The Day Mount St. Helens Blew Its Side Off

Описание: On the morning of May 18, 1980, the volcano Mount St. Helens in Washington state suddenly tore itself apart. For weeks the north side of the mountain had been swelling as magma pushed upward, but at 8:32 a.m. a powerful earthquake caused the unstable slope to collapse in the largest landslide ever recorded on land. That collapse uncorked the pressurized magma inside the volcano and triggered a sideways blast that ripped straight through the forest in front of the mountain. In a few seconds, a wall of super‑heated gas, ash, and rock raced outward at highway speeds, snapping millions of trees like matchsticks and erasing everything in its path.
As the lateral blast raced north, a towering vertical plume of ash and gas shot into the sky. It climbed more than ten miles high and spread out into a vast gray umbrella that darkened the daylight across large parts of the Pacific Northwest. Fine ash began to fall on towns and farms hundreds of kilometers away, coating cars, buildings, and fields, clogging engines, and forcing airports to shut down. For people watching from a distance, it looked as if a nuclear bomb had gone off in the wilderness. Closer to the volcano, rivers filled with mudflows—lahars—made from melted snow, ice, and debris, which surged down valleys, smashing bridges, roads, and logging sites.
By the end of the day, 57 people had lost their lives, including scientists, locals, and visitors who had stayed too close to the mountain. Hundreds of homes, nearly 300 kilometers of roads, and enormous areas of commercial forest were destroyed or badly damaged. The eruption sheared roughly 400 meters off the summit, shrinking the mountain and leaving a vast open crater that still scars the landscape today. Yet in the years that followed, scientists turned this devastation into a natural laboratory, studying how life slowly returns to a landscape that has been reset to zero and using the lessons from Mount St. Helens to better understand, monitor, and prepare for future volcanic eruptions around the world.
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