When Mount St. Helens got up on the wrong side of the bed in March of 1980, she provided an unprecedented chance for geoscientists to get their volcanology on. This is the story, pulled from the pages of the earliest USGS papers on the 1980 eruption sequence.
Dedication: The Geologists Who Died at Mount St. Helens
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “The Current Quiet Interval Will Not Last…”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “One of the Most Active and Most Explosive Volcanoes in the Cascade Range”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “The Unusual Character of the Seismic Activity Became Clear”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “Something Dramatic”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “Pale-blue Flames”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “The Only Way It Can Stabilize is to Come Down”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “Our Best Judgement of Risk”
Prelude to a Catastrophe: “The Volcano Could Be Nearing a Major Event”
The Cataclysm: “Vancouver! Vancouver! This Is It!”
The Cataclysm: “One of the Most Dramatic Mass-Movement Events of Historic Time”
Interlude: “Lateral Blasts of Great Force”
The Cataclysm: “A Sudden Exposure of Volatile Material.”
The Cataclysm: “That Whole Mountain Range Had Just Exploded”
The Cataclysm: “A Boiling Mass of Rock”
The Cataclysm: “I Was Just Instantly Buried”
Interlude: When Vehicles Become Part of the Geologic Record
Interlude: What Vehicles Say About Temperatures Within a Volcanic Blast
The Cataclysm: “A Horrible Crashing, Crunching, Grinding Sound”
The Cataclysm: “All of the Trees Seemed to Come Down at Once”
The Cataclysm: “From Unbaked Fragments to Vitreous Charcoal”
The Cataclysm: “The Path of Maximum Abrasion”
The Cataclysm: “Fully Down and Buried”
The Cataclysm: “Stripped from the Proximal Forest”