January 25, 2025 • 48 mins
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!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everyone. It's Josh.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
For this week's s YSK Selects. I've chosen our January
twenty twenty three episode on the Mount Saint Helen's eruption.
It 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,
(00:23):
so I hope you enjoy it as well.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry
today is our great friend and co producer Dave Sea,
and the C stands for cool. Say hello Dave, Hi, everybody,
that's pretty. That's a really great Dave impression.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
He's a troll.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, I always hear him.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
As Dave is great. I wish you all knew him,
but we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have
to take our word for it. That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have
to say to all the people who don't know much
about Mount Saint Helen's, prepare to have your socks knocked.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Off, or your lid blown.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Or your skin seared off of your your muscle.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
sixteen years to get to it.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And none of that margarine stuff are low fat. It's
like full milk fat butter. Man bread and butter stuff.
You should know salted butter even you like salted huh.
It depends what you're using it for. I like just
plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece
of like bread with butter.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's
when it matters.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, I gotcha. What's your brand?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Boy?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It depends. I mean I love to get the heat
to be that guy, but I do love to get
the local butter when we go to our farmer's market
and get it from our CSA.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
What's wrong with that?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I don't know. Can't you say, park Ca?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Can you right?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You must be a social justice warrior you buy local butter.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I do you like that? What's the stuff? The Irish
butter in the grocery store?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That's my brand? Carry Gold?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Carry Gold. That's good too, Like I've.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I've researched it, like I've literally researched the butter because
I want 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.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Yeah, I totally agree. I love carry gold. I take
that stuff camping.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, I carried it around in my pocket.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Well, I like it. You can get a tub. It's
a smaller tub, but I do like a spreadable tub
as opposed to a stick.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because
we have a cute little butter dish that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We use, so we use the sticks.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
So anyway, back to Mount Saint 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.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
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 and E put out
years ago. It had to be it was called minute
by minute colon. The eruption of Mount Saint Helen's really
(03:35):
gripping stuff. As A and E used to do. You know,
they probably still do that kind of stuff. But I
don't know 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.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, although I think it was more of like a yeah,
regional thing for this the lead up. And then also
if you were a geologist, a volcanologists, 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
(04:20):
to buy it, I mean, Mount Saint 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.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, I mean, because like you said, the Mount Saint
Helens is basically saying it's coming everyone. Would you like
to document this? Yeah, I'm telling you again it's coming,
and I'll show you in lots of different scary ways
that it's coming. And people left, people stayed, people came there,
people like tourists came to see this thing. So for sure,
(05:00):
let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeah, twenty ten was volcanoes, twenty seventeen with super volcanoes.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
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
Saint Helens is. It's a stratovolcano, 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
(05:38):
the Earth, all of 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. Yeah, but it
can't necessarily, sometimes it can, and when it can, it
just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that
(05:58):
builds the volcano in it kind of a cone shape,
which is what Mount Saint Helens was up until May eighteenth,
nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah. It's a part of the cascade arc arranged there
in the Pacific Northwest. And all of this happened and
you know, geologically speaking, pretty quickly. Yeah, it happened over
the course of about forty thousand years in the case
of Mount Saint Helens, which is pretty speedy. And Ed
helped us out with this when did a great job
on this article, and Ed points out that you know,
(06:28):
in the Pacific Northwest, that's why you see so many
you know, sort of coney mountains like that is because
of this cascade arc and how these mountains were formed,
you know, not too long ago.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe less.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Forty thousand for Saint Helens, and I think the whole
arc is less than one hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Right, So the whole thing that's driving Mount Saint Helens
and apparently also there's some other I guess volcanic mountains
in the area, like Adams. I think Mount Adams is
one is well. Yeah, there's a 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
(07:09):
a straddo volcanoes 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 Saint Helens is, that
magma starts to back up. It hits the crust and
it starts to back up below and all of a
(07:30):
sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that
makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happen.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Yeah, this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber
is well is and was quite large, and like you said,
it's 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 Saint Helens is it starts bulging, and
like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting
(08:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
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 Saint Helen's had two bulges also
called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome from previous volcanic eruptions.
(08:45):
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.
(09:08):
And that was one of the big signs initially that
something was going on. And one more thing before we
started to get into Mount Saint Helens itself, Chuck, I
think we need to say, like Mount Saint Helens was big.
It was a big eruption, but it was not the
biggest eruption Saint Helens has ever had, And apparently the
biggest eruption it's ever had came just about four thousand
(09:30):
years ago, which is within traditional like folk tale memory.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah. I mean it had been an active volcano for
forty thousand years, but the big one before nineteen eighty was. Yeah,
like you said, for I was trying to look at
a specific year, but let's just say four thousand years ago. Yeah,
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 puyall Up people, called
(10:01):
the mountain Lewittowit, 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 like decade or so, this is one
that was. It seems so like sort of egregious that
(10:24):
we should call it LeWitt and not Mount Saint Helen's.
That 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 Saint Helens in seventeen ninety two
after Captain George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell,
it should gave the name of it because of a
diplomat name. Allan fitz Herbert didn't call it fitz Herbert
(10:50):
Peak or anything like that because his noble title was
Baron Saint Helen's, thank god. But here's the rub is
that Allan fitz Herbert never even saw Mount Saint Helens,
the mountain named after him. So like, I don't know,
maybe maybe let's call this one LEWITTT Yeah, I think
that's a great idea actually, And the reason they call
(11:10):
it LeWitt that was she was named after a like
a famous volcanic fire tender woman and Lewett and a
couple of other men who fell in love with her
and fought for her became LeWitt, became Mount Saint Helens
or Lewett, if you want to call it that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
And then the other the other men who were fighting
for 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 puyol Up 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
(11:50):
Floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation
that describes this enormous eruption four thousand years ago pretty
good stuff, Yeah, for sure. And it was a big
eruption too. There's just one other thing. There is a
layer of tephra of basically volcanic ash and debris and
stuff that is so thick and so wide it goes
(12:12):
up into British Columbia and sixty two miles away from
Mount Saint Helen it's still twenty inches thick, almost two
feet thick of ash sixty two miles away. That's how
big that four thousand year ago eruption was that's huge.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And all this to say that Mount Saint Helen's, which
has an s by the way, did you know that?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah? I did.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
You keep saying, Helen. I just wondered.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I'm being short. I don't want to take up too
much time talking about certainly.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's good.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
All this to say is that Mount Saint Helen's had been,
you know, active, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
No, definitely not.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot
of eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist
named Paul Caine who painted an eighteen forty seven eruption. So,
I mean, starting in the nineteenth century, Mount Saint Helen's
was documented pretty clearly scientifically too, as being an eruptive volcano,
(13:27):
a disruptive volcano.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
You can almost say.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
All right, shall we take a break. Yeah, it's a
nice prelude, I think so too. All right, we'll be
back right after this, softy.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Josh so.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Okay. So we got a nice background on Mount Saint Helens.
It had been very active for about or on and
off active for forty thousand years, including I believe the
last sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven.
Not too long after that, in nineteen oh eight, about
a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest,
(14:23):
which was hence renamed Gifford Pinchhot or Pinchot. I never
know how to say that the Bronson Pinchot National Forest
National Forest, and that was in nineteen forty nine, and
Mount Saint 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
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right well put, so the whole thing starts. Actually even
before the whole thing started, and I saw in nineteen
seventy five the two volcanologists published a paper saying that
it was very likely Mount Saint Helens was going to
erupt in the twentieth century at some point, like a
big one.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
And five years later, on March twentieth, nineteen eighty, the
whole thing was kicked off by a four point zero 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 twenty four quakes of four point
zero or greater within eight hours. Oh man, when a
(15:47):
volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when
the geologists come running from far and wide.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah. So they you know, the word gets out, and
they did cone 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 an
e special, that there are like volcano chasers even that
they hear about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I
(16:14):
guess it's 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 Saint Helen's 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
(16:36):
Geographical Survey, and he was one of the There were
some great interviews with him in this A and E special.
He was 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 thing like
(16:58):
people need to start leaving.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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 governmental
net and 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 exactly, it's like
(17:26):
a roller rink over there. And then there was Weyerhauser
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,
(17:47):
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. Yeah, potentially, which is
(18:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
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
(18:40):
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 his sixteen cats, which is
the only part of the story. Like, hey, man, I'm
(19:02):
all for people evacuating and keep people safe, but I'm
also like some old old mountain man wants to stay
up there and go go down with a volcano. Like, yeah,
that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't say
like I'm gonna go down and kill these sixteen cats
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like you know,
medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
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 sent the cats away.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yeah, no way, not a lodge codure. So Harry Truman
will come back in. This is Harry ar Truman, by
the way, everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
He'll come back in later.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
But so the last thing that we happened on the
mountain March twenty fifth, in eight hours, there's twenty four
four point zero 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
(20:13):
one hundred miles away from Mount Saint Helens. So anybody
who had anything to do with geology just happened to
be in the area or was purposefully in the area.
And then on March twenty seventh, it's just getting more
and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
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 ashcolumn went up sixty five hundred feet into
the air.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It's nothing to sneeze it.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew
to about sixteen hundred feet wide, so it was a
major thing. There was another one on the twenty eighth,
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 upheople, mud slides, avalanches,
(21:15):
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 settled down.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
On what was that like May around the fifteenth.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah, around the fifteenth 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 know 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
(21:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
They did.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of
a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three
piece suit of canning people a pen being like signed here.
It's really hilarious, but they did. They started some people
started to trickle in, and that's actually why there were
you know, I think, And we ended up with fifty
(22:20):
seven casualties. Fifty seven people died and that was one
reason why it was actually that high. Could have 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
(22:43):
who is probably hilarious at parties because he makes like
a funny a funny voice for the police when the
police is talking, when he's recreating a conversation he had
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
(23:05):
later everything happened. You said, you said S was getting real.
This is when the s hit the fan.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this, I guess.
Let's back up one half second and let you know about, OK,
what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had
moved from their initial base at Coldwater one, which was
about I think eight or nine miles away, took their
second station, which was called cold Water two, which is
(23:33):
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
(23:55):
if you come and relieve me the next day. And
then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was
there when everything went boom.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
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 eight thirty two am
on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Mount Saint Helens like blew up.
(24:25):
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. Yeah, but that is
not what happened with Mount Saint Helens. Mount Saint Helens
was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because
(24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
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.
(25:18):
It's got pressure from below because 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 like boiling under there. But 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. Like
(25:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by
about six feet a day. That was what the it
is because like it's as violent as as you can
imagine that a bulge, and something that could make a
bulge on the side of the mountain would be and
sound under other circumstances, a pliny an eruption where volcano
(26:17):
explodes out at the top, like you typically think of
that pressure that magma's 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 Saint 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
(26:38):
kicked off Mount Saint Helens eruption wasn't the volcano. It
was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that earthquake
caused the largest landslide and recorded history on Earth. More
than half of a square mile of Mount Saint Helen's
suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped off the side
(27:00):
of the north side of the mountain.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah. And it's like, you should really go check out
the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing,
like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen, just to
see this mountain and then that you know, especially in
the ane thing, to see people interviewed describing like seeing
this with their eyeballs. It was just like it was
(27:22):
incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large
and part of it just going away immediately.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
And one of the reasons they were able to witness it,
and we have such great documentations because at eight thirty
two am, a pair of geologists husband and wife geologists,
happened to be flying in a plane. Yeah, because they'd
hired a plane to go look at Mount Saint Helens
because they'd heard that, you know, it was there's some
stuff going on, and they happened to make one more
pass right as the mountain that earthquake dropped the side
(27:53):
of the mountain. They were like right above it in
a plane.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
As a matter of.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Fact, Yeah, what's where's your quote? Should we read that?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:00):
This is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel in twenty nineteen. She said,
the whole north half of the mountain that we were
flying just five hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper
opening along the mountain.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
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 and funny voices,
and volcano chasers like they got some like some one
guy got like twenty two 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
(28:48):
with their two young daughters. Oh Man, and that guy.
They were you know on the north side, you know,
well below it, but you know, within the range. And
he was like, you know, speaking to how it didn't
blow from the top, he said, it looked like somebody
shot a shotgun right out of the side of this
mountain pointed at us. So ash was raining down, but
(29:09):
it was raining like at people unless down from the
sky right exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It
was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north
of the mountain.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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.
(29:46):
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 within incredible force.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, and that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
That's why Mount Saint Helens blew out the side rather
than the top, because there had been a weakening and
the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out
and blow.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Out it did.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
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 twenty
four mega ton blast, which I know everyone always tries
to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was sixteen hundred
(30:37):
times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Good lord, but I mean that's what it would take
to move zero point six square cubic miles of mountain
all of a sudden too, you know. Yeah, and that
blast chuck, that twenty four mega ton blast. It was
described as like a fast moving cloud of heat in stones,
moving at some points pretty close to the mountain three
(31:04):
hundred miles an hour. He did to like six hundred
and sixty degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three hundred
and eighty 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,
(31:24):
David Johnston's cold Water to camp was within about five miles.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
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 Aria Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously,
(31:55):
Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen 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.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
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, he said, gentlemen, the camper
and the car that's sitting over to the south of me.
He was talking about David Johnston is covered is going
(32:38):
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 one hundred foot trees that were like ten twelve
(32:58):
feet in diameter just completely flatten and also denuded.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Of any bark on the way as well.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And this was just a blast that the landslide that
was created from the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption
that had in some incredible effects as well.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
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 mud slides, and you
have a word that I had never even heard of before.
Ed included it in here, which was Lahar, which sounds
(33:40):
like just a mud slide on steroids. Yeah, like a
mudside carrying ammunition with it. 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.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
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 five hundred and fifty
eight feet or seven hundred and seventy meters across. Wow,
that's as big as a fifty story building. It was
moving rocks that size just fast as you can imagine,
(34:16):
down the mountain into the valleys. And I saw it
described as if you were watching it from a ridge,
as some.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
People were, like far away.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
You would see the cloud 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
(34:45):
actually there watching this happen.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Crazy.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
It is crazy. You want to take a break.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit
more about the after effects right after this.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, and we're back, And as Chuck promised everyone, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
After effect time.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Well, we talked a little bit about it. 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
(35:47):
such that the outlet was basically dammed up, and so
the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced
its depth by about eighty 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
two hundred miles of road and railways were completely obliterated.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, I also saw that lake was now two hundred
feet higher in elevation than it had been before, as
if like there was so much debris it like raised
the lake two hundred feet, even though it also made
it shallow or it's nuts.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount
Saint Helens.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Right, yeah, I can't remember. I think by like six
hundred 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 Saint Helens today or especially like right afterward, it
turned into like an amphitheater. Yeah, like the north side
(36:47):
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 Saint Helens. One of the
more positive ones is I saw it described as like
a crash course for volcanologists, Malls and everybody who are
now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in,
and that the eruption, because it was the lateral blast,
(37:09):
opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain
that they could study. Now it's past history from the
inside out, which I thought was pretty neat.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
And a young tray Anastasia said, one day I shall
play at the bates of that amphitheater. Oh did he
and bore people with noodling on.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
My guitar they played there?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there.
I was just kidding.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh wow, that was just completely made.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
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 you know, just equipment not working, electrical ottages
and blacks and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. As
(38:05):
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 it ash will help promote
rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently
wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah, that was surprising.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, I also saw and 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 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,
(38:49):
fungi that had survived just fine. And we're among the
first to recolonize, and we're part of the reason why
Mount Saint Helen's ecosystem started to bound so quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
I mean, that's what'll happen, right if the Earth ever
just burns up into a fiery ball, that'll just become
a big mushroom field, right.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Probably, and then the animals that lived underground will come
above ground and say it's our.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Time, baby. I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
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 plinium 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 eighty thousand feet
(39:40):
into the air, and it was moving so fast that
it circled the globe in fifteen days, came back to
square one in fifteen 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?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, weren't you stranded by that or something. No, Okay,
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Okay, It like they knew what to do in part
because of how Mount Saint Helen's affected air travel at
the time. They were like, this is brand new to us,
but it helped lay the ground work for understanding what
to look for, how to deal with that kind of
stuff later on.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah. The 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 like re routed you know,
the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, but
it looks like it looks like a logging operation is happening. Yeah,
(40:38):
and like you could almost and may have been able.
Well obviously it's been too dangerous, but it looks like
you could have walked over these logs. They were so
like packed and these were just trees, you know, an
hour before.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, if you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yeah, you could have probably made it across the light.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
We could have, but they're in that minute by minute.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
But so there was a pair of like high school
sweethearts who've been camping. Yeah, and they had a harrowing
experience because they both got thrown into Spirit Lake and
the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend is 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
(41:20):
were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
They were in their car.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Oh, that's how they got in the lake. They were
in their car. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
They said it just picked them up and all they
were driving and then they were floating and they said
that they're you know there, she said, like my instinct
was to get out of the car, but there was
like nowhere to go.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Right yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
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 Stoffel,
who was the geologist that was flying. I guess was
her husband Keith or was that her brother her husband Keith?
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Okay, they survived that plane flight like they got out
of there. There were stories of people that literally it
was like it from a movie, drove, you know, one
hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running this
ash debris slide coming out right.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
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 in the blasts just caught
up with him and buried him in the in the
ash and he probably died pretty much instantly. But like again,
that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a
(42:43):
house just flowing down like a newly engorged mud slidey 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 doc documented volcanic eruptions of all times.
So there's really amazing footage on there or just on
(43:06):
the internet, is what I mean. But that wasn't the
last time that Mount Saint Helens has erupted. I think
it erupted a few times between nineteen eighty and maybe
nineteen ninety six, I think, yeah, and then the biggest
one recently was between two thousand and four and two
thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
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 on how
it reforms on top of it. But this time, apparently
(43:46):
there are there are more ways for this pressure to
be released. So I think it's just sort of the
pressures being released a little more gradually since the two thousand.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And four that's my impression too.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yeah, we just don't know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Now, but they are studying it. Like there there's a
lot of active research and study going on at Mount
Saint Helens now.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
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 two thousand and four activity
basically ran from two thousand and four to two thousand
and eight. Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely.
So there's amazing time lapse footage of those four years,
(44:43):
and it's astounding how fast and how big Mount Saint
Helens just grows from that eruption activity called time lapse
Images of Mount Saint Helen's dome growth. It's on YouTube
and I recommend checking that as well.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, I would just be careful when you google dome growth.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Or bulge growth.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
So man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (45:12):
And by we I mean me?
Speaker 3 (45:14):
No, me too.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
But like we said, Mount Saint Helens bounce back, Spirit
Lake open back up and the cold Water two station
has been renamed after David Johnston and there's an amazing
memorial too. I saw on some trip Advisor post that
somebody so that it was like the one of the best,
like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that
the person's ever been to.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
So I would like to go there, Right, You got
anything else?
Speaker 3 (45:42):
I got nothing else? All?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Right, we go.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Forth and research Mount Saint Helen's with an S. And
you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak. Since
I said Dante's Peak, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
This is following up on an email that you particularly
from our spectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly enjoying the most
recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius. Megal, do you
want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect I'm
going to bring Migal back every now and then. By
the way, I just want to prepare you in the audience.
(46:19):
I wanted to address a couple of eighteen hundred's diction
issues that cause some puzzlement when you got talked about
toilet It's basically what Josh said. I've always thought of
it as a refreshing as freshening up in the bathroom,
washing her 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.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Yeah, sure. On the other hand, the strangers in the
beverage from the toll House is a lot more puzzling. Yes,
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
(47:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
By the way, yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are
considered omens that you will 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,
(47:35):
using tea leaves to predict the future. By the way,
other omens can also be strangers, like unburned candlewicks or
soot on grates. I've loved the show for years, look
forward to many more. That is a great email. Nat
Jacob's fantastic sleuthing yep, and we are super grateful.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
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.
But I mean that was really hard like you. 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
(48:14):
like Nat and get in touch with us in the
best way possible, you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Everyone. It's Josh.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
For this week's s YSK Selects. I've chosen our January
twenty twenty three episode on the Mount Saint Helen's eruption.
It 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,
(00:23):
so I hope you enjoy it as well.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry
today is our great friend and co producer Dave Sea,
and the C stands for cool. Say hello Dave, Hi, everybody,
that's pretty. That's a really great Dave impression.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
He's a troll.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, I always hear him.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
As Dave is great. I wish you all knew him,
but we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have
to take our word for it. That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have
to say to all the people who don't know much
about Mount Saint Helen's, prepare to have your socks knocked.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Off, or your lid blown.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Or your skin seared off of your your muscle.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
sixteen years to get to it.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And none of that margarine stuff are low fat. It's
like full milk fat butter. Man bread and butter stuff.
You should know salted butter even you like salted huh.
It depends what you're using it for. I like just
plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece
of like bread with butter.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's
when it matters.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, I gotcha. What's your brand?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Boy?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It depends. I mean I love to get the heat
to be that guy, but I do love to get
the local butter when we go to our farmer's market
and get it from our CSA.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
What's wrong with that?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I don't know. Can't you say, park Ca?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Can you right?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
You must be a social justice warrior you buy local butter.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I do you like that? What's the stuff? The Irish
butter in the grocery store?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That's my brand? Carry Gold?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Carry Gold. That's good too, Like I've.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I've researched it, like I've literally researched the butter because
I want 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.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Yeah, I totally agree. I love carry gold. I take
that stuff camping.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, I carried it around in my pocket.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Well, I like it. You can get a tub. It's
a smaller tub, but I do like a spreadable tub
as opposed to a stick.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because
we have a cute little butter dish that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We use, so we use the sticks.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
So anyway, back to Mount Saint 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.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
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 and E put out
years ago. It had to be it was called minute
by minute colon. The eruption of Mount Saint Helen's really
(03:35):
gripping stuff. As A and E used to do. You know,
they probably still do that kind of stuff. But I
don't know 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.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, although I think it was more of like a yeah,
regional thing for this the lead up. And then also
if you were a geologist, a volcanologists, 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
(04:20):
to buy it, I mean, Mount Saint 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.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, I mean, because like you said, the Mount Saint
Helens is basically saying it's coming everyone. Would you like
to document this? Yeah, I'm telling you again it's coming,
and I'll show you in lots of different scary ways
that it's coming. And people left, people stayed, people came there,
people like tourists came to see this thing. So for sure,
(05:00):
let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeah, twenty ten was volcanoes, twenty seventeen with super volcanoes.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
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
Saint Helens is. It's a stratovolcano, 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
(05:38):
the Earth, all of 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. Yeah, but it
can't necessarily, sometimes it can, and when it can, it
just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that
(05:58):
builds the volcano in it kind of a cone shape,
which is what Mount Saint Helens was up until May eighteenth,
nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah. It's a part of the cascade arc arranged there
in the Pacific Northwest. And all of this happened and
you know, geologically speaking, pretty quickly. Yeah, it happened over
the course of about forty thousand years in the case
of Mount Saint Helens, which is pretty speedy. And Ed
helped us out with this when did a great job
on this article, and Ed points out that you know,
(06:28):
in the Pacific Northwest, that's why you see so many
you know, sort of coney mountains like that is because
of this cascade arc and how these mountains were formed,
you know, not too long ago.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe less.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Forty thousand for Saint Helens, and I think the whole
arc is less than one hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Right, So the whole thing that's driving Mount Saint Helens
and apparently also there's some other I guess volcanic mountains
in the area, like Adams. I think Mount Adams is
one is well. Yeah, there's a 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
(07:09):
a straddo volcanoes 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 Saint Helens is, that
magma starts to back up. It hits the crust and
it starts to back up below and all of a
(07:30):
sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that
makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happen.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Yeah, this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber
is well is and was quite large, and like you said,
it's 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 Saint Helens is it starts bulging, and
like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting
(08:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
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 Saint Helen's had two bulges also
called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome from previous volcanic eruptions.
(08:45):
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.
(09:08):
And that was one of the big signs initially that
something was going on. And one more thing before we
started to get into Mount Saint Helens itself, Chuck, I
think we need to say, like Mount Saint Helens was big.
It was a big eruption, but it was not the
biggest eruption Saint Helens has ever had, And apparently the
biggest eruption it's ever had came just about four thousand
(09:30):
years ago, which is within traditional like folk tale memory.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah. I mean it had been an active volcano for
forty thousand years, but the big one before nineteen eighty was. Yeah,
like you said, for I was trying to look at
a specific year, but let's just say four thousand years ago. Yeah,
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 puyall Up people, called
(10:01):
the mountain Lewittowit, 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 like decade or so, this is one
that was. It seems so like sort of egregious that
(10:24):
we should call it LeWitt and not Mount Saint Helen's.
That 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 Saint Helens in seventeen ninety two
after Captain George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell,
it should gave the name of it because of a
diplomat name. Allan fitz Herbert didn't call it fitz Herbert
(10:50):
Peak or anything like that because his noble title was
Baron Saint Helen's, thank god. But here's the rub is
that Allan fitz Herbert never even saw Mount Saint Helens,
the mountain named after him. So like, I don't know,
maybe maybe let's call this one LEWITTT Yeah, I think
that's a great idea actually, And the reason they call
(11:10):
it LeWitt that was she was named after a like
a famous volcanic fire tender woman and Lewett and a
couple of other men who fell in love with her
and fought for her became LeWitt, became Mount Saint Helens
or Lewett, if you want to call it that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
And then the other the other men who were fighting
for 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 puyol Up 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
(11:50):
Floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation
that describes this enormous eruption four thousand years ago pretty
good stuff, Yeah, for sure. And it was a big
eruption too. There's just one other thing. There is a
layer of tephra of basically volcanic ash and debris and
stuff that is so thick and so wide it goes
(12:12):
up into British Columbia and sixty two miles away from
Mount Saint Helen it's still twenty inches thick, almost two
feet thick of ash sixty two miles away. That's how
big that four thousand year ago eruption was that's huge.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And all this to say that Mount Saint Helen's, which
has an s by the way, did you know that?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah? I did.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
You keep saying, Helen. I just wondered.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I'm being short. I don't want to take up too
much time talking about certainly.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's good.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
All this to say is that Mount Saint Helen's had been,
you know, active, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
No, definitely not.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot
of eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist
named Paul Caine who painted an eighteen forty seven eruption. So,
I mean, starting in the nineteenth century, Mount Saint Helen's
was documented pretty clearly scientifically too, as being an eruptive volcano,
(13:27):
a disruptive volcano.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
You can almost say.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
All right, shall we take a break. Yeah, it's a
nice prelude, I think so too. All right, we'll be
back right after this, softy.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Josh so.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Okay. So we got a nice background on Mount Saint Helens.
It had been very active for about or on and
off active for forty thousand years, including I believe the
last sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven.
Not too long after that, in nineteen oh eight, about
a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest,
(14:23):
which was hence renamed Gifford Pinchhot or Pinchot. I never
know how to say that the Bronson Pinchot National Forest
National Forest, and that was in nineteen forty nine, and
Mount Saint 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
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right well put, so the whole thing starts. Actually even
before the whole thing started, and I saw in nineteen
seventy five the two volcanologists published a paper saying that
it was very likely Mount Saint Helens was going to
erupt in the twentieth century at some point, like a
big one.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
And five years later, on March twentieth, nineteen eighty, the
whole thing was kicked off by a four point zero 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 twenty four quakes of four point
zero or greater within eight hours. Oh man, when a
(15:47):
volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when
the geologists come running from far and wide.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah. So they you know, the word gets out, and
they did cone 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 an
e special, that there are like volcano chasers even that
they hear about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I
(16:14):
guess it's 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 Saint Helen's 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
(16:36):
Geographical Survey, and he was one of the There were
some great interviews with him in this A and E special.
He was 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 thing like
(16:58):
people need to start leaving.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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 governmental
net and 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 exactly, it's like
(17:26):
a roller rink over there. And then there was Weyerhauser
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,
(17:47):
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. Yeah, potentially, which is
(18:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
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
(18:40):
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 his sixteen cats, which is
the only part of the story. Like, hey, man, I'm
(19:02):
all for people evacuating and keep people safe, but I'm
also like some old old mountain man wants to stay
up there and go go down with a volcano. Like, yeah,
that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't say
like I'm gonna go down and kill these sixteen cats
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like you know,
medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
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 sent the cats away.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yeah, no way, not a lodge codure. So Harry Truman
will come back in. This is Harry ar Truman, by
the way, everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
He'll come back in later.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
But so the last thing that we happened on the
mountain March twenty fifth, in eight hours, there's twenty four
four point zero 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
(20:13):
one hundred miles away from Mount Saint Helens. So anybody
who had anything to do with geology just happened to
be in the area or was purposefully in the area.
And then on March twenty seventh, it's just getting more
and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
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 ashcolumn went up sixty five hundred feet into
the air.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It's nothing to sneeze it.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew
to about sixteen hundred feet wide, so it was a
major thing. There was another one on the twenty eighth,
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 upheople, mud slides, avalanches,
(21:15):
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 settled down.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
On what was that like May around the fifteenth.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah, around the fifteenth 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 know 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
(21:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
They did.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of
a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three
piece suit of canning people a pen being like signed here.
It's really hilarious, but they did. They started some people
started to trickle in, and that's actually why there were
you know, I think, And we ended up with fifty
(22:20):
seven casualties. Fifty seven people died and that was one
reason why it was actually that high. Could have 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
(22:43):
who is probably hilarious at parties because he makes like
a funny a funny voice for the police when the
police is talking, when he's recreating a conversation he had
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
(23:05):
later everything happened. You said, you said S was getting real.
This is when the s hit the fan.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this, I guess.
Let's back up one half second and let you know about, OK,
what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had
moved from their initial base at Coldwater one, which was
about I think eight or nine miles away, took their
second station, which was called cold Water two, which is
(23:33):
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
(23:55):
if you come and relieve me the next day. And
then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was
there when everything went boom.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
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 eight thirty two am
on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Mount Saint Helens like blew up.
(24:25):
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. Yeah, but that is
not what happened with Mount Saint Helens. Mount Saint Helens
was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because
(24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
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.
(25:18):
It's got pressure from below because 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 like boiling under there. But 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. Like
(25:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by
about six feet a day. That was what the it
is because like it's as violent as as you can
imagine that a bulge, and something that could make a
bulge on the side of the mountain would be and
sound under other circumstances, a pliny an eruption where volcano
(26:17):
explodes out at the top, like you typically think of
that pressure that magma's 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 Saint 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
(26:38):
kicked off Mount Saint Helens eruption wasn't the volcano. It
was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that earthquake
caused the largest landslide and recorded history on Earth. More
than half of a square mile of Mount Saint Helen's
suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped off the side
(27:00):
of the north side of the mountain.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah. And it's like, you should really go check out
the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing,
like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen, just to
see this mountain and then that you know, especially in
the ane thing, to see people interviewed describing like seeing
this with their eyeballs. It was just like it was
(27:22):
incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large
and part of it just going away immediately.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
And one of the reasons they were able to witness it,
and we have such great documentations because at eight thirty
two am, a pair of geologists husband and wife geologists,
happened to be flying in a plane. Yeah, because they'd
hired a plane to go look at Mount Saint Helens
because they'd heard that, you know, it was there's some
stuff going on, and they happened to make one more
pass right as the mountain that earthquake dropped the side
(27:53):
of the mountain. They were like right above it in
a plane.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
As a matter of.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Fact, Yeah, what's where's your quote? Should we read that?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:00):
This is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel in twenty nineteen. She said,
the whole north half of the mountain that we were
flying just five hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper
opening along the mountain.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
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 and funny voices,
and volcano chasers like they got some like some one
guy got like twenty two 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
(28:48):
with their two young daughters. Oh Man, and that guy.
They were you know on the north side, you know,
well below it, but you know, within the range. And
he was like, you know, speaking to how it didn't
blow from the top, he said, it looked like somebody
shot a shotgun right out of the side of this
mountain pointed at us. So ash was raining down, but
(29:09):
it was raining like at people unless down from the
sky right exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It
was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north
of the mountain.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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.
(29:46):
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 within incredible force.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, and that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
That's why Mount Saint Helens blew out the side rather
than the top, because there had been a weakening and
the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out
and blow.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Out it did.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
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 twenty
four mega ton blast, which I know everyone always tries
to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was sixteen hundred
(30:37):
times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Good lord, but I mean that's what it would take
to move zero point six square cubic miles of mountain
all of a sudden too, you know. Yeah, and that
blast chuck, that twenty four mega ton blast. It was
described as like a fast moving cloud of heat in stones,
moving at some points pretty close to the mountain three
(31:04):
hundred miles an hour. He did to like six hundred
and sixty degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three hundred
and eighty 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,
(31:24):
David Johnston's cold Water to camp was within about five miles.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
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 Aria Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously,
(31:55):
Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen 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.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
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, he said, gentlemen, the camper
and the car that's sitting over to the south of me.
He was talking about David Johnston is covered is going
(32:38):
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 one hundred foot trees that were like ten twelve
(32:58):
feet in diameter just completely flatten and also denuded.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Of any bark on the way as well.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And this was just a blast that the landslide that
was created from the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption
that had in some incredible effects as well.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
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 mud slides, and you
have a word that I had never even heard of before.
Ed included it in here, which was Lahar, which sounds
(33:40):
like just a mud slide on steroids. Yeah, like a
mudside carrying ammunition with it. 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.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
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 five hundred and fifty
eight feet or seven hundred and seventy meters across. Wow,
that's as big as a fifty story building. It was
moving rocks that size just fast as you can imagine,
(34:16):
down the mountain into the valleys. And I saw it
described as if you were watching it from a ridge,
as some.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
People were, like far away.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
You would see the cloud 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
(34:45):
actually there watching this happen.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Crazy.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
It is crazy. You want to take a break.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit
more about the after effects right after this.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, and we're back, And as Chuck promised everyone, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
After effect time.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Well, we talked a little bit about it. 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
(35:47):
such that the outlet was basically dammed up, and so
the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced
its depth by about eighty 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
two hundred miles of road and railways were completely obliterated.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, I also saw that lake was now two hundred
feet higher in elevation than it had been before, as
if like there was so much debris it like raised
the lake two hundred feet, even though it also made
it shallow or it's nuts.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount
Saint Helens.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Right, yeah, I can't remember. I think by like six
hundred 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 Saint Helens today or especially like right afterward, it
turned into like an amphitheater. Yeah, like the north side
(36:47):
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 Saint Helens. One of the
more positive ones is I saw it described as like
a crash course for volcanologists, Malls and everybody who are
now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in,
and that the eruption, because it was the lateral blast,
(37:09):
opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain
that they could study. Now it's past history from the
inside out, which I thought was pretty neat.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
And a young tray Anastasia said, one day I shall
play at the bates of that amphitheater. Oh did he
and bore people with noodling on.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
My guitar they played there?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there.
I was just kidding.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh wow, that was just completely made.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
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 you know, just equipment not working, electrical ottages
and blacks and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. As
(38:05):
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 it ash will help promote
rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently
wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah, that was surprising.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, I also saw and 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 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,
(38:49):
fungi that had survived just fine. And we're among the
first to recolonize, and we're part of the reason why
Mount Saint Helen's ecosystem started to bound so quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
I mean, that's what'll happen, right if the Earth ever
just burns up into a fiery ball, that'll just become
a big mushroom field, right.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Probably, and then the animals that lived underground will come
above ground and say it's our.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Time, baby. I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
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 plinium 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 eighty thousand feet
(39:40):
into the air, and it was moving so fast that
it circled the globe in fifteen days, came back to
square one in fifteen 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?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, weren't you stranded by that or something. No, Okay,
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Okay, It like they knew what to do in part
because of how Mount Saint Helen's affected air travel at
the time. They were like, this is brand new to us,
but it helped lay the ground work for understanding what
to look for, how to deal with that kind of
stuff later on.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah. The 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 like re routed you know,
the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, but
it looks like it looks like a logging operation is happening. Yeah,
(40:38):
and like you could almost and may have been able.
Well obviously it's been too dangerous, but it looks like
you could have walked over these logs. They were so
like packed and these were just trees, you know, an
hour before.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, if you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yeah, you could have probably made it across the light.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
We could have, but they're in that minute by minute.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
But so there was a pair of like high school
sweethearts who've been camping. Yeah, and they had a harrowing
experience because they both got thrown into Spirit Lake and
the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend is 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
(41:20):
were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
They were in their car.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Oh, that's how they got in the lake. They were
in their car. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
They said it just picked them up and all they
were driving and then they were floating and they said
that they're you know there, she said, like my instinct
was to get out of the car, but there was
like nowhere to go.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Right yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
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 Stoffel,
who was the geologist that was flying. I guess was
her husband Keith or was that her brother her husband Keith?
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Okay, they survived that plane flight like they got out
of there. There were stories of people that literally it
was like it from a movie, drove, you know, one
hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running this
ash debris slide coming out right.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
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 in the blasts just caught
up with him and buried him in the in the
ash and he probably died pretty much instantly. But like again,
that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a
(42:43):
house just flowing down like a newly engorged mud slidey 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 doc documented volcanic eruptions of all times.
So there's really amazing footage on there or just on
(43:06):
the internet, is what I mean. But that wasn't the
last time that Mount Saint Helens has erupted. I think
it erupted a few times between nineteen eighty and maybe
nineteen ninety six, I think, yeah, and then the biggest
one recently was between two thousand and four and two
thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
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 on how
it reforms on top of it. But this time, apparently
(43:46):
there are there are more ways for this pressure to
be released. So I think it's just sort of the
pressures being released a little more gradually since the two thousand.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And four that's my impression too.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yeah, we just don't know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Now, but they are studying it. Like there there's a
lot of active research and study going on at Mount
Saint Helens now.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
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 two thousand and four activity
basically ran from two thousand and four to two thousand
and eight. Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely.
So there's amazing time lapse footage of those four years,
(44:43):
and it's astounding how fast and how big Mount Saint
Helens just grows from that eruption activity called time lapse
Images of Mount Saint Helen's dome growth. It's on YouTube
and I recommend checking that as well.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, I would just be careful when you google dome growth.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Or bulge growth.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
So man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (45:12):
And by we I mean me?
Speaker 3 (45:14):
No, me too.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
But like we said, Mount Saint Helens bounce back, Spirit
Lake open back up and the cold Water two station
has been renamed after David Johnston and there's an amazing
memorial too. I saw on some trip Advisor post that
somebody so that it was like the one of the best,
like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that
the person's ever been to.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
So I would like to go there, Right, You got
anything else?
Speaker 3 (45:42):
I got nothing else? All?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Right, we go.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Forth and research Mount Saint Helen's with an S. And
you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak. Since
I said Dante's Peak, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
This is following up on an email that you particularly
from our spectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly enjoying the most
recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius. Megal, do you
want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect I'm
going to bring Migal back every now and then. By
the way, I just want to prepare you in the audience.
(46:19):
I wanted to address a couple of eighteen hundred's diction
issues that cause some puzzlement when you got talked about
toilet It's basically what Josh said. I've always thought of
it as a refreshing as freshening up in the bathroom,
washing her 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.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Yeah, sure. On the other hand, the strangers in the
beverage from the toll House is a lot more puzzling. Yes,
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
(47:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
By the way, yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are
considered omens that you will 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,
(47:35):
using tea leaves to predict the future. By the way,
other omens can also be strangers, like unburned candlewicks or
soot on grates. I've loved the show for years, look
forward to many more. That is a great email. Nat
Jacob's fantastic sleuthing yep, and we are super grateful.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
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.
But I mean that was really hard like you. 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
(48:14):
like Nat and get in touch with us in the
best way possible, you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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