It is 30 years ago this month that Mount St. Helens ‘blew.’ 

     Without warning on a Sunday morning in May, the mountain in southwestern Washington erupted.  The blast killed 57 people, 7,000 elk and deer, and it ’shortened’ the mountain from a 9,665-foot peak to a crater just 8,300 feet high.  The eruption of this volcano, which had been considered dormant until that day, triggered the largest landslide in recorded history.  As a result, 230 square miles of forest were laid waste, and 14 miles of river valley were clogged with mud.  The churning pillar of ash and rock that Mount St. Helens spewed upward and eastward turned day into night in Yakima and Spokane, and spread particles of volcanic ash as far east as New England.

     But this is a success story, not a tale of utter destruction. 

     Miraculously, 30 years after Mount St. Helens erupted, the mountain is coming back!  While scientists predicted that the barren, ‘lunar’ landscape that the pristine mountain ecosystem had become on May 18, 1980, could never recover, life is returning to Mount St. Helens!  Humans left the mountain relatively undisturbed after the eruption, and now scientists are viewing Mount St. Helens is a testament to the resilience of nature.  It has become apparent that many, many plants and animals can make a dramatic comeback, even after a catastrophic disturbance.

     Today, visitors to Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument can see many signs of regeneration:  alpine wildflowers and herbs, patches of scrubby willow and alder trees, chipmunks and grazing elk.  From microbes to mammals, from fungi to flowers, millions of plants and animals of thousands of species are now flourishing on Mount St. Helens.  And while the mountain today is a far less diverse ecosystem that it was before the eruption, so much life has returned that scientists now expect that in 30 more years a forest will begin to grow in what is still wasteland below the crater.   

     Mount St. Helens has provided scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to observe what happens to a landscape that is virtually wiped clean biologically.  Researchers report that they have learned a great deal about how plants and animals respond to volcanic blasts.   For example, when mountain lupine began to grow in profusion on the incinerated plain below the crater, scientists were surprised because the large seeds of the purple wildflower had not been thought to travel great distances on the wind.  Yet they did.   There have been many similar surprises.    “We have learned to expect the unexpected,” says Jeanne Bennett, executive director of the nonprofit Mount St. Helens Institute.

     The national monument that Mount St. Helens has become attracts more than 200,000 visitors every year.  I can imagine that it would be a thrill to visit the place every few years and observe new life each time–more plant and animal species returning to a mountain once deemed forever dead!–April Moore

Mount St. Helens--2010

Mount St. Helens explosion, May 18, 1980

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Good news for Mother Earth!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.