Fire and Ice
by Jon Burch Photography
Title
Fire and Ice
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Capture
Description
I distinctly remember walking with my first born kid over to a nearby school playground so he could climb on a tall rope thing they had set up for such purposes. As we walked along, I looked up and could see the trail of ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption overhead in the Kansas sky. That's a long ways away from where it blew!
Mount St. Helens is an active stratovolcano located in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The mountain takes its name from the British diplomat Lord St Helens, a friend of explorer George Vancouver who made a survey of the area in the late 18th century. The volcano is located in the Cascade Range and is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire that includes over 160 active volcanoes. This volcano is well known for its ash explosions and pyroclastic flows.
Mount St. Helens is most notorious for its catastrophic eruption on May 18, 1980, the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States. Fifty-seven people were killed; 250 homes, 47 bridges, 15 miles of railways, and 185 miles of highway were destroyed. A massive debris avalanche triggered by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale caused an eruption that reduced the elevation of the mountain's summit from 9,677 feet to 8,365 feet, replacing it with a 1 mile wide horseshoe-shaped crater. The debris avalanche was up to 0.7 cubic miles in volume. The Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument was created to preserve the volcano and allow for its aftermath to be scientifically studied.
As with most other volcanoes in the Cascade Range, Mount St. Helens is a large eruptive cone consisting of lava rock interlayered with ash, pumice, and other deposits. The mountain includes layers of basalt and andesite through which several domes of dacite lava have erupted. The largest of the dacite domes formed the previous summit, and off its northern flank sat the smaller Goat Rocks dome. Both were destroyed in the 1980 eruption.
Image copyright 2013 Jon Burch Photography
Uploaded
December 29th, 2013
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Viewed 279 Times - Last Visitor from Ottawa, ON - Canada on 04/19/2024 at 1:57 AM
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