When Mount St. Helens Blew Its Top

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 St. Helen's prepared 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 uh. 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.

Bread and butter stuff you should know salted butter, even you like salted Huh. It depends on 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 got too. Um, what's your brand? Oh boy? It depends. I mean I love to get the hate to be that guy, but I dude, love to get the local butter when we get to our farmer's market and get it from our c s A.

What's wrong with that? Well, I don't know. Can't you say parquake? Can you right? You must be a social justice warrior you buy local butter? Do you like that? What's the stuff? The Irish butter in the grocery store? That's my brand? Uh? Carry Gold? Carry Gold. That's good too, Like I've I've reached arched it, like I've literally researched but the butter because I want to get the most bang from my buck, and it is at the top of basically every list. It's 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 out in my pocket. 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. We have a stick because we have a cute little butter dish, so we have we used the sticks. So anyway back to um,

Mount St. Helen's 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, UM, there's a really really great thing on YouTube that I recommend that A and He put out, You're ago it

had to be. It was called minute by Minute Colin. Uh, the eruption of Mount St. Helen's really gripping stuff as a any 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. Yeah, although I think it was more of like a yeah, a

regional thing for this the lead up. And then also if you were a geologist, a vulcanologists, a seismologist, anything that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then it would have been a big deal to you two. And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And because there was so much warning, um, and it was able to buy it. I mean, Mount St. 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, the 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, 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 let's get into it. Okay, so just a real quick refresher, we've done um volcanoes, and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that sounds like us. Yeah, was volcanoes, seventeen 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 St.

Helens is. It's a strato volcano, 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. The 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 close to the crust, it wants to pop out of there, 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 a kind of a cone shape,

which is what Mount Saint Helen's was up until May. Yeah. Um, 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. It happened over the course of about forty years in the case of Mountain St. Helens, which is pretty speedy. And uh, Ed helped us out

with this. We did a great job on this article. Um. And Ed points out that you know in the Northwest, that's why you see so many you know, uh 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 St Helens And I think the whole arc is less than a hundred right, um, so the whole thing that's driving Mount St. Helens. And apparently also there's some other, um,

I guess volcanic mountains in the area, like Atoms. I think Mount Adams is one as well. But there's a there's a magma chamber somewhere under there, I think, um possibly miles and miles below the surface. But under normal circumstances, like I said, when a Stratto volcanoes formed, the the lava just kind of is able to find cracks in the crust and like it's 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 st Helens is um, 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 um makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens. Yeah, this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is uh, well I is in 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 st Helens is it starts bulging, and like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting to see this happen. Um, even though it's very scary and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountains 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. 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 St. Helen's had two bulges also called crypto domes, which is pretty

awesome UM, from previous volcanic eruptions. One was called Goat Rocks Bulge UM, 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 ft a day. Every day it kept growing another six ft, which is really fast for a mountain to grow. Uh. And that was one of the big signs initially that that something

was going on. And and one more thing before we started to get into um Mount St. Helens itself, Chuck, I think we need to say like Mount St. Helens was big. It was a big eruption, but it was not the biggest eruption Mountain St. Helens has ever had. Apparently the biggest eruption it's ever came just about four thousand years ago, which is within um 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, four, I was trying to look at a specific year, but let's just say four thousand years ago, 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 pulla Up people, called the mountain LeWitt l O O w I T and there was a Lout's

brewing company, so shout them out. This is one of those things where, uh, I thought, I wonder why, because there's been such a push to change names of things over the past like a decade or so, this is one that was. It seems so like sort of egregious that we should call it LeWitt and not Mount st. Helens 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 Mountain St. Helen's in after Captain

George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell, it should gave the name of it because of a diplomat name, Alan fits Herbert didn't call it fits Herbert peak or anything like that because his noble title was Baron St. Helen's God. But here's the rub is that Allan fitz Herbert never even saw Mountain St. Helen's the mountain named after him, So like, I don't know, maybe maybe let's

call this one LeWitt. Yeah, I think that's a great idea actually, And the reason they call it lewe It that that was she was named after Um, a like a famous volcanic fire tender woman, Um and low Itt and a couple of other men who fell in love with her and fought for her. Um became low it became Mount St. Helen's or lou It if you want to call it, at and then the other the other men who were fighting for became mount Hood and mount Atoms. They were smited by the creator God and turned into

mountains for fighting Um. And there's legends not just from the pool 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 tefra 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 St. Helen. It's still twenty inches thick, almost two ft 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 Helen's uh which has an asked, by the way, did you know that? Uh? Yeah, I did, you keep saying, Helen.

I just wondered. I'm I'm being short because 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. Um, all of us to say is that Mount St Helen's had been, you know, active, had a long history of activity. So it's not like anyone ever thought, well, well, that thing

is done and it's never gonna happen again. No, definitely not. Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot of um eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist named Paul Kane who painted in eighteen forty seven eruption. So I mean start starting in the nineteenth century. Um, Mount St Helen's was documented pretty pretty clearly scientifically too, as as being an eruptive volcano, disruptive volcan you know you can almost say, all right, shall we take a break. Yeah,

that's a nice prelude, I think so too. All right, we'll be back right after this geo. Okay, So we got a nice background on Mount St Helen's that had been very active for about or on a off, active for forty thousand years, uh, including I believe the last sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven. Um, not too long after that, in nineteen o eight, about a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest, which was hence renamed Gifford. Uh a pin shot or

pin show. I never know how to say that the Bronson Pinchot National Forest National forest, and that was in nine and Mount St. Helens is inside that National Forest. Um all this uh, this 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 um near the base of the mountain, which is uh, 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, Um,

the whole thing starts. Actually even before the whole thing started, and I saw in nineteen seventy five the two volcanologists published a paper UM saying that it was very likely Mount St. Helen's was going to erupt in the twentieth century at some point, like a big one and five years later, in March eighty, the whole thing was kicked off by h four point oh 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 oh or greater within eight hours. When a volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, you you, that's when the geologists come running from far and wide. Yeah, so they you know, the word gets out, and they did come running from foreig and wide and they you know, set up camp

there at various places. Other just sort of um, as I learned from watching this uh any special that um there are like volcano chasers even that um, 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 St. Helen's including and this is you know, they're all kinds of people we could feature story wise, but one gentleman we are going to feature.

His name was David Johnston UH, and he was a volcanologist at the U s g S, the United States Geographical Survey, and he was one of the UM. There were some great interviews with him in this A and E special. He was very young guy, UM, 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 things like people need to start leaving. Yeah, like the thing is is there are the people who did live on the mountain were not the kind of folk who listened to like, you know, the governmentcil neton college boys or the government to be told like leave your home. And then also there was um those youth groups that were like you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake. UM. There was also Weyerhauser the first base exactly it's like

a roller rink over there. UM. 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 them outain 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 potentially, which is pretty cool. I mean, and everything I've seen about and he was a genuinely great person and also like a really great

pioneer in volcanology too. Yeah. Absolutely, um yeah. They did eventually set up what they called a red zone, and a lot of people did evacuate. Uh, there were some notable people who didn't. Um. Certainly, we need to mention Harry Truman. Um obviously not the president, but he was this old kajer 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 I'm a part of this place. It's a part of me. If the

mountain goes, I'm gonna go with it. Art Carney played him in the movie version. He was He got a lot of media attention along with his sixteen cats. Um, which is the only part of the story. Like, hey man, I'm 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 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 the sky, right, and then I heard about the cat I was like, oh, dude, you should have at least set the cats away. Yeah, no way, not not a lodge cajure. So um, Harry Truman will come back in. This is Harry Ard Truman, by the way,

everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him. He'll come back in later. But so this mark the last thing that we happened on the mountain. March in eight hours, there's twenty four four point or greater magnitude earthquakes, and

that brought everybody running. Um. 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 a hundred miles away from Mount St. Helen's, So anybody who has any had anything to do with geology just happened to be in the area or was purposefully in the area. And then on March that'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 many 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 ash column went up sixty feet into the air, it's nothing to sneeze, and a new crater formed at the summit, which grew to about six hundred feet wide,

so it was a major thing. There was another one on 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 uh warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches, craters growing, and like the mountain is saying like it's

gonna happen people. This is not a false alarm until things calmed down, and that's what you were talking about earlier, Like things kind of settled down on what was that like May around around may to where the people got Auntie 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 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 gonna sue us, and let him go back there. And that's what they did.

They did. There's footage of them signing um 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 um they did. They started some people started to trickle in um and that's actually why there were you know, I think, and we ended up with fifty seven casualties. Seven people died, and that was one reason why it was actually that high. Could have could have been less, but bowl 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. Um, he's 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 let's back up one half second and let you know about what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had moved from their initial base at cold Water one, which was about I think eight or nine miles away. Uh, took their second station, which was called cold Water two, which is about five to six miles from the mountain. UM and notably it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to

be the wrong spot to be UM. But you know, these guys knew what was going on. Uh. They know it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping UM 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 him 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 night, Mount St. Helen's 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 at ash and magma straight into the air from

its top. But that is not what happened with Mount st Helens. Mount st 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 uh a lot under the surface. There's a lot of moisture down there. Some of it was um, like you mentioned, from that initial uh plate subduction. That's

called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular groundwater from 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 and I don't 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 upper half and notably sort of the north side of this mountain. Yeah, and that that created that bulge that kept growing by about six ft a day. UM.

That was the bultree. It is because like it's as violent as it as you can imagine that a bulge, and it's something that can make a bulge on the side of the mountain would be. And so under under other circumstances a plenty in eruption where where 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 and that's how it's going to explode. This is not what how been with Mount St Helen's

that kind of UM. I guess the hump was on one side. It was on the north flank, wasn't it. So it was on the north flank, And the thing that kicked off Mount St Helen's eruption wasn't the volcano. It was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that that that earthquake caused the largest landslide and recorded history on Earth. More than half of a square mile of Mount St. Helen's suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped

off the side, the north side of the mountain. Yeah, and it's um 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 Anything to see people interviewed, uh describing like seeing this with their eyeballs that was it was just like it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large and and part of it just going

away immediately again. 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 because they had hired a plane to go look at Mount St. Helen's 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, you know, what's where's your quote? Should we read that? Yeah, this is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel Uh in twenty nineteen. She said, the whole north half of the mountain that we were flying just five 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 as like a zipper opening along the mountain. Yeah. And and you know there there were amateur photographers around for some of the stuff. Um, some of these hikers like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story and finding voices, UM and volcano chasers like they got some 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. Uh. There was a family uh camping with their two young daughters and that guy they were you know on the north side, Um, you know, well below it but uh, 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 out of the side of this mountain pointed at us. So ash ash was raining down, but it was raining like at people

and less 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. Yea. And the reason why the north of the mountain was so dangerous 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, uh, it does so with incredible force. And that's what happened. That's why Mount Saint Helen's 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 um. If you look at it, it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something. Um. It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast that you might think of in your head. Um. It happened kind of all at once, and it was twenty four megaton blast, which I know everyone always tries to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was six hundred times

as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Good lord, But I mean that's what it would take to move point six square or cubic miles of mountain all of a sudden too, you know, And that that blast chuck that that twenty four megaton blast. It was described as like a fast moving cloud of heat and stones moving at at some points pretty close to the mountain three hundred miles an hour, heated to like six hundred and sixty

degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three 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 recall correctly, David Johnston's um cold Water to camp was within about five miles. Yeah, he obviously didn't make it. Uh, they found I think they found pieces of his trailer like a decade later. H 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 Arie Johnston Ridge in his honor. Um. Obviously, Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen cats, and he was close enough, uh 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 rad that Ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it. He documented David Johnston. Um get covered up, he said, Um the he said, gentleman, the camper in 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 hundred foot trees that were like ten twelve feet in diameter, just completely flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way as well. UM. And this was just a blast that UM. The landslide that was created from that, the the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption UM 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, 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, like

a mudside carrying ammunition with it. And this is just raining down everywhere and 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 that 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 across. 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 or 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 keep going. It would. It was just filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's just it's it's

unimaginable trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier that some people are actually they're 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, we're back, and as Chuck promised everyone, it's after effect time. Well,

we talked a little bit about it. Um. Obviously, Spirit Lake, which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the base of the mountain UM, has a very strange effects on bodies of water. It Uh, 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 eight feet. Um. I think five years later they built a spillway tunnel to control the depth of the lake. Um. 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 shallower. It's nuts, And I think

it lowered the ultimate height of Mount Saint Helen's right. Yeah, Um, I can't remember. I think by like six 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 um if you look at Mount St. Helen's today or especially like right afterward, UM, it was turned into like an amphitheater, 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 St. Helen's. One of the more positive ones is I saw it described as like a crash course um for vulcanologists and seismologists 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 it's past history from

the inside out, which I thought was pretty neat. And a young Trey Anastasia said, one day I shall play at the base of that amphitheater and bore people with noodling. They they there, No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there. How was this kidding? Oh wow, that was just completely made. I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish with you. Uh so, ash is raining down and out. Uh, it literally darkened the skies. Um. When this ash, if you were close

enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. Um. If you're far away, it can just create a lot of problems everything from uh, you know, just equipment not working, electrical outages and blackouts and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. Um. 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 um 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 any big game animal in the blast zone. Was I said, big game animal by the way, was it was in the blast zone? Was was killed without question, But they were They were very surprised. Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found they were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and

plants and microbes. Fun. Guy that had survived just fine. And we're among the first to recallonize and we're part of the reason why um Mount St. Helen's ecosystem started to rebound so quickly. I mean, that's what will happen, right if if 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 look forward to for some um what else happened? Oh?

I saw that the ash cloud that that um that blew finally out of the top. We should say that the lateral blast was followed by a plenty in 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 the icelandic Uh volcano that affected air traffic in Europe for like weeks. Weren't you stranded by that or something? Okay? Okay? Um it like they knew what to do in part because of how Mount St. Helen's affected air travel. At the time, they were like, this is brand new to us, um, but it helped lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for how to deal with that kind of stuff later on. Yeah,

the um. The other thing I wanted to point out to 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 out it you know, the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, um, but it looks like it looks like a logging operation is happening, um, and like you could almost and may have been able. Well obviously it has 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, you could have probably made it across the lake. But there in that minute by minute episode, there was a pair of like high school sweethearts who have been camping 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. Is like the logs were starting to close in on him.

He pulled her out from the lake and they were hanging onto logs when they finally made it out and were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody. They were in their car. Oh is that how? And that's

how they got in the lake. They were in their car. Yeah, they said it just picked him up and all that they were driving and then they were floating and they said that there 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 him, right 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. Um and they you know, they all survived because they were being interviewed obviously UM Dorothy Stoffel, who was the the geologist that was flying with UM. I guess it was her husband, Keith. Was that her brother her her

husband Keith? Okay, Um they survived that plane flight, like they got out of there. There were stories of people that literally it was like from a movie. Drove, you know, a hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running this ash debris slide coming at 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 you can in the blasts just caught up with him and buried him um in the in the ash um

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 slide e 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 documented um volcanic eruptions of all times. So there's really amazing footage on there

or just on the internet, is what I mean. Um, But that wasn't the last time that that Mount St. Helen's has erupted. I think it erupted a few times between nineteen eighty and maybe I think, yeah, and then the biggest one recently was between two thousand four and two thousand eight. Yeah, it started sort of getting a

little more active again. Uh this time though, you know, one of the things that um to the benefit of the surrounding area when a volcano blows like that is that pressure is released and it's gonna take a long time to build back up to that level again kind of depending on what how it reforms on top of it. But this time apparently there are, uh, 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 two thousand foursion too. But there they do say that like, oh no, like it will happen again, like things are uh, 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 Helen's now. Yeah, I believe, you know, the eruption was such a big deal that they've they've opened the U s g S opened a research station nearby UM and also that that two thousand four activity basically ran from two thousand four to two eight. Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely. So there's amazing time laps footage of those four years, and it's astounding how fast and how big Mount St. Helen's just

grows from that eruption activity. It's called time laps Images of Mount St Helen's um dome growth. It's on YouTube, UM, and I recommend checking that out as well. Yeah, I would just be careful when you google dome growth or bulge growth. Boy. So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we? And by we I mean me too. Um. But like we said, Mount St Helens bounced 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 posts that somebody so I was like, the one of the best, um, like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that the person's ever been to. So I would like to go there. Some cookies are en real? All right? You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, We'll go forth and research um Mount St Helen's with an s UM. 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 liked from our speectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly enjoying the most recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius. Uh Meagle, do you want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect? I'm gonna bring Megle 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 hundreds diction issues that call some puzzlement. Uh. 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 your face and hands when first waking up, or going to bed. A double check with Marion Webster, though, and it's more generally dressing and grooming. That makes sense. Yeah. Sure. On the other hand, the strangers in the beverage from

the toll House is a lot more puzzling. I had no idea what it meant, And although Josh's guests that beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't really make sense just as a reminder of the sentence is talking about some men drinking tea in an end 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 them, 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. 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 sit on greats. I've loved the show for years, look forward to anymore. That is a great email. Nat Jacob's fantastic uh sleuthing and we are super grateful. Top to bottom start to finish. Wonderful email. Also just put so nicely to 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 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 podcast at iHeart

radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio from our podcasts My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm