Washington’s Mount St. Helens Was Finally Caught in the Act

Washington’s Mount St. Helens Was Finally Caught in the Act Mount St. Helens pushed solid rock out of the ground for more than three years, and it moved up to thirty five feet in a single day. In this one I go through the 2004 eruption, the seven lava spines that rose as hot stone rather than flowing lava, and the Whaleback that was over sixteen hundred feet long and drove its nose straight into the crater wall. The part that gets me is the drumbeats, more than a million tiny earthquakes arriving every minute or two like a heart monitor, caused by a plug of solid rock sticking and slipping half an inch at a time. I will be honest, the detail nobody expected is what happened to the ice, because the glacier in there did not melt away, it got squeezed, doubled in thickness, split in two, and then closed back around both domes in 2008. After all that, the crater is only about seven percent refilled, and the deep earthquakes came back in 2024.