On May 17, 1980, after two months of thousands of daily earthquakes and more …show more content…
Now the mountain was free to explode, and that’s what it did.
For the next nine hours, ash and magma spewed thousands of feet up in a 3-mile wide plume. People 30 miles away reported that burned pinecones and pebbles rained down around them. The day had started with the largest landslide in recorded history and ended with a devastating volcanic eruption that spread ash and debris over thousands of miles of landscape. It took many years for the area to recover.
Even though the eruption of Mount St. Helens was a disastrous event, it did some good. It taught scientists an important link between earthquakes and volcanic activity. Some refer to the eruption of Mount St. Helens as the “dawn of earthquake science in the United States.”
Since that terrible day, scientists have learned a lot about how volcanoes grow and change, as well as how they are linked to earthquakes. Scientists like David Johnson, who lost his life monitoring Mount St. Helens, are a brave bunch. They are called volcanologists. Volcanologists may have the most dangerous job in the field of