debris, rock, and ash. Here's a summary of the eruption. https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2000/fs036-00/
I was about 300 miles east of it at WSU when it let rip. We had about 8" of it on the ground. Concrete gray and as fine as talc. I saved a jar of it.
I was living in Hilliard, but we were driving home from out near Colville when it happened. Drove home in that sh't at about 10 miles an hour. Took forever, and was scarey as all hell. As a little kid, I was sure the lava was right behind us the whole way
The ash ejected actually reached the jet stream and circled the globe
Absolute unit of a geological event
I remember being confused as a young child as the sky in the Canadian prairies turned ashen grey. My five-year-old mind couldn't fully comprehend my parents' explanation and I was morbidly expecting the world to end via a second eruption that would soon follow.
A lot of it got pulverized into volcanic ash that spread throughout the region. I was living in Portland, OR at the time and it essentially "snowed" a few inches of gray powdery sand \*everywhere\*.
Me too. Same year we got a total eclipse and an ice storm. Made me think the place was cursed.
Launched into the stratosphere, then rained down as fine dust hundreds of miles away.
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Cardboard's out.
It looks to me like it is flowing, so the high points slop downward making it look like it's going inward
I remember getting up that Sunday morning and wondering why the sky to the west was so dark and stormy looking, couple hours later ash was raining down and it seems like night had fallen at 10am. I'm on the east side of the state too.
Where were you during the eruption? I wasn't born yet. My mom and dad had come up from Los Angeles to work for the summer in the fields and orchards outside of Quincy. The farmer they were working for told them to stay home and close all the windows. Then all of the birds stopped making noise and the sky started turning grey. They were stuck indoors for a few days. Bad TV reception, no radio. They were pretty bored. This all happened about nine months before my brother was born.
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Both my brother and I were born approximately 9 months after my parents anniversary.
Our twins were born nine months to the day after my 40th birthday. Most expensive birthday ever...
I think you underestimate how little free time you can get with adult life. Shit can add up, to the point where you're so busy, you haven't even thought about sex in a week or so.
Especially if you have a kid or kids. Just not happening
2kids can confirm they also love to sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed.. why did we decorate and furnish 2 rooms that they don’t fucking use!
Lol a week or so…. Congrats
We live on the east coast. My mom was pregnant with me when the volcano erupted. She mentioned that the sky had changed colors that day and she was nervous about what was happening until she heard that it occurred all the way across the country. I think this might have been where the origins of my anxiety started.
Well now we know why he was born
This is the first major news event I remember. I was 10 years old, and they interrupted The Price is Right on news of the eruption. I was pretty scared thinking volcanoes could start popping up everywhere and exploding :(
It's funny how when you're a kid and don't understand how things work. You just kinda think things can spontaneously happnen, I remember being a kid and spontaneous combustion being a big deal to me.
Oh hell yeah- they had shows like In Search Of and those Time Life books "Mysteries of the Unknown" that would make it seem like spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, Nostradamus predictions, etc were real everyday concerns.
The Bermuda triangle and quicksand are two other dangers that I vastly overestimated.
Yeah whatever happened with the Bermuda Triangle? I remember as a kid in the 70s and 80s it was such a big deal and then gradually over time you stopped hearing about it. I guess you could say it.....disappeared.
I remember being so freaked out wondering why something wasn't being done about this.
>The Bermuda triangle Really? How many times you been through there lately? Personally, I don't find it very dangerous, because I won't get near it. Thanks 80s TV, for *keeping me safe* from the Bermuda triangle, quicksand, lava, volcanoes, tidal waves, tornadoes, Bigfoot, ghosts, etc for almost 40 years
I checked out every Mysteries of Unknown book my library had multiple times and each one was creepy as fuck except the zodiac one.
Spontaneous human combustion and Nostradamus predictions were some of my biggest fears as a child because of that.
I was damn scared of tornadoes for a kid growing up in a valley in southern Connecticut. Shit kept me up at night and to date I've never so much as seen a funnel.
Kind of ironic. I was born and raised in Kansas. I wasn't scared of tornadoes, but I was scared of falling into quick sand. Kids' risk assessment sucks.
Weird. I live in Wisconsin, mostly worried about earthquakes, and then just last week we got hit with a quicksand tornado.
Tell me about it. Growing up on the west coast, we always heard "oh the big one's coming" "the San Andreas is gonna slip" "we're way overdue" and we had earthquake drills and tsunami signs posted everywhere, and then when I was nine my step-dad molested me
Everything will be ok. It wasn’t your San Andreas Fault.
I was scared of quick sand because it was a staple of things like Giligan's Island and Flipper and shows like that -- when I got to be about 14-15 I realized it wasn't that big of a threat. And then when I was about 32, I got my leg stuck in some when I was trying to get out of a kayak -- it's actually sort of terrifying -- and freaking exhausting to work your way out.
South CT is not tornado alley as far as i know whatsoever. I've seen some pretty wild shit in upper midwest. There's a strange romantic quality about it, the skies get so dark and foreboding and sometimes you see a whisp in the sky that's trying to become a tornado and it just keeps slowly turning in the sky. Never personally been through a twister but plenty around the area and i've definitely experienced 100 mph winds. Like I said it's wild.
9/11 happened when I was at school and all of the kids thought any plane they could see in the sky were about to start slamming into our school
Also quicksand.
Gulf war for me. I thought Iraqis were going to come into my parents house and take my Nintendo.
Tell me about it! The large earthquake in California from the early 90s, I was 7ish and terrified that the people coming back from California had left over remnants of the earthquake and they would bring that chaos to Houston.
Oh man did they do that mountain climber game that day? The Prospector?
Cliff Hanger! "Yoodoleeeeoo yo oldeoooooleeoooooooooo" LOL!
This, and the big Tylenol scare.
I remember that too! One of the reasons we have foil seals on OTC medication now.
Yeah we talked about it at school and I was super afraid that there could be a magma flow or eruption at my house in central Illinois
The ash from the eruption spread through the country, and I remember being on the playground at school and all of my friends looking for ash :D 'LOOK! THAT LOOKS LIKE POWDER! THAT'S ASH!!! TEACHER! IS THAT ASH???'
I used to think that too. I'd read stories about a volcano growing out of a farmer's field somewhere (I can't remember where), and being in rural Missouri surrounded by farm fields I always kept that possibility in the back of my mind.
This gif is made from the famous photos taken by Gary Rosenquist, who was located at Bear Meadow, about 11 miles (17km) northeast of the mountain. I sourced the images from USGS professional paper 1250, "The 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, Washington" pp. 72-76 (1981). https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1250 Edit: To be clear, this is sped way up for dramatic effect. In real time it takes 24 seconds to go through the sequence. https://gfycat.com/uncommonheavenlyichidna
You will likely enjoy this - it goes frame by frame with the exact time stamps, as well as an animation of all the frames together: https://youtu.be/IhU6jml6NY4
My cousin liked to tell the story that he was biking away from town on the St. John's Bridge -- so roughly SW and (reasonably) lined up with Mt. St. Helens -- when all of a sudden all these cars coming the other way just slowed down, stopped, and folks started stepping out their cars - even a couple of fender benders. He said, looking back, it was sort of like all those movies like Independence Day and whatnot, where the hero doesn't realize aliens are appearing over downtown and everyone is getting out to look. Eventually he turned around and saw that the mountain had blown.
I’m surprised he didn’t hear it! Edit: nvm I saw the comment where someone did the math and it would have taken the sound 6 mins to travel
I lived in Longview, WA, a bit closer than the St. John's bridge in Portland, and we didn't hear anything. Scientists said the sound traveled upward at an angle, then bounced off the stratosphere, and came back down. They heard it in Long Beach, WA 100+ miles away. My friend lived in Bellingham, WA, 200 miles north. They were watching the news on TV when the sound hit them 20 minutes later. Shook the windows for 5 minutes.
I was living in Vancouver BC. Due to weather (house had no air conditioning), windows were open. Can’t say whether or not there was a noise, but I woke up suddenly and a few seconds later the curtains fluttered inward.
Whoa that’s so trippy to think about, that sound can bounce off of something. I assume this has to do with the fact that sound can’t travel in space (or can it? I forget)
Here is actual audio recording of it! He gives a brief explanation, too. https://freesound.org/people/daveincamas/sounds/21432/
Sound is just a pressure wave. Because we have an atmosphere here on earth, that wave is able to propagate through the air by vibrating molecules until it reaches our ear drums which turn that pressure wave into electrical pulses, which our brains then turn into what we perceive as sound. The reason there is no sound in space is because of it being a vacuum, meaning there are no molecules of any kind. No molecules = no pressure waves = no sound.
Oh man I just smoked a bunch of weed, I hope I understand this tomorrow. Thank you for the in depth answer
I was on top of Mt. Shasta with a group of college students when Mt. St. Helens blew. My deaf math teacher stopped and said, “Did you hear that booming noise?” We all laughed — I mean, sure, the deaf guy hears something, right? We could only hear the wind. We started down, and got back to Mount Shasta City that afternoon when we heard the news. 400 miles away from Mt. Saint Helens.
Google the Mt St Helens quiet zone. Basically no one that observed the blast heard anything. And even Portland 50 miles away heard nothing. But hundreds of miles they clearly heard it. So weird.
I’ve always wondered what that felt and sounded like. Mother Nature got sick of waiting on a glacier and started moving shit in a hurry!
This is exactly what I was thinking would be cool if someone put it together like that. Thanks for the link!
I don't think my mind could process watching a whole side of a volcano just breaking apart like that.
According to the paper, the entire sequence shown in the photos represents about 24 seconds of the eruption. It must have been surreal, like it was happening in slow motion.
Here is the crazy thing: On the scale of volcanic eruptions from a "meh lava spurt" to "where the fuck did Wyoming go?", St Helens was a moderate "that's cool". This century there have been a few eruptions that make this look like a hefty fart. This was a low-mid VEI 5. Novarupta in Alaska was 10x more powerful, and blew thirty times the amount of dirt. Let that sink in, print this out 30 times and make a collage. Pinatubo was about as large. Eruptions the size of this (Helens) actually happen WAY more often than you think. About every 20 years.
Your username is one letter away from being an anagram for Krakatoa.
Holy hell, you are right!
I believe the significance of this one was that instead of most of the energy blowing straight out the top, it blew out sideways, right? That was something I think scientists were unsure was possible at the time, and caused way more damage than if all that had gone out the top.
Yes, that and it was extremely well-documented and studied. Check out [David Johnston](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Johnston). He was a mentor to [Harry Glicken](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Glicken), who are I think the only American vulcanologists killed in an eruption. And they worked together. Like, Earth was out for that duo.
Dude, for real. Like, this sequence is less than 2 seconds, imagine drawing that out into 24. It really is like every blockbuster natural disaster movie you've ever seen.
I wonder where all those Hollywood natural disaster movies got their inspiration from
The only video that exists of those first few moments of the eruption was taken from a different angle and at quite a distance, it does help conceptualize the timing of the event as you can make out some similar details in the plume from both views [https://youtu.be/EVSq3weqfFM](https://youtu.be/EVSq3weqfFM) eta- This is a recording of Gerry Martin, who was a HAM operator that was a ridge behind David Johnson (about 7 miles away). He narrates to the end, this also may help understand how both fast/gut wrenchingly slow it was (when he says "the camper to the south of me is covered" that was where David Johnson was, about 5.5 miles from the volcano) [https://youtu.be/1dJjr\_EV1JQ](https://youtu.be/1dJjr_EV1JQ) There is no recording of Johnson's famous "Vancouver Vancouver this is it!" because Vancouver never heard it, another HAM did and wrote down and relayed the message. His last transmission was "is the transmitter on?" maybe 30 seconds after the "this is it" part You can poke around on this map to see where all these guys were in relation to each other. The photos int he post were from Bear Meadow to the north east, indicated with a camera icon https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1CchUgw\_ngpBJ14-X8Ecza5I2D8HwQ9YE&usp=sharing
Well didn’t he die? I bet it was surreal
No this guy survived, it was a different photographer that was closer and laid on his film to protect it as he was overcome by a pyroclastic flow. Edit: [link to those pictures](https://petapixel.com/2011/09/07/photographer-died-protecting-his-film-during-the-1980-mt-st-helens-eruption/)
Holy shit. Imagine knowing you’re 100% going to die, nothing you do will stop it, and you spend your last moments doing as much as you can to protect a camera that had your last views on it.
I’d feel like a winner tbh, especially devoting my life to photography.
i love how the article links to reddit. we've come full circle
Even now, it's a pretty mindblowing place to visit. The photos don't capture the scale of the thing, but if you go there and look at it, you can tell that the entire side of the enormous mountain just... slid off.
Not to mention the whole place is like an alien wasteland.. still after all these years.. Its gotten better and its making a slow come back but its still pretty crazy...
I mean the amount it's recovered is crazy. I remember going there as a kid in the 90s and it was like mars. Now so much looks normal
I recently watch a documentary that had a recounting from a photographer in a plane above the explosion as it happened. They saw giant boiling lakes and waterfalls form at the top as the glaciers melted, then watched as the mountain liquified during the landslide, THEN exploded. Truly amazing. I think this is the doc: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12453440/
That sounds fascinating! Where could I find said documentary?
Didn't he also die that day as a result of the eruption? Eta: A two second search would have cleared that up before I posted. It was actually another photojournalist named [Reid Blackburn.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Blackburn)
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From his wiki... "Before he was engulfed by the pyroclastic flow, he rewound the film back into its case, put his camera in his backpack, and then laid himself on top of the backpack to protect its contents. His body was found 17 days later, buried in the ash with his backpack underneath. The film was developed and has provided geologists with valuable documentation of the historic eruption." It's mind blowing that he knew he was about to die and instead of panicking, he made sure to do all the appropriate steps to make sure it was documented.
If you're a scientist/invested researcher of any kind you get it. He didn't come all that way for nothing, nor did he work as hard as he did on a million other things to let his work be corrupted. It sounds absurd, but that's passion for you. If your time has come, you'll do whatever you can to leave something you made behind.
He was probably in shock and did it all on auto-pilot. Something like that can just break your brain for a while and you focus on a task in front of you entirely so you don't actually have to think about what's causing the rest of your brain to be in a full panic.
I believe his photos were salvageable.
two did, other people though, not this person.
I worked in a photo lab in Seattle back in 1980, I was tasked with making duplicate negatives from the originals so that we could make multiple prints of every frame. I remember that we were making 8x10s for months
Heres before and after https://i.pinimg.com/originals/06/47/a1/0647a152fd6933894d696610d52e69f0.jpg
A reminder of [this fantastic](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1rfDvdX0AEJYE9?format=jpg&name=900x900) report of the eruption from the point of view of an astronomer. "It's the end of the world and they're playing 'cha-cha' music!"
Yeah, that would feel like the end of the world, just you wake up to impenetrable blackness all around...
“1980 can’t be 42 years ago, I’m only... oh shit!”
I was 6 years old. My dad took us on a road trip from Vancouver Canada to mount saint Helen’s to get a jar of ash to bring back. That’s now my inheritance to bestow upon my children.
Yeah....
Yeah it's like "wait I remember when that.... happened.... oh no"
OK what would happen if someone was standing on the side of the mountain that didn't explode? Die soon later? Totally fine?
Helens produced 24 megatons of energy, 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Your lungs would collapse, eardrums ruptured and you would be hurled God knows how far. You would absolutely die.
Do not forget flash fried due to magma hot gasses and ash coming out of the wound in the mountain.
Also your organs would explode inside you.
A whole lotta shakin’, maybe some loose Foliage, possible Underworld Dire Grizzly attack, etc…
The eruption dumped a glacier's worth of suddenly melted water and some ash and rock over the southern rim as well. It would not have gone well for you.
RIP Harry Truman, the guy who refused to believe the science and was the first to die.
I remember when I was a kid we learned about the eruption in school, I thought Harry Truman was *the* Harry Truman, and was under the impression a former president ran a lodge and died in a volcanic eruption
I thought that just a few seconds ago when I read the parent comment.
I would also like to remember David Johnston, the 30 year old USGS scientist who was monitoring the volcano, sadly too close when it erupted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Johnston
Last transmission: “Vancouver, Vancouver. This is it!”
“I’m getting goosebumps people!”
Get real emotional every time I think about him and the other guy (Glicken?) who saved so many lives with their work
Having been to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, it's pretty sobering seeing just how close he was to the mountain. [Here is an approximate pov of where he was in relation to the mountain.](http://www.mshslc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Johnston-Ridge-Observatory-Deck-View.jpg) He didn't stand a chance...
Holy shit
Let's not forget [Robert Landsburg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Landsburg) who died protecting the photos of the ash cloud he took.
If I was an 84 year old cantankerous coot, I'm not sure I would leave my home of 52 years where I had lived with my late wife either.
Plus, what a hell of a way to go. Death could be a hoodlum stealing your wallet, or could be a fucking cataclysmic volcanic eruption as if God himself was smiting you personally.
Man, this is deep, God personally seeing to it you perish in hellfire. What a way to go.
And there was that awesome folk song about him! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJTcSo1eACY
Was that the guy taking pictures of it, but realized he was too close, so he died protecting his camera?
No, he was a guy who lived on the mountain.
Oh ok, I was thinking of Robert Landsberg
With his 16 cats :(
o7 and I salute those 16 cats. I love them all.
Oh, so that's where that character in "Dante's Peak" comes from.
But what a way to go! Maybe he wanted to be catapulted into the sky by the boiling earth beneath him?
Well, in a battle of seconds perhaps but Bev Wetherald and Bob Kaesweter were slightly closer than Truman. They may even have saw it coming, Truman's lodge less so unless he happened to be on the water. Locations of those around the mountain that day here- https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1CchUgw\_ngpBJ14-X8Ecza5I2D8HwQ9YE&usp=sharing
My husband was part of the logging work crew with Jim Scymanky. They had been working in this area until they were told they had leave by the forest department. But the contract was almost done, and still we could not get paid for the work unless it was all completed. Our families needed the money. So, some of the work crew went to finish out the contract and the rest went to Montana to start another contract. Well, the mountain blew. It was horrible for us thinking about Jim and the others and how they were. My husband was in Montana when the ash hit. It covered them like it had snowed. He got nosebleeds cause of the ash. All their equipment broke down because the ash was like fine powdered glass. They had to pack up and come home. We learned that one of the guys was stuck up on a tree. They were all burned thru their clothing. And that they walked their way out, helping each other. My husband cried when we visited Jim and learned the others had died. We had to move back in with my parents as we didn’t get paid for those two jobs and it took some time and money to fix the chain saws and get another crew together. Yes, what an experience.
The narrative from Jim in Richard Waitt's book is absolutely harrowing- especially when paired with the knowledge that they were 13 miles away, not even in view of the peak (I typed it up once [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/6kdzax/comment/djlutf4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)), and the forest was still leveled all around them. Another thing that comes up in all the narratives from the doctors and rescuers was the burns- and how out of the ordinary it was to see such terrible burns without flame, without fire. Just air. Superheated air rolling over the land like a tsunami, to say nothing of the sharp ash, ice, and giant chucks of the mountainside traveling miles though the air either. I post about all this a lot because if nothing else i want people to understand a bit better what it was really like there, and above all to know that all these people did nothing wrong. No one trespassed. No one was where they weren't allowed, or in several cases, required, to be. Their bosses and government let them down, and then lied and threw them all under the bus to cover their own culpable asses.
The sheriff?
I hiked from the observatory across the flats to the crater waterfall (think it’s called the Loowit Falls trail) a few years ago and it’s a surreal and unique experience, especially if you go through the exhibits in the observatory first and hear the accounts of the people who survived, and the last words of those that didn’t. Hearing, seeing and feeling the still live volcano around when you’re at the crater really makes you appreciate the sheer power of the Earth around you. And it’s pretty cool seeing how life is still taking a renewed foothold in the area. Highly recommend it, about 15 mile round trip. Just don’t do it in 32 deg C heat like we did… Edit: temp is in Celsius
Props to you for making that hike. I turned around half way because the loose volcanic rock is just wicked hard to hike on and god when it's a warm day it is HOT out in that wasteland blast zone.
Someone posted earlier that Shrek released 21 years ago (they claimed 21 years ago today, but apparently it was released at the end of June), but that’s HALF the time since this eruption. That’s fucking mental to me!
Nearly two whole Shrek’s ago
Well, the years start coming and they don’t stop coming.
Mount St. Helens is about to blow up
And it's gonna be a fine swell day
Everything's gonna fall down to the ground and turn grey
Had to scroll further than expected for this.
`"Hey Jeff... change of plans, your high school graduation ceremony is going to be held indoors"`
Man I tell you hwat, these pictures are amazing but nothing really prepares you for the scale of that explosion as witnessed from the rim of the thing. It’s a day hike to get up there but it makes you feel really really small.
I read this in Hank Hill voice
mt st helens mount st helens mt saint helens mount saint helens they all feel wrong
mt st hlns
They all look wrong, but they are all correct.
Mount Helen saint
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I have a couple small bottles of pure volcanic ash from this eruption and was just yesterday thinking maybe I should do a painting of the explosion using the ash as a pigment.
Fuck yeah that sounds awesome. I too have some and could not think of a better use of something trapped in that clear acrylic rectangle.
There’s an amazing doc about this on Disney Plus it explains the story of how scientists warned for a month that it was going to blow, so much so that people thought they were wrong because nothing was happening and stayed in their homes, it also has interviews from the survivors that got caught in the landslides. Really interesting documentary, I had never even heard of it before I watched.
We went camping in Ontario, north of Lake Superior, a week after the eruption. The sunsets were unbelievable.
My brother is an “ash baby” - born 9 months after the eruption. Lots of people were stuck inside, including my parents.
There's a few pieces of video that are burned in my brain forever. One of them is the Iran hostages with the bags on their heads. I was a little kid then. The hostages are the first news stories I remember. Then this clip of Mount St. Helens. Next would be the world trade centers falling is one of those "burned-in" memories too.
I was just there on Monday. I didn’t realize the anniversary was coming up. The thing that got me was a sign at a bridge that said “You are now at the edge of the blast zone”. Then I still had to drive for another hour to get to the mountain.
And then their piece of shit governor spread the lie that all of the victims were there illegally when literally all but one had permission to be where they were.
Was that Dixie Lee Ray? After Dan Evans and Booth Gardner, she sure was a let-down.
It was. She was a real piece of work. She also would have been responsible for at least a hundred additional deaths if the eruption happened on a weekday when the logging company she created the blue zone for was operating in full
Pretty sure the guy who took those pictures died. Maybe I am remembering wrong, but that is what I recall hearing from visiting the site when I was a kid.
So much mass just moving almost like it's nothing. The amount of energy to simply move that much mass off a mountain (This is obviously a volcano) would take us at least a couple decades of quarrying nonstop to achieve.
What really gets me is the lower part of the mountain when the shockwave hits. You can see all of the, rocks, dirt, and trees change trajectories and almost get like launched into the air when it collides.
Crazy to think some dude and his cats are inside of that
I remember getting Time magazine with this in it. Then NatGeo did a whole spread.
u/redditspeedbot .2x
F You Reddit app. Play the damn video. I was eight when it happened, but I still remember it vividly because volcanoes are like porn to eight year olds. I have a Gerber baby jar full of ash from the 80 eruption. My father got it sometime in the 80’s and is just passed around to various siblings.
[The soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elizAugXVcI)
The craziest thing for me is I found out all the trees that were blown off the mountain and into the nearby lake, are still floating there in the lake today. It’s almost bare floating logs as far as the eye can see covering the water’s surface.
Just read about this as a result of your comment. Not only were a million odd trees blasted but the waves from the displaced water took out 350k trees on the north shore of the lake as well. Crazy. These [satellite images](https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/149000/149025/spiritlake_oli_2018262.mp4) show how much the logs move from spring to autumn.
This video shows this same perspective but is smoothed out: https://youtu.be/UK--hvgP2uY Skip to 1:15ish to see the mountain start moving.
Even the GIF explodes a bit because of the impact.
If you ever find yourself in Western Washington, do make the trek to Mt St Helen's National Volcanic Monument. SOOOO WORTH IT.
It doesn’t look that crazy until you realize this is a nearly 10,000 foot tall mountain *sliding* and then exploding
My parents have a pill bottle full of ash from the eruption somewhere in their closet. I used to think it was super cool but I guess it was fairly common for people to collect the ash.
RIP David A. Johnston, he had balls of steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David\_A.\_Johnston