Mount St. Helens Kicks off the 1980s with a Big Bang
The mountain’s crater had been rumbling and steaming for several weeks. I was camping near a mountain stream in the Cascade Mountain Range over 300 air miles from the mountain when it blew. What I heard sounded like blasting nearby.
Odd for early Sunday morning. But our party didn’t think much of it until we boarded our rigs for the trip home and tuned in the radio.
As it turned out, a tremendous explosion of trapped gases, generating about 500 times the force or the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, blew the entire top off Mount St. Helens.
In a single blast Mount St. Helens was transformed from a picture-perfect symmetrical cone 9,667 feet high to a flat-top 1300 feet lower. Clouds of hot ash made up of pulverized rock were belched twelve mile into the sky.
The force of the prolonged energy burst rocketed into the upper atmosphere and slapped the skies. Vertical ripples spread through the atmosphere causing lazy fluctuations in the air. Hours later in Washington D.C., scientists would record gravity waves from Mount St. Helens crossing the Eastern Seaboard.
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