She's Gonna Blow!!

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Cascades/CurrentActivity/current_updates.html

Mt. St. Helens is about to erupt! Maybe. Possibly.

The famous volcano has a special place in my heart for two reasons. I had just started school when the last eruption happened. Strange child that I was, I preferred the evening news to the cartoons, so I got to see the apocalytic imagery firsthand as it filtered out. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet grasp the concept of the distance involved between Ohio and Washington. I constantly ran to the windows to look for a cloud of ash blotting out the sun, images from the Bible mixing in my mind with the televised coverage from Washington. Before I would go outside, I would look up and down the street for the flow of lava that I imagined being the product of the eruption. I was terrified of the destruction that I was truly convinced was headed our way.

Many years later, I finally got around to taking my science gen ed in college. The choices were Chemistry (which I almost failed in high school), Physics (which I had to drop in my German high school), Biology (which had a five-day-a-week four hour lab—who are they kidding??), Life Science, and Geology. Having narrowed it down to the last two, I visited the bookstore to look at the textbooks for the course. The book for the life sciences course looked deadly boring and cost almost twice what the Geology text cost. So I registered for Geology. Then I had to choose between two classroom elements: Intro to Geology or a three-part sequence called something like “Survey in Real World Geology”. Now really, given those two titles, which course would any other science-phobe take?

It turned out to be a great choice. The first part of the course was called “Geology of Cincinnati” and involved weekly field trips where we observed different rock formations, fault lines, caves, and so on. We also learned quite a bit about how human activity affects and is affected by the geological features of the area they live in. For example, we visited a neigborhood that was built on an artificially created hill with a creek at the bottom. The neighborhood had started off just fine. Unfortunately, as more houses were built (increasing the weight on the artificially created hill) and the creek continued to erode the soft shale banks at the bottom of the hill, the land under the houses started to literally slide down and cave in from under the houses. We were able to walk along the street and then along the creek banks and see the processes at work. I was instantly hooked.

The second part of the sequence was to do with glacier formation and ocean currents. It was most notable for the teacher, who was a hippy from the old school of hippiness. He had wild hair, wore Birks everyday (even in the middle of winter), and really loved it when the students would come to visit him in his office. Again, lots of fun and I learned more than I ever expected to learn from a Gen Ed class.

The final part of the sequence was the “sexy” part: vulcanology. Of course, by the sheer nature of the course, it was only an overview of the field. We learned (more) about plate tectonics (which we’d touched on briefly in both of the previous parts) and about things like inclusions and geysirs, and then we got to the meat of the course. We started off easy with the formation and evolution of the Hawaiian islands. Then we talked about Iceland (which, incidentally, was the previous prof’s pet topic, so we’d already covered it in great depth by means of small asides in lecture and coversations before and after class). Then we spent more than a week talking about Mt. St. Helens (you had to know I’d make it back here eventually).

The professor had assembled a great array of video footage, photographs, and charts/ graphs documenting the eruption and its aftermath. It was, if you’ll pardon the expression, devastatingly effective. The computer graphics and charts were frightening enough, but the testimony of survivors of the eruption was chilling. It is somehow unimaginable that something like that could happen in someone’s suburban backyard, or in a major city. But there it is—piles of ash making streets impassable, torrents of mud sweeping heavy rescue equipment away as though it were nothing more than a pile of Tonka trucks.

The professor followed up day after day of this with several more days of charts and data from a number of other places in the U.S., including Yellowstone National Park. It was almost like being a child again. I was (and sort of still am, in an insane kind of way) too terrified of a massive geothermal eruption at Old Faithful to even contemplate a visit there. And Seattle? Forget it! Don’t you know there’s a buncha volcanos there, just waiting to blow?? (Although now I have a strong reason to want to go to Seattle, so I guess I’ll have to overcome that irrational fear.)

And now it looks as though Mt. St. Helens is ready to speak again. I wonder, though, how much of the coverage is due to the fact that Mt. St. Helens is a “sexy” volcano—it's famous, it has a history, people know what it means to say “Mt. St. Helens erupted”. All indications so far are that any eruption that occurs (if there is one at all), will be fairly mild as these things go. The other thing I
don’t get is the footage I keep seeing on the news of people lining up along the observation decks to look at it. Hello! Don’t you people remember what happened last time? Seriously, do you think you can outrun the product of a volcanic eruption? Maybe what needs to happen is that people wishing to stand along the viewing platform be required to watch video tape of the last eruption and to listen to the radio transmissions from the geologists who were caught in the blast and died. Personally, if I were near a volcano that suddenly started spewing steam and ash, I would leave the area as fast as my little legs (or my four little wheels, as the case may be) can carry me.