My date with a volcano ...
In 1980, I was graduating from high school and getting ready to enter college. My then boyfriend and I went camping in the Blue Mountains of southeastern Washington. After a long weekend of ‘smores and marathon Risk-playing, we returned home to Pasco, WA. We had not been listening to the radio, as he just had installed a new cassette player in his car. Out of the sky was falling soft greasy flakes of a grey ash. Living within a few miles of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, you can imagine my relief when we turned on the television and found out that it was only a volcano erupting in southwestern Washington state.
When Mt St Helens exploded in such a spectacular way on May 18, 1980, it produced the same of paradigm shift that resulted from 2004 Andaman subduction zone earthquake and tsunami. What had been a sexy, if somewhat nerdy, field of scholarly inquiry became a matter of life and death.
A bit on the science of volcanoes...
The Earth is not a passive piece of rock underneath our feet. It is a roiling mass of molten metal and rock with a crunchy candy shell. We live on that thin wafer of candy. Volcanoes result when boiling hot magma (you know I had to go ) makes its way to the surface, usually at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The Hawaiian islands are an example of an exception to this boundary rule. In the case of the Cascades, the Holocene volcanoes are a result of the subsiding Pacific plate melting underneath the North American plate. What this geologic process leaves us with are sublimely beautiful mountains that have repeatedly, and will again, explode leaving devastation in their wakes.
What is "volcano monitoring"?
Volcanoes tend to be rather polite natural disasters. They usually give you plenty of warning, if you are paying attention. And it’s that last bit, the paying attention bit, that is really key here. It is very rare for a volcano to not send signals to the scientists who monitor them.
Benefits of volcano monitoring
Volcanoes are destructive monsters who rend and tear the earth with fire and stone and water. And they kill wantonly with cool indifference. But they can also be planned for so that when they do erupt lives and property can be saved. Mitigation and response planning are very effective in reducing the cost of natural disasters. But we have to know about the danger. Monitoring saves lives... period.
Updated: Sorry about the misspelling on the title. It be fixed now.