* Astronomy

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RE: Mount St Helens

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30 years ago this Saturday, a giant awoke

A magnitude 4.2 earthquake 30 years ago Saturday marked the reawakening of Mount St. Helens after 123 years of inactivity and set the stage for the most destructive eruption in U.S. history.
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Johnston Ridge Observatory

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RE: Mount St Helens

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NASA Goes Inside a Volcano, Monitors Activity
Scientists have placed high-tech "spiders" inside and around the mouth of Mount St. Helens, one of the most active volcanoes in the United States. Networks such as these could one day be used to respond rapidly to an impending eruption.
On July 14, 2009, these spider pods were lowered by cable from a helicopter hovering about 30 meters up and gently put in hot spots inside and around the volcano crater.

"This project demonstrates that a low-cost sensor network system can support real-time monitoring in extremely challenging environments" - WenZhan Song of Washington State University Vancouver.

Song is the principal investigator for this NASA-funded technology research project, which also draws on participation from the U.S. Geological Survey and from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

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Johnston Ridge Observatory

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RE: Mount St Helens

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St. Helens observatory closing for winter
The Johnston Ridge Observatory will close for the season at the end of the day on Sunday, Nov. 9, the U.S. Forest Service announced today.
The observatory will reopen in mid-May, depending on weather and snow levels.

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Mount St. Helens may be following the example of Kilauea in Hawaii with magma being replaced from a reservoir beneath the volcano as fast as it emerges as lava at the surface.
While the two volcanoes are different in many respects, St. Helens appears to have become an "open system" as its domebuilding eruption that began in the fall of 2004 continues at a pace that has been unchanged for the past year.
Analysing of digital elevation models made from high-resolution aerial photographs, scientists have kept close tabs on the rate at which lava has been pushing into the crater. At first it was about a dumptruck load, roughly 8 cubic yards, per second.
A year later it was down to slightly more than 1 cubic yard per second and since last April it has been fairly constant about 0.6 of a cubic yard per second - still the equivalent of about nine truckloads every two minutes.
The longer the eruption continues at that rate, the more likely it is that a direct pathway has developed for molten rock to emerge from deep within the planet's crust.

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