- This was Mount Saint Helens. It lost about 1,300 feet off of the top. And it had a dramatic
change to the landscape. But to understand-- - For decades the shattered
volcanoes stood quiet. No one expected another eruption. But nearly 25 years after Mount
Saint Helens blew its top, rumblings deep within the mountain made it clear that this volcano
was coming back to life. - 2004 was a fairly quiet
year in terms of earthquakes. And then all of a sudden,
over a couple day period, we were in a crisis mode. September 23rd came, we had an earthquake, and then more earthquakes,
and dozens of earthquakes. Suddenly we were having magnitude
two and three earthquakes that are rated two or three a minute. - My line of thinking was
that it was just gonna be a little earthquake swarm,
and it was gonna be over with. And then it just kept going
and ramping up from there. - It's entirely possible
that this is a continuation of the process that began in the 1980's. This is the next phase. - At the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington
scientists were caught by surprise. And the public, along with the media, worried about a repeat of the
devastating blast of 1980. - We expect fluctuations in the
level of unrest to continue. - This event in September, I mean it was an international incident. There were people here from all over. It was obvious that
something was punching up behind the old lava dome
in the crater floor, and fracturing the glacier and so forth. - From what I've been told,
these are very small quakes. They're not occurring very often. But clearly things are moving down there, and opening pathways up. It doesn't seem to be over. (news reporters speak) - The world waited anxiously
for something to happen. Then, on October 1st 2004,
a rift opened in the crater. The mountain began to erupt. Ash and steam rose to 12,000 feet. Glaciers buckled and broke apart. This wasn't a big eruption. At least not compared
to the blast in 1980. But for science, it was a big deal. The most studied volcano
in the United States had come back to life
with almost no warning. It was as if everything
scientists knew about volcanoes had brought us no closer to prediction. - In some ways, this was
almost a phantom-type eruption. That we know that lava had to
have gotten to shallow levels without our being able to detect it. The 2004 eruption is a
second chance for us. There was no reason to expect that Saint Helens would erupt
again during our lifetimes. - Scientists had learned enough to know we weren't in for a 1980 repeat. But there was still plenty
of unsettling questions. Why did this volcano erupt so suddenly? Why didn't scientists see it coming? What does this mean for
other Cascade Volcanoes that are, for the moment, quiet? - It was a pretty vigorous
burst of steam and ash while we were there. - Every time a volcano performs
for us, it gives us a test. And usually poses more questions
than we have answers for. - In the Cascades, each
peak, each hot spring, each hillside of ancient
basalt, hints at the invisible volcanic plumbing
beneath the surface. These are windows on a volcanic past (water bubbling) that remind us that the Cascades are alive and will erupt again. Potentially threatening millions
of people in the northwest. Science is our first line of defense. So with technology and a lot of footwork, scientists are working
to better understand how volcanoes work. And they're uncovering a few
new mysteries along the way. (nature sounds) Today, in a remote wilderness
25 miles west of Bend, Dan Dzurisin and a team of
researchers are on a mission. They've come to investigate what may be the first rumblings of
new volcanic activity. - We're at the Three
Sisters volcanic center. It's a very active area of
volcanism in central Oregon. It's an area that's been
active the last few years, too. There haven't been eruptions, of course. But the ground has been rising. At an average rate of about
an inch and a half a year. So something's happening
four miles under our feet, causing the ground surface to rise. Been going on since 1998. Right here, and for miles
on either side of us. So we'd like to know, of course, what's causing the ground to rise. - Ground deformity is Dan's specialty. He believes the swelling
of the earth's crust around South Sister may
be an early warning sign. An indicator of some future eruption. It's the kind of clues
scientists wished they had in the 1970's at Mount Saint Helens. - Prior to 1980, we didn't have a good way of measuring any ground
movements that might've happened before the earthquake
started, and that big bulge started to form on the
north flank of the volcano. By the time we got there, magma was already up inside the volcano, the part you can see at the surface, and was pushing the north flank out. So of course that resulted
in the catastrophic eruption on May 18th, 1980, and I always felt, well if only we had
been there in the 70's, we probably would've seen a broad bulging as that magma accumulated. - Broad bulging is
what's happening beneath the Three Sisters right now. This potential warning sign
would've gone unnoticed just a few years ago. But now, thanks to something
called a radar interferogram, scientists can see what
would otherwise be invisible. An interferogram is a satellite scan that shows changes in
the landscape over time. In this case, the view
is over Three Sisters. The bullseye represents the bulge emerging along the
shoulder of South Sister. This was the only clue scientists had that the earth was moving
below central Oregon. - Shorten point four. - Dan now conducts annual ground surveys to get a more accurate reading of how much the bulge is growing. And global positioning
systems are placed throughout the wilderness, in areas that
often fall far from the trail. That job falls to Mike Lisowski. - Working in the wilderness
is really difficult, because it's physically demanding. There's some people that
enjoy that type of work, at least for a while. (laughs) - 60.7 - We know what our target is. There's a bulge and it's
centered over there, about two kilometers away. So we put a number of stations close in, and we try to put other
stations farther out, and other stations farther out, because we wanna document
where the deformation is in the area, and how fast it's occurring. - The bulge has been hit with
at least one earthquake swarm. The kind that signals volcanic unrest. That's not enough to cause concern yet. - This part of the Cascades has both basaltic eruptions and
explosive eruptions. But it's unlikely that
they'll be anything like Mount Saint Helens in 1980, and I think even an explosive eruption wouldn't cause too much loss of life. You know, would mess up
the wilderness though. (laughs) - Scientists keep an eye
on the bulge using GPS. By calculating distance
between GPS on the ground, and satellites in space,
they record the swelling of the earth down to the
thousandths of an inch, and in three dimensions. - Lengthen 1.7. - The bulge has grown just
eight inches since 1998. As a tourist attraction,
it doesn't amount to much. - We do have hikers ask us, "Where can I go to see the bulge?" and they typically ask us that
when they're standing on it. And of course, you can't see it. An inch a year over ten
miles, you're not gonna see. - The bulge gets attention
because in all other respects, the Three Sisters wilderness is quiet. But evidence of past
eruptions are everywhere. - Something like this may be just how the Cascades stay alive. They get a little plop
of magma come up here, and it stays there and nothing happens. Or it may be the start
of another eruption. What we don't know, because
we've only been here for a short period, is sort
of the long term pattern. Do we just happen to be here
in exactly the right place, in exactly the right time, with
exactly the right techniques to measure the bulge that's gonna come right before the next eruption? Well it could be. But it could also be
that uplifts like this happen all the time, over
geologic time scales, and that the vast majority of them don't culminate in eruptions. - Eruptions are the exception. But central Oregon has
historically produced more lava than any other
spot in the Cascades. And it's still active. - We talk about the Three
Sisters volcanic center. There's a little bit
of a combination here, where there are lots of vents. Not big, tall volcanic peaks that erupt again and again and
again, like Mount Baker on Saint Helens, Mount Hood. The volcanism is more
diffused, more spread out. - Several active
volcanoes around the world bear a striking resemblance to those found in central Oregon. Eruptions in the Galápagos Islands, where lava oozed from the
ground as recently as 2005, are nearly identical to the
shield volcano eruptions 1300 years ago, in Newberry
Crater, south of Bend. (lava splashes) The spectacular vent eruptions on Kilauea, which carpet miles of
Hawaiian country side with rivers of lava,
are the same forces that buried McKenzie Pass, east
of Eugene, 1500 years ago. Eruptions will happen in Oregon
again, sometime, somewhere. But the clues that could help
predict the next eruption remain frustratingly hard to decipher. - So let's say a volcano is gonna erupt once every hundred years. What we think we've learned
is that after 50 years, very little will have changed. As far as we know, after 95 years, very little will have changed. And it might be after 99 years, you still won't be able to s-- no matter how hard you study that volcano, see anything different
from the past 99 years. But at some point there's
a significant departure from what's been happening. Now, at Redoubt volcano
in Alaska, for example. 1989, the volcano had
not erupted in 30 years, an earthquake swarm began, intensified, 24 hours later the volcano
erupted explosively. At Saint Helens in 1980, that
period lasted two full months before the catastrophic
events of May 18th, when the north flank slid
away in a gigantic landslide. So, you don't always know how
long the warning is gonna be, but there's almost always
short term warning. What we don't know here at
Sisters is where this uplift fits in to that scheme. We're pretty sure it's
not short term warning. It could be intermediate term warning. (beeping) - The painstaking study of volcanoes, especially quiet ones, can seem academic. But for scientists, the
reality of what happened at Mount Saint Helens in
1980 is never far away. Back then, researchers had
little more than seismographs, binoculars, and a good pair of boots to help determine when Mount
Saint Helens would blow. Volcanology was in it's infancy. Mount Saint Helens was poorly understood. - For 123 years, it was dormant. But today the volcano
exploded with a powerful force that turned daylight to dark. Tonight, the death toll from the explosion had reached at least seven. - The blast on May 18th exceeded the worst case predictions of the experts. The devastation that rained
down on southern Washington was on view to the world. (car crash) (screaming) 57 people died. - The May 18th, 1980 eruption
of course was catastrophic, and in hindsight, we know a
lot more about what happened, why it happened, and how
it could have been more directly anticipated than we knew then. Was this an unprecedented
event? Turns out is wasn't. Just in a few years after
that landslide and explosion, there was tremendous erosion of gullies on the floor of the crater. And down in those gullies,
geologists found evidence of at least two other landslides
and lateral explosions. There's a geological record
in the walls of the crater that we could never access before. So we now know that Saint Helens does have this kind of history. - After 1980, the
consequences of an eruption were clear to everyone. Public demanded a better understanding of the volcanoes in our backyard. Scientists took the lead, and made Mount Saint
Helens their laboratory. - Here's an image of what we
call a digital elevation model. It shows you what the surface looked like soon after the eruption in 1980. You can step through time.
Here's six years later. You can see that there's
been tremendous change in the growth of the dome. Then in 2003, this glacier
that's formed back here-- - Steve Schilling is a hydrologist with the Cascades Volcano Observatory. - Since then, we've had
even a more dramatic change. We're not quite sure of
what is driving everything underneath the ground. So we're using these different methods, trying to answer what is going on, and what can we expect from it. - Many people are surprised to learn that Mount Saint Helens is still erupting. It has been since October 2004. Dramatic outbursts of steam and ash can occasionally be seen for
hundreds of miles around. But most of the changes
taking place are more subtle. Visible now, thanks to new technology. - The yellows and whites and
reds are the hotter colors, where the rock is hot. - Heat sensing cameras capture
the drama that's unfolding within the crater. Magma, liquid rock for
miles beneath the mountain, oozes onto the surface at
over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the rock cools, a dome grows. Time lapse photographs show the magma dome approaching 1000 feet in height, and stretching over a half-mile wide. To put it in perspective, if the city of Portland were
dropped into the crater, it would be dwarfed by two magma domes. One built in the 80's, and the other, the grayish mass in the background, created in just the last year and a half. If dome building continues as it has, Mount Saint Helens could
reach pre-1980 heights in just 50 years. Few volcanoes in history
have ever rebuilt so quickly. - It's not just a garden variety eruption. This one is very strange. The magma that's coming out of the ground is very poor in volcanic gas. It's a little cooler than the lava that came out in the 1980's. It's more crystalline,
it's much much stiffer. It apparently rose up under the lava dome that grew in the 1980's,
and was deflected, and now it's coming out
of the ground at an angle, so it's not piling up on the vent, and we can watch it
come out of the ground. That's an opportunity
we've never had before. Got a whole new set of questions to ask. - To extract answers from the
steaming, bubbling crater, scientists have gotten creative. - This is the GPS antenna. All this is either stainless steel-- - Their solution? The spider. - Okay, what we've got in this one, this one is the setup to monitor the dome in the back of the crater. We've got our seismic transmitter, we've got two telemeters back in here, and two axis, the GPS receiver. - This unmanned craft,
invented by scientists in Vancouver, Washington,
transformed almost overnight, the way research is conducted. - We needed to get right up
near this growing lava dome, and so we started developing new tools. We took a little bit of the
old, a little bit of the new. We took GPS technology, modern radio and computer technology, put 'em in a package that we
could take with a helicopter up to the dome, and put it right there. - Spiders get their name from the spindly legs beneath each unit. They're slung in by helicopter, and are dropped into the
most dangerous regions of the new and crumbly dome. This is territory
scientists would rather not explore on foot. But spiders can be left
unattended for weeks. Or at least until things get rough. - This is one of the spider
carcasses that came back, and it broke the steel legs off, it just crushed and tore
off half of this container, and shattered the inside contents. You can also see that it was very hot. We've got rocks that are
actually melted into the plastic, and most of the protection on the cable is actually burned off. So the heat and the crushing
blow really drives home the fact that this is not a place where we wanna have people. - With the spider, Rick
LaHusen says scientists can get an up close look at unusual,
but unstable features. Like a glacier that manages to share space with a red-hot dome. - This glacier was about
six hundred feet deep in the back of the crater. So there's a large volume
of water available. As this hot rock material
is coming up, it's melting. These pools of water
essentially could rapidly hit the hot rock and form some
significant explosions. And there's really no indication
of when that's gonna happen so it's kind of a surprise event. - We know that we have this mass of lava that's relatively cool on the outside. Inside, we know that it's probably six, seven hundred degrees Celsius. And right next to this is a wall of ice. - Scientists roll the dice
every time they descend onto the surface to gather
rocks or sample gasses. So for the most part, they're happy to let spiders do the work. - What we had in the 80's,
when it was a good weather day, and you could fly, and you
could be out in the crater, you can make some measurements
during the core of the day. This eruption started just as we're heading into Fall/Winter. That's a time period where you
can't be out there as much. You just can't access the site. The nights are long. And these guys are on
the job 24 hours a day. So we have a continuous record. (pulsating) - The flip side of technology
is that scientists have to digest the cascade of raw
information pouring in. Even from their desks now, scientists are hardwired to the mountain. - These are the realtime data. Here's the earthquake coming
through right now, in realtime, from the two spiders out in the crater. When our beeper goes off, and Murphy's Law says it'll
be Saturday night at 3 AM, in the middle of a storm,
you can pop up your screen, turn the thing on, and you
can look at the deformation, you can look at the seismic information, and you can make an assessment. Having this communication capabilities, both the wireless cellphones,
pagers, and things like that, and having the high-speed
internet available that we can analyze the data in realtime, then communicate it out is
a huge difference from 1980. - Mount Saint Helens is easily the most wired volcano in the world. When it woke up in 2004, access to the mountain's
vital signs allowed scientists to predict, accurately, that this eruption would
be nothing like 1980. The public could witness this eruption without fearing for their lives. But scientists know much less
about other Cascade volcanoes. Mount Hood, Mount
Jefferson, Mount Rainier, any of these could be next. Yet we know little more
about these volcanoes than we did about Mount
Saint Helens prior to 1980. - What was learned from
experience is it's difficult to play catch-up with a volcano. And we worry about, for example,
a period of intense unrest starting at Mount Rainier in February. There's not much you can do
at Mount Rainier in February. If you don't already have the instruments in the preceding summer, there's not a lot more you can
do in the middle of winter. - It is probable tonight
Spirit Lake is no more. Huge pyroclastic flows of hot ash, rock, and gas have enveloped the lake, turning it into a bubbling
cauldron of hot debris. - 25 years after Mount
Saint Helens showed us how destructive volcanoes can be, scientists still dream
of the big breakthrough. The one that could help them
predict the next disaster. - If we could say now that
the next volcano to erupt in the Cascades was gonna be that one, because we see something that tells us that it's closer to its
short-term period of unrest than all the others, that
would be extremely valuable. You probably wouldn't
build big subdivisions around that volcano and
threatened valleys, for example, if you had some way of
knowing that within, say, the next decade something could happen. - The questions are the same
as they've been for centuries. What makes volcanoes tick?
What fuels the process? Scientists still struggle for the answers. - At a rate of five feet per day-- - I hope that the public
doesn't think we know everything there is to
know about volcanoes. We don't. We're on the steep part of the
learning curve, if you will. Volcanology is still a
relatively immature science. - For those who live in the northwest, Mount Saint Helens remains a daily wonder. The bulge beneath South
Sister is still a mystery. Maybe they fascinate us because
there are forces at work that we still don't understand. Yet each day, scientists
scratch the earth for clues. Each night, they crunch
numbers and analyze data. Hoping to one day unravel
the secrets of the Cascades. - It looks like you just
powered up the gas monitor, is that correct? - I think a lot of us
were really fortunate to have one eruption in our career, and now to have a second
one is really great. And it's also giving a new
generation of folks experience. We've learned a tremendous
amount, just in my short career. But there's so much we don't understand. It's such a rich subject,
that there's work to be done for generations to come.
Wow I remember walking by that bulge they show at 4:52 and thinking it was a cool unique feature. I had no idea that it was evidence of volcanic activity.
I watched this last night! really fun!
Epic post
Really cool video! St. Helens is one of my earliest memories of really being “wowed” by nature.
Nice bulge