Legit Reviews

Mount St. Helens erupted. at 5:25 last night.
"Pilot reports indicate that the resulting steam-and-ash plume reached an altitude of about 36,000 feet above sea level within a few minutes" http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Cas ... dates.html

The funny thing was one of the news stories on TV just a few minutes before was they were considering reopening the Johnston ridge observatory to the public later this month to allow tourists in for the 25th anniversary of the 1980 eruptions

Simply incredible...and according to the USGS...it ain't done. Was watching live news tonight with lava flow in the dome.

from seattle (about 100 miles away)

Edit the TV station has this marked as seattle, but from the direction of the cloud and the sun, it must be portland

I was going to say..... thats not Seattle, thats Portland...they said the cloud was moving to the NE, so too bad for Yakima and spokane......not much there to worry about though.

this one is still very small compared to the 80's ,probably no signifigant ashfall beyond 5 miles (all in the wilderness)
still it killed off 3 more insturment packages in the crater ($20-60k each)
They are hoping it's just the radio relay station, since they all went off the air at once (easy fix, if you can get some sucker to go in a do it )

dude that is pretty sweet looking. I'm sure the people that live by it don't think so, but looks pretty damn cool!

depends on how close you mean. not many in the portland area are worried though it was way too tiny

they did get some ashfall in Yakima (eastern washington)
At this time of year winds towards Portland would be unusual.
2 kind of problems come from the ash, if it's dry it's like comet (bad for car windows, engines and paint) and if it gets wet it shorts out transformers/powerlines and then sets up like concrete
Fun to watch, not fun to be in.

"Recent observations: The volcano is clear this morning and sporting an intermittent steam plume. There have been no explosive events since 5:25 p.m. local time on Tuesday. After the event Tuesday, seismicity returned to a level similar to that in the several hours prior to the explosion, and it remains at about that level at this time. Yesterday, the new dome was found to be remarkably intact. Ballistics up to ~1 m in diameter were hurled as far as the northern flank of the old dome. No ballistics were found along or beyond the crater rim. Ash deposits were found along a narrow eastward swath. Ash up to ~1 inch thick was deposited along the east flank of the volcano. Although no obvious vent was observed, the distribution of ballistics and ash suggest the explosion emanated from a source very near that of the October 1, 2004 and January 16, 2005 explosions. Today, crews will conduct more visual observations, measure gases, do routine maintenance on some far-field instrument stations, and redeploy GPS units. "


Ballistics 1 meter in diameter! No wonder nobody wants to go in the crater.
and this happened with virtually no warning, a small (magnitude 2, would not even be felt by someone standing in the crater) earthquake an hour or 2 before.
Always before there has been a ramping up of earthquake activity, in a pattern that warns of an eruption is likely.
They were thinking of doing a helicopter drop of some more 'spiders' (insturment packages on legs to replace the 7 that stopped responding. 1 partially came back to life, but none of the ones on rock are working, and the ones on ice are considered unreliable as ice tends to melt suddenly

the new dome with glacier in front

and one of the spiders on the glacier

Here's one of the spiders, that was rocovered

they are hopeing to be able to rebuild some of these
this is NED when he was new

I bet that spider only got hit by a .25m chuck of earth! A 1m chunk would have smashed it worse than that!

Looks like things got a bit warm, too, judging by the peeling paint.

A cool photo sequence from the volcanoCam of the March 8th eruption. Unfortunatly not the best angle for the plume itself. About 26Mbits so 56kers may want to skip it.
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/m ... vent.shtml

not sure if the big orange "flash" during the eruption was fire or just a weird reflection from the sunset