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!
Everyone. It's Josh.
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, so I hope you enjoy it as well.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry today is our great friend and co producer Dave Sea, and the C stands for cool. Say hello Dave, Hi, everybody, that's pretty. That's a really great Dave impression.
He's a troll.
Yes, I always hear him.
As Dave is great. I wish you all knew him, but we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have to take our word for it. That's right.
Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to all the people who don't know much about Mount Saint Helen's, prepare to have your socks knocked.
Off, or your lid blown.
Or your skin seared off of your your muscle.
Yeah, this is a good one. This is I mean, this is so bread and butter stuff. You should know it is. I don't know why it took us almost sixteen years to get to it.
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.
Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's when it matters.
Yeah, I gotcha. What's your brand?
Oh?
Boy?
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.
What's wrong with that?
Well, I don't know. Can't you say, park Ca?
Can you right?
You must be a social justice warrior you buy local butter.
I do you like that? What's the stuff? The Irish butter in the grocery store?
That's my brand? Carry Gold?
Carry Gold. That's good too, Like I've.
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.
Yeah, I totally agree. I love carry gold. I take that stuff camping.
Yeah, I carried it around in my pocket.
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.
I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because we have a cute little butter dish that.
We use, so we use the sticks.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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, let's get into it.
Okay, So just a real quick refresher, we've done volcanoes, and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that sounds like us.
Yeah, twenty ten was volcanoes, twenty seventeen with super volcanoes.
Okay.
So we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in those episodes, So if you want to know a lot more in depth, go check those out. But just as a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that mount 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 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 builds the volcano in it kind of a cone shape, which is what Mount Saint Helens was up until May eighteenth, nineteen eighty.
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, 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.
Right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe less.
Forty thousand for Saint Helens, and I think the whole arc is less than one hundred.
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 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 sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happen.
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 to see this happen, even though it's very scary and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountain start to bulge out in a direction and we're talking, you know, hundreds of feet of bulge over the course of a pretty short period of time, then it's pretty like it's a pretty notable thing. And that's exactly what was happening in the case of the magma chamber there in Washington.
Yeah, like this pressure is building up so much it's causing a boil on the mountain. The mountain grows a goiter basically, and that's just full of pressure and magma just waiting to go off. It doesn't always go off, And in fact, Mount Saint Helen's had two bulges also called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome from previous volcanic eruptions. One was called Goat Rocks bulge and then the other one was called the Sugar Bowl bulge, and they just never like the magma found its way out other ways, but the bulge was left. This is a new bulge, and like you said, it was growing I think about six feet a day. Every day it kept growing another six feet, which is really fast for a mountain to grow. And that was one of the big signs initially that 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 years ago, which is within traditional like folk tale memory.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
And all this to say that Mount Saint Helen's, which has an s by the way, did you know that?
Yeah? I did.
You keep saying, Helen. I just wondered.
I'm being short. I don't want to take up too much time talking about certainly.
That's good.
That reminds me of the guy in college who fell on the sidewalk and his books splayed out and then he acted like he was reading.
Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.
All this to say is that Mount 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.
No, definitely not.
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, a disruptive volcano.
You can almost say.
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.
Josh so.
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, 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 and suburbs and stuff like that. But there was something or is still something called Spirit Lake there near the base of the mountain, which is they have like youth camps there, People had cabins here and there. There were recreational activities that all over the place. So it's not like no one was there, but it wasn't heavily populated.
Right well put, so the whole thing starts. Actually even before the whole thing started, and I saw in 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.
Yeah.
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 volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when the geologists come running from far and wide.
Yeah. So they you know, the word gets out, and they did 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 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 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 people need to start leaving.
Yeah, Like the thing is is there were the people who did live on the mountain were not the kind of folk who listened to like you know, the 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 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, 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 pretty cool. I mean, and everything I've seen about him, he was a genuinely great person and also like a really great pioneer in volcanology too.
Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah. They did eventually set up what they called a red zone, and a lot of people did evacuate. There were some notable people who didn't. Certainly, we need to mention Harry Truman obviously not the president, but he was this old codger who ran the lodge there, and he became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his nose and stayed and said, you know, I'm a part of this place. It's a part of me. If the mountain goes, I'm going to go with it. Art Carney played him in the movie version. He got a lot of media attention along with his sixteen cats, which is the only part of the story. Like, hey, man, I'm all for people evacuating and keep people safe, but I'm also like some old 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.
Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like you know, medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.
Yeah. I just I don't know. Man. Once I heard about the cats, because I was all into this guy, right, and then I heard about the cats, I was like, oh, dude, you should have at least sent the cats away.
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.
He'll come back in later.
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 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.
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.
It's nothing to sneeze it.
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, 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.
On what was that like May around the fifteenth.
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 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.
They did.
There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three piece suit 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 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 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 later everything happened. You said, you said S was getting real. This is when the s hit the fan.
Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this, I guess. Let's back up one half second and let you know about, 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 about five to six miles from the mountain, And notably it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to be the wrong spot to be. But you know, these guys knew what was going on. They know it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping taking shifts, and Don Swanson got the call from Johnston and he said, hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow if you come and relieve me the next day. And then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was there when everything went boom.
Yeah, and I think there have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around cold Water too, and Johnston sent them away. He's like, this is outside the red zone. It's still potentially dangerous. There's no reason for more than just one of us to be here at a time. So you guys go So at eight thirty two am on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Mount Saint Helens like blew up. And there's like a typical idea that people have of a volcano going off, and most of the time it's shooting like a huge thing of ash and magma straight into the air from its top. Yeah, but that is not what happened with Mount Saint Helens. Mount Saint Helens was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because it didn't go out of the top. It came out of the side, and it came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption. Yeah.
So you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is building up a lot under the surface. There's a lot of moisture down there. Some of it was, like you mentioned, from that initial plate subduction, that's called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular old groundwater from rain and snow and everything. Because it is the mountains, that's called meteoric water, and all of that stuff is just heating up. It's got pressure from below because it's heating, it's got pressure from above because all of that weight of the rock 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 steam is expansive and it can't expand So it's just this superheated, beyond the boiling point level of liquid that's just distributed all throughout the upper half and notably sort of the north side of this mountain.
Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by about six feet a day. That was what the 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 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 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 of the north side of the mountain.
Yeah. And it's like, you should really go check out the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing, 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 incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large and part of it just going away immediately.
Yeah.
And one of the reasons they were able to witness it, and we have such great 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 of the mountain. They were like right above it in a plane.
As a matter of.
Fact, Yeah, what's where's your quote? Should we read that?
Yeah?
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.
Amazing.
I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper opening along the mountain.
Yeah. And you know, there were amateur photographers around for some of this stuff. Some of these hikers like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story 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 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 it was raining like at people unless down from the sky right exactly.
It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain.
Yeah.
And the reason why the north of the mountain was so dangerous is because that's where that hump had been. That's also where the earthquake moved a good portion of the mountain, which meant that all that pressure that was keeping that pressurized, superheated water from boiling under the mountain was suddenly exposed. It was that pressure was gone, and so all of that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam. And when that happens, that expands, Like you said, The reason that one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation is because it's too expansive. When it does have the chance to expand, it does so within incredible force.
Yeah, and that's what happened.
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.
Out it did.
Yeah, I mean it was If you look at it, it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something. It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast that you might think of in your head. It happened kind of all at once, and it was a twenty four mega ton blast, which I know everyone always tries to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was sixteen hundred times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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 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, David Johnston's cold Water to camp was within about five miles.
Yeah, he obviously didn't make it. They found I think they found pieces of his trailer. Like a decade later. He had time to send out one signal which was over his radio Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only person to pick that up was a Ham radio operator nearby, and they renamed that Aria Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously, 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.
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 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 feet in diameter just completely flatten and also denuded.
Of any bark on the way as well.
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.
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 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.
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, down the mountain into the valleys. And I saw it described as if you were watching it from a ridge, as some.
People were, like far away.
You would see the cloud the debris starting to come at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then all of a sudden, it would come up over the ridge and keep going. It was just filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's just it's unimaginable trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier that some people were actually there watching this happen.
Crazy.
It is crazy. You want to take a break.
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the after effects right after this.
Okay, and we're back, And as Chuck promised everyone, it's.
After effect time.
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 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.
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.
And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount Saint Helens.
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 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, 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.
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.
My guitar they played there?
No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there. I was just kidding.
Oh wow, that was just completely made.
I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish.
I'm with you.
So ash is raining down and out. It literally darkened the skies. When this ash, if you were close enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. If you're far away, it can just create a lot of problems, everything from you know, just equipment not working, electrical ottages and blacks and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. As far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out by this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them did a little bit better because they just got a little bit of the ash and it ash will help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well.
Yeah, that was surprising.
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, 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.
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.
Probably, and then the animals that lived underground will come above ground and say it's our.
Time, baby. I'll look forward to that.
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 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?
Yeah, weren't you stranded by that or something. No, Okay, I don't think so.
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.
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, 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.
Yeah, if you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing.
Yeah, you could have probably made it across the light.
We could have, but they're in that minute by minute.
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 were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody.
They were in their car.
Oh, that's how they got in the lake. They were in their car. Yeah.
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.
Right yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them.
Right yeah. And this is you know, these are just sort of That's what's so cool about the special is it really brought in the human element of these people that were around there, right and they you know, they all survived because they were being interviewed. Obviously Dorothy Stoffel, who was the geologist that was flying. I guess was her husband Keith or was that her brother her husband Keith?
Oh?
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
And four that's my impression too.
But they do say that like, oh no, like it will happen again, like things are there is a new lava dome growing, and the pressure is going to build up, and it could be in a thousand years or it could be in ten years.
Yeah, we just don't know.
Now, but they are studying it. Like there there's a lot of active research and study going on at Mount Saint Helens now.
Yeah, I believe, you know, the eruption was such a big deal that they've opened the USGS opened a research station nearby, and also that 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, 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.
Yeah, I would just be careful when you google dome growth.
Or bulge growth.
Oh boy.
So man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we?
Sure?
And by we I mean me?
No, me too.
But like we said, Mount 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.
So I would like to go there, Right, You got anything else?
I got nothing else? All?
Right, we go.
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.
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. 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.
Okay, that makes sense.
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 of the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the beverage end quote. I think I found the answer, though, guys, in a dictionary of Scottish dialect. We love this stuff.
By the way, yeah, this is amazing.
Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are considered omens that you 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, 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.
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 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.
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