Selects: When Mount St. Helens Blew Its Top

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Speaker 8 Hey everyone, it's Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our January 2023 episode on the Mount St.

Speaker 11 Helens eruption. Seems like just last year.

Speaker 9 It's a really good episode that's packed with science, action, adventure, heroics, life and death danger.

Speaker 18 It's got it all.

Speaker 11 It's one of my favorite episodes, so I hope you enjoy it as well.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 27 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.

Speaker 29 And sitting in for Jerry today is our great friend and co-producer, Dave C.

Speaker 33 And the C stands for cool.

Speaker 25 Say hello, Dave.

Speaker 17 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 33 That's pretty.

Speaker 34 That's a really great Dave impression.

Speaker 17 He's a troll.

Speaker 32 He is.

Speaker 25 I always hear him as, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Speaker 17 Dave is great. I wish you all knew him, but we do, and so he's ours.

Speaker 24 You're going to have to take our word for it.

Speaker 25 That's right.

Speaker 35 Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to all the people who don't know much about Mount St.

Speaker 40 Helens, prepare to have your socks knocked off.

Speaker 17 Or your lid blown.

Speaker 36 Or your skin seared off of your muscle.

Speaker 17 Yeah, this is a good one. This is,

Speaker 17 I mean, this is so bread and butter stuff you should know. It is.
I don't know why it took us almost 16 years to get to it.

Speaker 41 And none of that margarine stuff or low-fat.

Speaker 35 It's like full milk-fat butter. Oh, man.

Speaker 40 Bread and butter stuff you should know.

Speaker 17 Salted butter, even.

Speaker 43 You like salted, huh?

Speaker 17 Well, it depends what you're using it for.

Speaker 28 I like just plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece of like bread with butter.

Speaker 17 Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's when it matters.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I gotcha.

Speaker 43 What's your brand?

Speaker 17 Oh boy, it depends.

Speaker 17 I mean, I love to get the, I hate 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 34 What's wrong with that?

Speaker 25 Well, I don't know.

Speaker 17 You can't just say parquet, can you?

Speaker 45 Right.

Speaker 46 You must be a social justice warrior.

Speaker 47 You buy local butter.

Speaker 17 I do like that. What's the stuff? The Irish butter in the grocery store.

Speaker 24 That's my brand.

Speaker 22 Kerrygold. Kerry Gold.

Speaker 17 That's good, too.

Speaker 24 Like, I've researched it like i've literally researched 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 i totally agree i love carry gold i take that stuff camping yeah i carry it around in my pocket

Speaker 17 well i like that 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.

Speaker 10 We have a stick because we have a cute little butter dish that we use.

Speaker 46 So

Speaker 35 we use the sticks.

Speaker 30 So anyway, back to Mount St.

Speaker 10 Helens, the episode today.

Speaker 54 I was four years old when this happened.

Speaker 56 So, I mean, I didn't know what was going on.

Speaker 57 But I imagine you were like, holy cow, this is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on my TV.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I was nine, and I remember it being a big deal. But it's funny when I was researching this and then watching.

Speaker 17 There's a really, really great thing on YouTube that I recommend that AE put out

Speaker 17 years ago it had to be it was called minute by minute colon uh the eruption of mount st helens really gripping stuff as a e used to do you know they probably still do that kind of stuff but i don't know um 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 22 Yeah.

Speaker 36 Although I think think it was more of like a

Speaker 58 regional thing for the lead up.

Speaker 54 And then also if you were a geologist, a volcanologist, a seismologist, anything that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then it would have been a big deal to you too.

Speaker 41 And it definitely attracted them from far and wide.

Speaker 49 And because there was so much warning,

Speaker 45 And it was able to, and by it, I mean Mount St.

Speaker 17 Helens was able to kind of draw to it like a magnet all of these amazingly well-trained researchers um 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 they mount st helens is basically saying it's coming everyone would you like to document this yeah i'm telling you again it's coming yeah and i'll show you in lots of different scary ways that it's coming and people left people stayed people came there people left seismologists

Speaker 17 like tourists came to see this thing. So

Speaker 17 let's get into it.

Speaker 10 Okay, so just a real quick refresher.

Speaker 48 We've done volcanoes, and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that sounds like us.

Speaker 17 Yeah, 2010 was volcanoes. 2017

Speaker 17 was super volcanoes.

Speaker 57 Okay, so we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in those episodes.

Speaker 50 So if you want to know a lot more in depth, go check those out.

Speaker 62 But just as a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that Mount St.

Speaker 47 Helens is, it's a stratovolcano, and it's created when one younger plate is subducted under an older plate.

Speaker 10 And as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of the earth, all of the rock it carries with it gets heated up.

Speaker 44 Same with water too.

Speaker 29 And that stuff travels upward because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle down below.

Speaker 64 And as it gets closer and closer to the crust, it wants to pop out of there, but it can't necessarily.

Speaker 38 Sometimes it can.

Speaker 47 And when it can, it just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that builds the volcano in a kind of a cone shape, which is what Mount St.

Speaker 58 Helens was up until May 18th, 1980.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It happened over the course of about 40,000 years in the case of Mount St. Helens, which is pretty speedy.
And

Speaker 17 Ed helped us out with this. We 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,

Speaker 17 sort of cone mountains like that, is because of this Cascade Arc and how these mountains were formed, you know, not too long ago.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 29 Yeah, 40,000 years ago, maybe less.

Speaker 17 40,000 for St. Helens, and I think the whole arc is less than 100.

Speaker 61 Right.

Speaker 43 So the whole thing that's driving Mount St.

Speaker 37 Helens, and apparently also there's some other,

Speaker 51 I guess, volcanic mountains in the area, like Adams.

Speaker 37 I think Mount Adams is one as well.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 66 There's a magma chamber somewhere under there.

Speaker 37 I think possibly miles and miles below the surface.

Speaker 41 But under normal circumstances, like I said, when a stratovolcano is formed, the lava just kind of is able to find cracks in the crust and like it's

Speaker 49 released through there and it builds the mountain up slowly and slowly.

Speaker 39 But if there's not a crack in the crust, as in the case where Mount St.

Speaker 50 Helens is, that magma starts to back up.

Speaker 7 It hits the crust and it it starts to back up below.

Speaker 58 And all of a sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens.

Speaker 17 Yeah, this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is,

Speaker 17 well, is and was quite large. And like you said, it's looking for a place to go.
But if it doesn't have a place to go, what'll happen? And as you'll see, this is what happened in the case of Mount St.

Speaker 17 Helens, is it starts bulging. And like the mountain,

Speaker 17 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 uh it's it's a pretty notable thing and that's exactly what was happening in the case of the magma chamber there in uh in washington yeah like this pressure is building up so much it's causing a boil on the mountain yeah the The mountain grows a goiter, basically, and that's just full of pressure and magma just waiting to go off.

Speaker 62 It doesn't always go off. And in fact, Mount St.

Speaker 10 Helens had two bulges, also called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome,

Speaker 67 from previous volcanic eruptions.

Speaker 35 One was called Goat Rocks Bulge,

Speaker 56 and then the other one was called the Sugar Bowl Bulge.

Speaker 63 And they just...

Speaker 35 never like the the magma found its way out other ways but the bulge was left this is a a new bulge, and like you said, it was growing, I think, about six feet a day.

Speaker 29 Every day, it kept growing another six feet, which is really fast for a mountain to grow.

Speaker 57 And that was one of the big signs initially that something was going on.

Speaker 54 And one more thing before we start to get into Mount St.

Speaker 62 Helens itself, Chuck.

Speaker 10 I think we need to say, like, Mount St.

Speaker 62 Helens was big.

Speaker 45 It was a big eruption.

Speaker 62 But it was not the biggest eruption Mount St.

Speaker 41 Helens has ever had.

Speaker 28 And apparently, the biggest eruption it's ever had came just about 4,000 years ago, which is within

Speaker 28 traditional like folktale memory.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean it had been an active volcano for 40,000 years, but the big one before 1980 was,

Speaker 17 yeah, like you said, I was trying to look at a specific year, but let's just say 4,000 years ago. Yeah.
Because once you get back that far, you know.

Speaker 25 Who cares? Who cares?

Speaker 17 But it became, like you said, part of folklore. The indigenous people there,

Speaker 17 especially the Puyalup people, called the mountain Lewitt, L-O-O-W-I-T.

Speaker 17 And there was a Lewitt brewing company. So I wanted to shout them out.
This is one of those things where

Speaker 17 I thought, I wonder why, because there's been such a push to change names of things over the past like decade or so.

Speaker 17 This is one that was it seems so like sort of egregious that we should call it Lewitt and not Mount St.

Speaker 25 Helens.

Speaker 17 Right. 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 St. Helens in 1792

Speaker 17 after Captain George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell, it should.

Speaker 17 Gave the name of it because of a diplomat named Alan Fitz Herbert.

Speaker 17 Didn't call it Fitz

Speaker 17 Herbert Peak or anything like that

Speaker 17 because his noble title was Baron St. Helens.
Thank God. But here's the rub: is that Alan Fitzherbert never even saw Mount St.
Helens, the mountain named after him. So, like, I don't know.

Speaker 17 Maybe, maybe let's call this one Lewitt.

Speaker 54 Yeah, I think that's a great idea, actually.

Speaker 36 And the reason they call it Lewitt, that was she was named after

Speaker 13 a famous volcanic firetender woman.

Speaker 67 And Lewitt and a couple of other men who fell in love with her and fought for her

Speaker 44 became, Lewitt became Mount St.

Speaker 42 Helens, or Lewitt, if you want to call it that.

Speaker 58 And then

Speaker 41 the other men who were fighting for her became Mount Hood and Mount Adams.

Speaker 28 They were smited by the creator God and turned into mountains for fighting.

Speaker 12 And there's legends, not just from the Puyula, but other indigenous tribes around the area, that something really big happened.

Speaker 45 And it looks like what it is is a geomyth, which we've talked about before.

Speaker 63 I think the Great Floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation that describes this enormous eruption 4,000 years ago.

Speaker 17 Pretty good stuff.

Speaker 70 Yeah, for sure. And it was a big eruption, too.

Speaker 50 There's just one other thing.

Speaker 19 There is a layer of tephra, of basically volcanic ash and debris and stuff, that is

Speaker 47 so thick and so wide, it goes up into British Columbia.

Speaker 37 And 62 miles away from Mount St.

Speaker 36 Helen, it's still 20 inches thick, almost two feet thick of ash, 62 miles away.

Speaker 40 That's how big that 4,000-year-ago eruption was.

Speaker 17 That's huge. And all this to say that Mount Mount St.
Helens,

Speaker 17 which has an S, by the way, did you know that?

Speaker 32 Yeah, I did.

Speaker 17 You keep saying Helen. I just wondered.

Speaker 19 I'm being short because I don't want to take up too much time talking about certain things.

Speaker 22 Oh, that's good.

Speaker 17 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 35 Yeah, I love that story.

Speaker 33 I forgot about him.

Speaker 17 All this to say is that Mount St. Helens had been, you know, active, had a long history of activity.

Speaker 17 So it's not like anyone ever thought, well, that thing is done and it's never going to happen again.

Speaker 19 No, definitely not.

Speaker 40 Because also in the 19th century, there was a lot of eruptions, too.

Speaker 25 There's a painting by a Canadian artist named Paul Kane who painted an 1847 eruption.

Speaker 45 So, I mean,

Speaker 19 starting in the 19th century, Mount St. Helens

Speaker 45 was documented pretty clearly, scientifically, too, as being an eruptive volcano, a disruptive volcano, you can almost say.

Speaker 17 All right, shall we take a break? Yeah, that's a nice prelude.

Speaker 43 I think so, too.

Speaker 25 All right, we'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 17 Okay, so we got a nice background on Mount St. Helens.
It had been very active for about, or on and off active, for 40,000 years,

Speaker 17 including, I believe, the last sort of big one was in 1857.

Speaker 17 Not too long after that, in 1908, about a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest, which was hence renamed Gifford

Speaker 17 Pinchot or Pinchot. I never know how to say that.

Speaker 34 The Bronson Pinchot National Forest.

Speaker 17 National Forest, and that was in 1949. And Mount St.
Helens is inside that national forest.

Speaker 17 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.
Right.

Speaker 17 But there was something, or is still something called Spirit Lake there near the base of the mountain, which is,

Speaker 17 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 25 Right.

Speaker 22 Well put.

Speaker 43 So

Speaker 41 the whole thing starts, actually, even before the whole thing started.

Speaker 42 And I saw in 1975 that two volcanologists published a paper

Speaker 26 saying that it was very likely Mount St.

Speaker 54 Helens was going to erupt in the 20th century at some point, like a big one.

Speaker 24 And five years later, on March 20th, 1980, the whole thing was kicked off by a 4.0 earthquake, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Speaker 19 And it was at the mountain, like this earthquake took place at the mountain.

Speaker 54 And all of a sudden, within five days, there were quake storms.

Speaker 10 There was 24 quakes of 4.0 or greater within eight hours.

Speaker 35 Oh, man.

Speaker 39 When a volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it,

Speaker 42 that's when the geologists come running from far and wide.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so they, you know, the word gets out and they did come running from far and wide and they, you know, set up camp there at various places.

Speaker 17 Other just sort of, as I learned from watching this

Speaker 17 A ⁇ 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.

Speaker 17 And people started kind of coming in there because they got wind that something may be brewing at Mount St.

Speaker 17 Helens, 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.

Speaker 17 And he was one of the, there were some great interviews with him in this AE special. He was, he's a very young guy,

Speaker 17 super excited to be there.

Speaker 17 And he was one of the ones kind of sounding the alarm along with his partner, this guy named Don Swanson, about, hey, like, you know, the S is getting real here, everybody, and it looks like people need to start leaving.

Speaker 24 Yeah, like the thing is, is there the people who did live on the mountain were not the kind of folk who listened to like, you know, the governmental neck college boys

Speaker 41 or the government to be told, like, leave your home.

Speaker 48 And then also there was those youth groups that were like, you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake.

Speaker 40 There was also Weyerhauser.

Speaker 25 They're hoping to get to first base.

Speaker 61 Exactly. It's like a roller rink over there.

Speaker 13 And then there was Weyerhauser, who had a contract to be able to log

Speaker 21 on the mountain.

Speaker 37 They definitely didn't want to have to shut down operations.

Speaker 41 So there's a lot of pressure, a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you would think, to keep the mountain open.

Speaker 13 And David Johnston and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like, you really can't do this.

Speaker 41 And they managed to convince the governor of Washington that it was the right move.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 63 And they managed to push that back as well.

Speaker 40 And as a result, David Johnston is frequently credited for saving thousands of lives potentially, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 63 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 17 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Certainly, we need to mention Harry Truman,

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It's a part of me. If the mountain goes, I'm going to go with it.

Speaker 17 Art Carney played him in the movie version.

Speaker 17 he got a lot of media attention along with his 16 cats,

Speaker 17 which is the only part of the story like,

Speaker 17 hey, man, I'm all for people evacuating to keep people safe, but I'm also like,

Speaker 17 if some old, old mountain man wants to stay up there and go down with the volcano, like, that's his right, but send the cats away.

Speaker 17 Don't say, like, I'm going to go down and kill these 16 cats at the same time.

Speaker 37 Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like, you know, medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I just, I don't know, man. Once I heard about the cats, because I was all into this guy.
Right.

Speaker 17 And then I heard about the cats, I was like, oh, dude, you should have at least sent the cats away.

Speaker 24 Yeah. No way.

Speaker 47 Not a lodge codger.

Speaker 32 So

Speaker 36 Harry Truman will come back in.

Speaker 67 This is Harry R. Truman, by the way.

Speaker 54 Everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him.

Speaker 24 Right.

Speaker 19 He'll come back in later.

Speaker 24 But But so

Speaker 24 the last thing that

Speaker 41 happened on the mountain, March 25th, in eight hours, there's 24 4.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes, and that brought everybody running.

Speaker 28 This whole thing was so perfectly planned that on the day of the eruption, there was the

Speaker 24 mineral and gem show in Yakima, like I think less than 100 miles away from Mount St.

Speaker 62 Helens.

Speaker 64 So anybody who had anything to do with geology just happened to be in the area or was purposefully in the area.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 50 And then on March 27th, it's just getting more and more and more.

Speaker 20 There was an actual eruption, right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, so this was, I mean, compared to what eventually ended up happening, you could call this a sort of mini-eruption,

Speaker 17 even though it sent, it made a big boom. Apparently, it was a pretty cloudy day, so it wasn't super visible, but the ash column went up 6,500 feet into the air.

Speaker 69 That's nothing to sneeze at.

Speaker 17 And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew to about 1,600 feet wide.

Speaker 17 So it was a major thing. There was another one on the 28th, 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

Speaker 17 warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches, craters growing, and like the mountain is saying like, it's going to happen, people. This is not a false alarm.
Right.

Speaker 17 uh until things calm down and that's what you were talking about early like things kind of settled down on uh what was that like may

Speaker 17 around the 15th yeah around the 15th 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 yeah 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 uh 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.

Speaker 17 And that's what they did.

Speaker 32 They did.

Speaker 36 There's footage of them signing

Speaker 48 waivers on the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three-piece suit, like handing people a pen and being like, sign here.

Speaker 54 It's really hilarious.

Speaker 60 But they did.

Speaker 54 They started, some people started to trickle in.

Speaker 24 And that's actually why there were,

Speaker 28 you know, I think we ended up with 57 casualties, 57 people died, and that was one reason why it was actually that high.

Speaker 52 Could have been less, but people were allowed to trickle back in.

Speaker 31 They still kept like a perimeter, but I think it was kind of porous.

Speaker 13 If you wanted to get through, you could get through.

Speaker 12 And there are stories in that minute-by-minute episode of people.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 32 It was funny.

Speaker 28 He snuck through with friends.

Speaker 56 There are a lot of people on the mountain that otherwise might not have been had they kept it closed.

Speaker 28 But they did open it up a little bit.

Speaker 64 And it was because nothing had happened for a little while.

Speaker 44 And then about three days later, everything happened.

Speaker 64 You said S was getting real.

Speaker 36 This is when the S hit the fan.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Well, I mean, just prior to this, I guess let's back up one half second and let you know about what happened with David Johnson and Don Swanson.

Speaker 17 They had moved from their initial base at Coldwater 1, which was about, I think, eight or nine miles away,

Speaker 17 to their second station, which was called Coldwater 2, which is about five to six miles from the mountain.

Speaker 17 And notably, it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to be the wrong spot to be.

Speaker 17 But, you know, these guys knew what was going on.

Speaker 17 They know it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping, taking shifts.
And Don Swanson got the the call from Johnston and he said, hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow.

Speaker 17 If you come and relieve me the next day. And then on May 18th, 1980 is when Johnston was there, when everything went boom.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and I think there have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around Cold Water too.

Speaker 67 And Johnston sent them away.

Speaker 54 He's like, this is outside the red zone.

Speaker 13 It's still potentially dangerous.

Speaker 67 There's no reason for more than just one of us to be here at a time. So you guys go.

Speaker 70 So at 8.32 a.m.

Speaker 43 on May 18th, 1980, Mount St.

Speaker 51 Helens like blew up.

Speaker 42 And there's like a typical idea that people have of a volcano going off.

Speaker 27 And most of the time, it's shooting like a huge thing of ash and magma straight into the air from its top.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 43 But that is not what happened with Mount St.

Speaker 19 Helens. Mount St.

Speaker 59 Helens was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because it didn't go out of the top.

Speaker 13 It came out of the side.

Speaker 56 And it came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is building up

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It's got pressure from below because it's heating.

Speaker 17 It's got pressure from above above because all of that weight of the rock is just pushing it down yeah and all of this magma is just like boiling under there but and i know we talked about this before i guess it was in one of the volcano episodes but it's 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 the upper half and notably sort of the north side of this mountain.

Speaker 48 Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by about six feet a day.

Speaker 22 That was what the

Speaker 60 scary it is because, like, it's as violent as you can imagine that a bulge, something that could make a bulge on the side of a mountain would be.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 61 And so,

Speaker 43 under other circumstances,

Speaker 31 a Plinian eruption where a volcano explodes out of the top, like you typically think of, that pressure, that magma is going to basically force the top of the mountain open.

Speaker 37 And that's how it's going to explode.

Speaker 43 This is not what happened with Mount St.

Speaker 62 Helens.

Speaker 19 That kind of,

Speaker 69 I guess the hump was on one side.

Speaker 38 It was on the north flank, wasn't it?

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 50 So it was on the north flank.

Speaker 51 And the thing that kicked off Mount St.

Speaker 37 Helens eruption wasn't the volcano.

Speaker 19 It was actually an earthquake in the volcano. And that

Speaker 24 earthquake caused the largest landslide in recorded history on Earth.

Speaker 12 More than half of a square mile of Mount St.

Speaker 63 Helens suddenly vanished away.

Speaker 54 It just suddenly dropped off the side, the north side of the mountain.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and it's

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And then, you know, especially in the A ⁇ E thing, to see people interviewed describing, like, seeing this with their eyeballs,

Speaker 17 it was just like, it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large and part of it just going away immediately.

Speaker 46 Yeah, and one of the reasons they were able to witness it, and we have such great documentation, is because at 8.32 a.m., a pair of geologists, husband and wife geologists, happened to be flying in a plane because they'd hired a plane to go look at Mount St.

Speaker 67 Helens because they'd heard that, you know, it was, there's some stuff going on.

Speaker 24 And they happened to make one more pass right as the mountain, that earthquake dropped the side of the mountain.

Speaker 41 They were like right above it in a plane, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 17 Yeah, where's her quote? Should we read that? Yeah. This is Dorothy, Dorothy Stoffel

Speaker 17 in 2019. She said, the whole north half of the mountain that we were flying just 500 feet above began churning and a mile-long fracture shot across the mountain.

Speaker 17 Faster than our minds could absorb, the north half of the mountain just became like fluid and slid away.

Speaker 54 Amazing.

Speaker 44 I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper opening along the mountain.

Speaker 17 Yeah. And, you know, there, there were amateur photographers around for some of this stuff.
Some of these hikers, like that guy you mentioned, that was telling the story in Funny Voices.

Speaker 17 And volcano chasers, like they got some, some, like, some, one guy got like 22 pictures in a row, and this is when it eventually blew. The other guy got like six or eight pictures.

Speaker 17 There was a family

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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 out of the side of this mountain pointed at us.

Speaker 17 So ash was raining down, but it was raining like at people and less down from the sky.

Speaker 54 Right, exactly. It wasn't going up and then coming back down.

Speaker 44 It was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain. Yeah.

Speaker 50 And the reason why the north of the mountain was so dangerous is because that's where that hump had been.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 47 It was that pressure was gone.

Speaker 61 And so all of that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam.

Speaker 69 And when that happens, that expands.

Speaker 70 Like you said, the reason that one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation is because it's too expansive.

Speaker 50 When it does have the chance to expand,

Speaker 10 it does so with incredible force.

Speaker 69 And that's what happened. That's why Mount St.

Speaker 27 Helens blew out the side rather than the top, because there had been a weakening in the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out.

Speaker 24 And blow out it did.

Speaker 17 Yeah. I mean, it was.

Speaker 17 If you look at it, it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something.

Speaker 17 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 24-megaton blast,

Speaker 17 which I know everyone always tries to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was 1,600 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Speaker 25 Good lord.

Speaker 10 But I mean, that's what it would take to move 0.6 square or cubic miles of mountain all of a sudden, too, you know?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 69 And that blast, Chuck, that 24-megaton blast, it was described as like a fast-moving cloud of heat and stones moving at some points pretty close to the mountain, 300 miles an hour.

Speaker 68 Man.

Speaker 65 Heated to like 660 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 36 I think that's like 380 degrees Celsius.

Speaker 49 Just blowing northward away from the mountain.

Speaker 69 And everything within eight miles of that

Speaker 24 of the mountain was in that blast zone.

Speaker 30 And if you'll recall correctly, David Johnston's Cold Water 2 camp was within about 5 miles.

Speaker 17 Yeah, he obviously didn't make it.

Speaker 17 They found, I think they found pieces of his trailer like a decade later.

Speaker 17 He had time to send out one signal, which was

Speaker 17 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 area Johnston Ridge in his honor.

Speaker 17 Obviously Harry Truman perished along with those 16 cats and he was close enough to where I saw that they said that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized.

Speaker 17 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 13 Yeah, I have the impression the same thing happened to David Johnston.

Speaker 57 And also that ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it.

Speaker 13 He documented David Johnston getting covered up.

Speaker 52 He said,

Speaker 57 He said, gentlemen, the camper in the car that's sitting over to the south of me, he was talking about David Johnston, is covered. It's going to hit me too.

Speaker 41 And that was Jerry Martin, that ham radio operator, and that was his last transmission.

Speaker 54 He was vaporized as well, essentially.

Speaker 23 Everything, everything

Speaker 37 north of the mountain, within eight miles, was just destroyed, just destroyed.

Speaker 50 Like entire hundred-foot trees that were like 10, 12 feet in diameter, just completely flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way as well.

Speaker 64 And this was just a blast.

Speaker 30 That

Speaker 20 the landslide that was created from

Speaker 52 the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption,

Speaker 63 that had some incredible effects as well.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 So that snow melts, all that glacier ice melts, and you have flooding, and you have mudslides.

Speaker 17 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 mudslide on steroids. Yeah.
Like a mudslide carrying ammunition with it.

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 17 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 65 Yeah, it was like it had so much power, Chuck, that Sly did, that one part of it was carrying chunks of rock as big as 558 feet or 170 meters across.

Speaker 22 Wow.

Speaker 70 That's as big as a 50-story building.

Speaker 47 It was moving rocks that size just

Speaker 37 as fast as you can imagine down the mountain, into the valleys.

Speaker 47 And I saw it described as if you were watching it from a ridge, as some people people were, like far away, you would see the cloud or the debris starting to come at you.

Speaker 38 It would disappear into a valley, and then all of a sudden it would come up over the ridge and

Speaker 48 keep going.

Speaker 28 It was just filling valleys with rocks and debris.

Speaker 47 It's just, it's unimaginable trying to grasp what happened.

Speaker 48 And it's even crazier that some people are actually there watching this happen.

Speaker 25 Crazy.

Speaker 54 It is crazy.

Speaker 51 You want to take take a break?

Speaker 17 Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the After Effects right after this.

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Speaker 69 Okay, and we're back.

Speaker 13 And as Chuck promised everyone, it's After Effect time.

Speaker 17 Well, we talked a little bit about it.

Speaker 17 Obviously, Spirit Lake, which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the base of the mountain,

Speaker 17 has a very strange effects on bodies of water.

Speaker 17 It did two things. It made the lake larger, but it also made it shallower because it just flooded all this water water down there and raised it such that the outlet was basically dammed up.

Speaker 17 And so the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced its depth by about 80 feet. I think five years later, they built a spillway tunnel to control the depth of the lake.

Speaker 17 200 homes and cabins and about 200 miles of road and railways were completely obliterated.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 41 I also saw that lake was now 200 feet higher in elevation than it had been before.

Speaker 54 As if like, there was so much debris, it like raised the lake 200 feet, even though it also made it shallower.

Speaker 19 It's nuts.

Speaker 17 And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount St. Helens, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 24 I can't remember. I think by like 600 meters or something like that, some ridiculous amount of height just blown off.

Speaker 62 And that was another thing, too, like the after effects of it.

Speaker 19 If you look at Mount St.

Speaker 47 Helens today, or especially like right afterward, it turned into like an amphitheater.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 54 Like the north side was blown out and the other sides were kind of curved around.

Speaker 31 And what was neat is one of the huge after effects of Mount St.

Speaker 54 Helens, one of the more positive ones, is I saw it described as like a crash course

Speaker 12 for volcanologists and seismologists and everybody who are now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in.

Speaker 28 And that the eruption, because it was a lateral blast, opened up like basically a cross-section of the mountain that they could study now

Speaker 27 its past history from the inside out, which I thought was pretty neat.

Speaker 17 And a young Trey Anastasio said, One day I shall play at the base of that amphitheater. Oh, did he? And bore people with noodling on my guitar.

Speaker 32 Did he play there?

Speaker 17 No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there.
I was just kidding.

Speaker 61 Oh, wow. That was just completely made up.

Speaker 17 Oh, yeah. I never will miss a chance to take a digit fish.

Speaker 25 I'm with you.

Speaker 17 So ash is raining down and out.

Speaker 17 It literally darkened the skies.

Speaker 17 When this ash, if you were close enough to it, it would literally burn you alive.

Speaker 17 If you're far away, it can just create a lot of problems. Everything from

Speaker 17 just equipment not working, electrical outages and blackouts and brownouts. Visibility is obviously terrible.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Ash will help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well.

Speaker 61 Yeah, that was surprising. Yeah.
I also saw there was a lot of devastation.

Speaker 38 Any big game animal in the blast zone was,

Speaker 59 I said big game animal, by the way,

Speaker 24 was in the blast zone,

Speaker 24 was killed without question.

Speaker 38 But

Speaker 48 they were very surprised.

Speaker 72 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 were among the first to recolonize and were part of the reason why

Speaker 30 Mount St.

Speaker 62 Helens ecosystem started to rebound so quickly.

Speaker 17 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 11 Probably.

Speaker 24 And then the animals that lived underground will come above ground and say, it's our time, baby.

Speaker 22 I I look forward to that day for some reason.

Speaker 30 What else happened?

Speaker 61 Oh, I saw that the ash cloud that

Speaker 24 blew finally out of the top.

Speaker 35 We should say the lateral blast was followed by a Plinian blast.

Speaker 67 And that shot, like, you know, that was the money volcano shot that everybody was looking for.

Speaker 28 A plume of ash and smoke rose 80,000 feet into the air.

Speaker 29 And it was moving so fast that it circled the globe in 15 days.

Speaker 13 It came back to square one in 15 days.

Speaker 61 And of course, that was like affecting air traffic.

Speaker 28 Do you remember that Icelandic volcano that affected air traffic in Europe for like weeks?

Speaker 75 Weren't you stranded by that or something?

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 32 Okay. I don't think so.

Speaker 30 Okay.

Speaker 64 Like they knew what to do in part because of how Mount St.

Speaker 55 Helens affected air travel.

Speaker 24 At the time, they were like, this is brand new to us.

Speaker 66 But it helped lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for, how to deal with that kind of stuff later on.

Speaker 17 Yeah,

Speaker 17 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 rerouted, you know, the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections.

Speaker 17 But it looks like, it looks like a logging operation is happening.

Speaker 17 And like you could almost and may have been able, well, obviously it would have been too dangerous, but it looks like you could have walked over these logs.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 28 you could have probably made it across the lake

Speaker 54 but there in that minute-by-minute episode there was a pair of like high school sweethearts who'd been camping yeah and they had a harrowing experience because they they both got thrown into spirit lake and um the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend as like the logs were starting to close in on him.

Speaker 37 He pulled her her out from the lake and they were hanging on to logs when they finally made it out and were rescued.

Speaker 22 That happened.

Speaker 24 Like that happened to somebody.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they were in their car.

Speaker 61 Oh, is that how that's how they got in the lake? They were in their car?

Speaker 17 Yeah, they said it just picked them up and all they were driving and then they were floating.

Speaker 17 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 10 Right.

Speaker 24 Yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them, right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, and this is, you know, these are just sort of, that's what was so cool about the special is it really brought in the human element of these people that were around there. Right.

Speaker 17 And they, you know, they all survived because they were being interviewed, obviously.

Speaker 17 Dorothy Stoffel, who was the geologist that was flying with,

Speaker 17 I guess it was her husband, Keith, or was that her brother?

Speaker 48 Her husband, Keith.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 They survived that plane flight. Like they got out of there.

Speaker 17 There were stories of people that literally, it was like from a movie, drove, you know, 110 miles an hour, like outrunning this ash debris slide coming at them. Right.

Speaker 36 Yeah. And some people didn't make it.

Speaker 41 So there was one guy who was chronicled in that that was driving as fast as he can, and the, the, the blast just caught up with him and buried him

Speaker 59 in the in the ash.

Speaker 67 Um, and he probably died pretty much instantly.

Speaker 28 But, like, again, that happened to people.

Speaker 45 There's very famous footage of a house just flowing down like a newly engorged, mud-slidey river, yeah, moving so fast that you probably could have towed water skiers from the house, essentially.

Speaker 37 It was moving that fast, just down the river.

Speaker 30 So, I mean, again, it was one of the most documented volcanic eruptions of all time.

Speaker 13 So, there's really amazing footage on there, or just on the internet, is what I mean.

Speaker 14 But that wasn't the last time that Mount St.

Speaker 13 Helens has erupted.

Speaker 67 I think it erupted a few times between 1980 and maybe 1996, I think.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 39 And then the biggest one recently was between 2004 and 2008.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it started sort of getting a little more active again.

Speaker 17 This time, though, you know, one of the things that

Speaker 17 to the benefit of the surrounding area when a volcano blows like that is that pressure is released.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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 pressure is being released a little more gradually since the 2004.

Speaker 34 That's my impression, too.

Speaker 17 But they do say that, like, oh no, like it will happen again. Like things are,

Speaker 17 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 10 years.

Speaker 38 Yeah, we just don't know.

Speaker 17 No, but they are are studying it. Like there, there's a lot of active research and study going on at Mount St.
Helens now.

Speaker 54 Yeah, I believe the eruption was such a big deal that they've opened the USGS opened a research station nearby.

Speaker 54 And also, that 2004 activity basically ran from 2004 to 2008.

Speaker 19 Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely.

Speaker 36 So there's amazing time-lapse footage of those four years.

Speaker 27 And it's astounding how fast and how big Mount St.

Speaker 37 Helens just grows from that eruption activity.

Speaker 62 It's called Time-Lapse Images of Mount St.

Speaker 37 Helens

Speaker 52 Dome Growth.

Speaker 13 It's on YouTube.

Speaker 19 And I recommend checking that out as well.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I would just be careful when you Google dome growth.

Speaker 33 Or bulge growth.

Speaker 25 Oh, boy.

Speaker 49 So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we?

Speaker 61 Sure.

Speaker 59 And by we, I mean me.

Speaker 25 No, me too.

Speaker 43 But like like we said, Mount St.

Speaker 37 Helens bounced back.

Speaker 31 Spirit Lake opened back up.

Speaker 34 And the Coldwater 2 station has been renamed after David Johnston.

Speaker 66 And there's an amazing memorial, too.

Speaker 10 I saw on some TripAdvisor post that somebody said it was like one of the best,

Speaker 19 like, not welcome center, but you know, information centers that the person's ever been to.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 26 I would like to go there.

Speaker 17 Cookies are unreal.

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 19 You got anything else?

Speaker 30 I got nothing else.

Speaker 10 All right.

Speaker 21 Well, go forth and research Mount St.

Speaker 19 Helens with Aness.

Speaker 27 And you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak.

Speaker 35 Since I said Dante's Peak, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 17 This is following up on an email that you particularly liked from our Spooktacular. Okay.
Hey, guys, thoroughly enjoying the most recent Spooktacular, The Accents Our Comedy Genius.

Speaker 17 Meagle, do you want to pop in and say hi?

Speaker 32 Hello!

Speaker 25 Perfect.

Speaker 17 I'm going to bring Miguel back every now and then, by the way. Just want to prepare you and the audience.
Okay. I wanted to address a couple of 1800s addiction issues that cause some puzzlement.

Speaker 17 When you guys talked about toilet, it's basically what Josh said.

Speaker 17 I've always thought of it as a refreshing, as freshening up in the bathroom, washing your face and hands when first waking up or going to bed.

Speaker 17 I double-check with Merriam-Webster, though, and it's more generally dressing and grooming.

Speaker 61 Okay.

Speaker 19 That makes sense.

Speaker 25 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 17 On the other hand, the strangers in the beverage from the toll house is a lot more puzzling.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 I think I found the answer, though, guys, in a dictionary of Scottish dialect.

Speaker 17 We love this stuff, by the way.

Speaker 55 Yeah, this is amazing.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 If you pick up a stranger and bite it, the toughness will tell you whether the new acquaintance will be male or female.

Speaker 34 Amazing.

Speaker 17 Amazing. I'm going to guess there's also a way to predict the date you meet this person, although I didn't see reference to that.

Speaker 17 So that's what the characters are doing, guys, using tea leaves to predict the future.

Speaker 17 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 Jacobs.

Speaker 17 Fantastic saluthing. Yep.
And we are super grateful.

Speaker 13 Top to bottom, start to finish, wonderful email.

Speaker 64 Also, just put so nicely, too.

Speaker 27 Not like you big dummies.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess.
I didn't mean to bad guess.

Speaker 69 But I mean, that was really hard.

Speaker 22 Like, that was obscure, you know? Very much.

Speaker 19 Anyway, I love knowing that now.

Speaker 41 That was one of my favorite emails.

Speaker 19 So thanks a lot, Nat.

Speaker 27 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 stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 17 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

Speaker 17 Support for the show today comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 17 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is you're engaged with your investments and public gets that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 18 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 39 Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 17 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 73 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 73 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 73 Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 76 And now, Superhuman Shack.

Speaker 77 I keep telling them not to say that.

Speaker 33 I'm no superhuman.

Speaker 77 Believe it or not, I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA.

Speaker 77 In adults with obesity, moderate to severe OSA is a condition where breathing is interrupted during sleep with loud snoring, choking, gasping for air, and even daytime fatigue.

Speaker 77 Let's just say it can sound a lot like this.

Speaker 77 Sound familiar? Learn more at don't sleep on OSA.com.

Speaker 76 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.