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Mount St. Helens : Helens

Decent Essays

Irslan Shahid
Professor Glenn
Geology 1303
March 08, 2017
“Mount St. Helens”
Mount St. Helens is an active stratovolcano which is in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and is located in Washington, Skamania County to be exact. It is a volcano which is very near some major cities including Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. It is in the North American segment of the Pacific called the “Ring of Fire” and this is where the tectonic plates from the “oceanic plate” of the Pacific are forced underneath the “continental plate” of North America.
Age wise, Mount St. Helens is still a young volcano as it was developed only 40,000 years ago and is one of the most active volcanos in the Cascade Range. Just like other volcanoes …show more content…

This explosion during March caused two very large craters to open which then turned into one gigantic crater and at the same time a huge bulge on the northern region of the volcano appeared, this grew about six feet every day. Geologists researched the site of the bulge, measured the earthquakes, collected ash and sampled the gases that were released during this period and eventually the bulge grew to three-hundred feet wide and was over a mile in length. At 8:32 AM, on the 18th of May, Mount St. Helens erupted and it was a disaster, the explosion was preceded by thousands of earthquakes during the following two months, which accumulated to a major disaster. The landslide was one of the largest ever to be recorded in history. This may sound like a huge eruption but was not the largest eruption that has occurred by Mount St. Helens, in the year 1480, the eruption is said to be about five times bigger than the one that happened during May of 1980. Mount St. Helens has developed over the past thousands of years due to many eruptions.
Each eruption caused a hot rock called magma from inside earth to be forced out to the surface called lava. Some of the eruptions caused magma that was liquid to flow out lava while at other times the magma was solid bursting out molten rock. Volcanos are essential to life on earth for various reasons like adding

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