Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Mount St. Helens and Volcano Plumbing Systems (GeoShort)
Transcript
- 0:03SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
- 0:15SPEAKER_01: Hey Chris.
- 0:20SPEAKER_00: You are one lucky dude.
- 0:23SPEAKER_00: Oh, why?
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: Because you get to look at me.
- 0:27SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding me?
- 0:28SPEAKER_00: Look at you.
- 0:30SPEAKER_00: Hey.
- 0:31SPEAKER_01: Oh, God.
- 0:32SPEAKER_01: I have no comment.
- 0:34SPEAKER_01: But your beard, you're growing your beard out.
- 0:36SPEAKER_01: It looks good, doesn't it?
- 0:38SPEAKER_00: Well, come on now.
- 0:40SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 0:41SPEAKER_01: Okay.
- 0:41SPEAKER_01: Shady likes it.
- 0:43SPEAKER_01: I'm sure she does.
- 0:44SPEAKER_01: It's getting there.
- 0:44SPEAKER_01: It's getting there.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: It's got a little gray in it.
- 0:46SPEAKER_00: Not actually a lot of gray on it.
- 0:47SPEAKER_00: A lot of gray.
- 0:47SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I think.
- 0:49SPEAKER_01: It's a little gray.
- 0:50SPEAKER_01: What are you talking about?
- 0:51SPEAKER_01: There ain't no pepper in that salt.
- 0:54SPEAKER_00: There's a little bit of pepper.
- 0:55SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit.
- 0:56SPEAKER_01: A little bit.
- 0:57SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
- 0:58SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
- 0:58SPEAKER_01: All right, Chris.
- 1:00SPEAKER_01: So this is fun.
- 1:01SPEAKER_01: I like this episode, this geo short we're doing here.
- 1:04SPEAKER_01: And this is a bit of a prelude to a full episode we got coming out next week on volcanoes and how they're classified.
- 1:11SPEAKER_01: Really the basics of volcanoes, why they look the way they do, and sort of the processes that make them look the way they do.
- 1:18SPEAKER_01: So we kind of that that's a really fun episode.
- 1:20SPEAKER_01: That'll come out next week.
- 1:21SPEAKER_01: But this is a bit of a prelude, and this is about Mount St.
- 1:24SPEAKER_01: Helens.
- 1:24SPEAKER_01: And Chris, you hold on.
- 1:26SPEAKER_00: Are you saying prelude or prelude?
- 1:28SPEAKER_01: Because I think it it like I think you uh let me pronounce it however I want.
- 1:34SPEAKER_00: Is it spelled P-R-A-Y then lewd?
- 1:38SPEAKER_01: Well, it depends how you uh put your emphasis on the E there.
- 1:42SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
- 1:43SPEAKER_00: All right.
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna let that just ride.
- 1:46SPEAKER_01: Okay, all right, all right.
- 1:47SPEAKER_01: Well, this is a pre prelude.
- 1:50SPEAKER_01: This is a prelude to our our uh our uh oh god, Chris, you just threw me way off.
- 1:59SPEAKER_01: This is all about Mount St.
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: Helens.
- 2:01SPEAKER_01: And Chris, you have like a you have a really personal relationship with Mount St.
- 2:04SPEAKER_01: Helens, which sounds weird to have a personal relationship with a volcano, but you do.
- 2:09SPEAKER_00: I do.
- 2:10SPEAKER_00: Volcanoes for me, it's one of the things that really got me turned on to the field of geology.
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: But then, you know, with Mount St.
- 2:17SPEAKER_00: Helens, um, I went there a year after it erupted.
- 2:20SPEAKER_00: I just relentlessly bothered my mom, and I still have the ash that I collected in an old coffee.
- 2:25SPEAKER_00: I've seen the vial.
- 2:26SPEAKER_01: I've seen the vial.
- 2:27SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know.
- 2:27SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I use it and I wrote a lab using it.
- 2:29SPEAKER_00: You know, I got it from two different locations.
- 2:31SPEAKER_00: That's kind of cool, right?
- 2:32SPEAKER_00: I was I was like eight years old.
- 2:33SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and then you in 2004 were one of my students.
- 2:39SPEAKER_01: Let's not use numbers when I was in high school, but yes, when I was in high school.
- 2:42SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, I'm up there teaching, and you were doing an independent study for me, and I'm right in the middle of like just whatever we were talking about that day with my students, and you you're you're a hulking massive person.
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: So, you know, your six foot four frame comes up behind me, and you kind of bend down and whisper in my ear, hey, did you hear what's going on with Mount St.
- 3:07SPEAKER_00: Helens?
- 3:09SPEAKER_00: And I'm I look, I turn back and I look at you, I'm like, yeah, yes, I've heard.
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: And then you said, Are you going?
- 3:17SPEAKER_00: And I look, I'm like, Jesse, like, leave me alone.
- 3:19SPEAKER_00: I'm teaching right now, and and I just kind of dismissed you.
- 3:22SPEAKER_00: And then you walked away, and you're like, I knew you were all talk as you just walked away.
- 3:28SPEAKER_01: Well, because for I'd take it, you know, three classes from you, and all I'd heard about was how, oh, I just want to go and see a volcano erupt.
- 3:35SPEAKER_01: If Yellowstone erupts, I'm gonna go sit there and die by the ash flow coming at me, you know, all this big talk.
- 3:41SPEAKER_01: And then Mount St.
- 3:42SPEAKER_01: Helens is at this point, Mount St.
- 3:44SPEAKER_01: Helens was kind of gurgling and making noises about erupting again, right?
- 3:47SPEAKER_01: And it was all over the news.
- 3:48SPEAKER_01: And uh, but then you went.
- 3:50SPEAKER_01: You actually went, right?
- 3:51SPEAKER_00: I uh yeah, this the way the story goes, it's which is 100% true.
- 3:55SPEAKER_00: I I actually had a night class that night, okay.
- 3:57SPEAKER_00: That after you said this, I'm in downtown Grand Rapids, taking a night class, and it was just a horrible class.
- 4:04SPEAKER_00: It was really boring.
- 4:06SPEAKER_00: Um, it was not a good thing, and so but I had I was at a computer right in front of me.
- 4:11SPEAKER_00: And so before I realized what happened, I bought a ticket.
- 4:16SPEAKER_01: That's great.
- 4:17SPEAKER_00: I bought a plane ticket.
- 4:18SPEAKER_00: I hadn't talked to anybody, I hadn't talked to Jenny, I hadn't talked to my people at work at school.
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: I bought a ticket.
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: I'm going.
- 4:26SPEAKER_00: And so I I remember walking out of there and I'm driving home.
- 4:30SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm thinking, what the what the hell am I gonna do?
- 4:33SPEAKER_00: I haven't spoken to anybody.
- 4:34SPEAKER_00: And then my boss calls me and says, Hey, Chris, have you heard what's going on with Mount St.
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: Helens?
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Yeah, yeah, I gotta talk to you about that actually.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: He's like, What?
- 4:43SPEAKER_00: I said, um, I need a few days off.
- 4:46SPEAKER_00: I bought a plane ticket and I'm going out there.
- 4:48SPEAKER_01: And see, not a common request from it from a principal usually hears, huh?
- 4:54SPEAKER_00: But then, but then it gets weirder because he's like, Well, hey, I I want to go too.
- 4:59SPEAKER_00: So before I even got home, he got a ticket on the same plane uh to go out with me to Port to I think we flew into Portland, and um, yeah, so we we spent three days as close as we could possibly get to Mount St.
- 5:15SPEAKER_00: Helens during that time.
- 5:16SPEAKER_00: And I go home, and I Jenny's watching TV, and I said, Hey, I gotta talk to you.
- 5:22SPEAKER_00: And and I just told her what I did, you know, and she just shakes her head like you're the biggest idiot in the world.
- 5:27SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 5:28SPEAKER_00: But it all worked out.
- 5:29SPEAKER_00: Why did I marry you?
- 5:30SPEAKER_00: It all started because of you.
- 5:32SPEAKER_00: That's what it was just because of you.
- 5:34SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, hey, uh, I'll take credit for it.
- 5:36SPEAKER_01: And you know, we've been to Mount St.
- 5:37SPEAKER_01: Helens together, actually, to a geological uh Society of America meeting that was in Portland, and we took a little side trip and did some hiking in the dreary rain around Mount St.
- 5:45SPEAKER_01: Helens.
- 5:46SPEAKER_01: But it's beautiful, and and you've been there several times since then, right?
- 5:50SPEAKER_00: I have, yeah, I was there just there this summer, actually.
- 5:52SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, we uh we went out there with my family to climb it, and there was, you know, it was a it was a low snow year, but we were there very early in the season, and so we had to take the winter route, and right away, maybe a mile into it, we're we're in a snow and ice, and so it was a fun day on the mountain.
- 6:11SPEAKER_00: Walked right into a uh white out on the way up, and so route finding on the way down, that was that was fun to like kind of challenge yourself, and yeah, it was good nice, good time.
- 6:22SPEAKER_01: So we're talking about Mount St.
- 6:24SPEAKER_01: Helens today because well, we're gonna build this conversation or this this short, relatively short conversation off of an article that we'll put a link to in the show notes here.
- 6:34SPEAKER_01: But it's basically an article that was written a few years ago about Mount St.
- 6:36SPEAKER_01: Helens, and it's called The Next Big Bang.
- 6:39SPEAKER_01: It's really the story of Mount St.
- 6:40SPEAKER_01: Helens and some current research that's going on there, which is really interesting.
- 6:44SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I thought it was an amazing, like very, very well-written article because it's something that I think most people could read it and understand it if they kind of waded through it.
- 6:55SPEAKER_00: It was in just really well done.
- 6:57SPEAKER_00: The diagrams were amazing.
- 6:59SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this is an article in Scientific American, sort of very publicly accessible um article.
- 7:05SPEAKER_01: But we're gonna highlight three points here, Chris, about Mount St.
- 7:08SPEAKER_01: Helens, kind of from this article.
- 7:10SPEAKER_01: And it relates to our full episode that'll come out next week about sort of more general discussion of volcanoes, but really we're talking about the plumbing system, what's inside of the volcano?
- 7:22SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 7:22SPEAKER_00: You know, and how individualistic each volcano is, how complicated the plumbing system is, leading from the like the when we talk about the plumbing system, we're thinking about the source of the magma from deep down, then it has to make its way all the way up to the surface.
- 7:37SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're going to refer to as the plumbing system.
- 7:40SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you can think about this very much like in your house, right?
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: There's some similarities to the plumbing system in your house.
- 7:46SPEAKER_01: Water is coming out, usually in people's basement, you know, water pipes are coming in and they're feeding faucets upstairs.
- 7:53SPEAKER_01: You know, it looks kind of complicated.
- 7:54SPEAKER_01: If you trace the pipes, you can figure out where it's going.
- 7:57SPEAKER_01: There's a source to the water, there's an outlet to the water, and you kind of see it go along its path.
- 8:02SPEAKER_01: And understanding the plumbing system of volcanoes is very comparable to being able to understand the plumbing system of your house.
- 8:09SPEAKER_01: If you're going to troubleshoot the house or trouble or be like, ah, I got a leak in this faucet, or what might go wrong with this house, you want to know something about the plumbing system.
- 8:17SPEAKER_01: The same thing goes for volcanoes, and it can be kind of a complicated pathway.
- 8:21SPEAKER_01: So we'll also highlight here that we've covered some of the processes in a previous episode of on Bowen's reaction series.
- 8:28SPEAKER_01: So some of the processes that we'll just touch on today, you can go back to that episode and use the information there to plug into the understand volcanoes a little bit better.
- 8:38SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 8:38SPEAKER_00: And you know, another thing that we've learned from this whole thing and that was highlighted in this paper is that these underground, you know, magma chambers, if you will.
- 8:49SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna put chambers in quotations when I say that because it's not really idealized like that, but they get heated up and then they cool down and they get heated up again and they cool down.
- 8:58SPEAKER_00: This happens several times to the magma as it builds up to this like next activity.
- 9:06SPEAKER_01: That's right.
- 9:07SPEAKER_01: So this is built really the foundation for this article and the foundation for this discussion that we're having is built on this visualization of the plumbing system beneath Mount St.
- 9:17SPEAKER_01: Helens.
- 9:18SPEAKER_01: And this was a big project that was uh a research project that was called IMUSH, that's I-M-U-S-H, and it's seismologists or people who study uh volcanoes or to study signals transmitted throughout Earth.
- 9:32SPEAKER_01: Uh, they're very infamous for coming up with acronyms, and some are very ridiculous acronyms.
- 9:38SPEAKER_01: This one is quite a good acronym.
- 9:39SPEAKER_01: IMUSH stands for Imaging Magma under St.
- 9:43SPEAKER_01: Helens.
- 9:44SPEAKER_01: So that's like that's a really good acronym.
- 9:46SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
- 9:47SPEAKER_00: So basically, what they did is they took they took about 25 bore holes, they drilled holes into the ground and very systematically, like they got to pick where they wanted these holes, right?
- 10:01SPEAKER_00: And they packed each hole with anywhere from a half ton to a full ton of explosives.
- 10:07SPEAKER_01: That's right.
- 10:07SPEAKER_01: And before they did anything with that, though, they put a ton of seismometers, a bunch of instruments all over the volcano that could monitor ground movement.
- 10:15SPEAKER_00: Now, St.
- 10:15SPEAKER_00: Helens is already a you know monitored, equipped volcano all the time, but this allowed them to do this in a very systematic way, right?
- 10:24SPEAKER_00: Because we got to pick where we're gonna send the seismic waves from and where we're gonna detect them.
- 10:31SPEAKER_00: So this was this is cool.
- 10:33SPEAKER_00: You always get these earthquakes with a mountain like St.
- 10:36SPEAKER_00: Helens, but we don't get to plan where they originate from.
- 10:42SPEAKER_00: And that's what makes this different.
- 10:43SPEAKER_01: So you put a bunch of explosives in the ground, you detonate that thing, and that is a source of seismic signals or energy traveling through the earth.
- 10:53SPEAKER_01: Then we're detecting that with a seismic network around there, and that is imaging the volcano, but you have a very controlled time and location for where the source is of that ground motion.
- 11:03SPEAKER_01: So that's what they sort of did here.
- 11:05SPEAKER_01: And what did what were some results?
- 11:07SPEAKER_01: And again, we're just we're just touching the surface here of what the results are in this whole big complicated thing.
- 11:13SPEAKER_01: But what were a couple ones, Chris?
- 11:14SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, I think I think we can boil it down to like three to us anyway.
- 11:19SPEAKER_00: Let's simplify it down to three conclusions, right?
- 11:22SPEAKER_00: One of the things that they learned is that there are multiple quote unquote magma chambers beneath the mountain, and they have different pathways to get to those magma chambers.
- 11:36SPEAKER_00: That's one conclusion that we can make.
- 11:38SPEAKER_01: These different paths have, I mean, they look very different.
- 11:42SPEAKER_01: Some of them are sort of really deep, they're straight, skinny, and therefore magma moves very, very quickly through them and can go right to the surface.
- 11:51SPEAKER_01: Think of that like a pipe that's coming right out of the ground, you know, your cold water pipe.
- 11:56SPEAKER_01: It's coming right out of your wall, it's heading straight up to the second floor sink.
- 12:00SPEAKER_01: It's just a straight pipe that goes up, it's really small, it's narrow, nothing else really happens to it.
- 12:05SPEAKER_01: And then there are other paths that are more convoluted than that.
- 12:08SPEAKER_01: There are paths that, like your hot water pipe, where their cold water comes out of the wall or comes out of the water supply, and it goes into this hot water heater and it has to get heated up.
- 12:19SPEAKER_01: It sits there for a while in this big tank, and then it goes up and it goes up a convoluted, more convoluted route.
- 12:24SPEAKER_01: So the water takes longer to get to the surface, it has to sit somewhere and stuff happens to it before it goes up and comes out of the faucet.
- 12:32SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
- 12:33SPEAKER_00: And this leads to really the second conclusion then is you know, why are there different rocks that can be found around St.
- 12:39SPEAKER_00: Helens?
- 12:40SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not just straight up andesite, which is what you would expect from these kinds of volcanoes.
- 12:46SPEAKER_00: Well, it has to do with what you said that like if magma shoots up from the deep chamber up through the crust and erupts rather quickly, right?
- 12:56SPEAKER_00: It doesn't spend a lot of time in any one spot on its way up, then that magma is not gonna change much.
- 13:03SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna assimilate the rocks around it and and it's gonna come out and and be this kind of runnier, effusive, non-explosive kind of magma.
- 13:14SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and we would call that most of that magma is basalt.
- 13:16SPEAKER_01: It's sort of dark colored rock.
- 13:18SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, it's very primitive.
- 13:19SPEAKER_01: It's sort of from deep in the earth, and nothing's really happened to it on the way up.
- 13:24SPEAKER_01: But if it sits there for a while in a big batch of magma and it sits there for a long time, a lot of chemistry happens to it, it's kind of cooked in place, then it can change composition.
- 13:34SPEAKER_01: And it usually becomes more silica rich, which means it has more SiO2 in it.
- 13:38SPEAKER_01: It changes composition to an andesite, is another rock, this sort of intermediate salt and pepper rock, and then it can become a daycyte, which is like a really sort of a light colored rock, which is highly cooked, has been cooked a lot at depth.
- 13:50SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 13:51SPEAKER_00: So, what we're talking about then is if the source magma comes up through the crust and then it spends a significant amount of time in these chambers, you know, just below the mountain, it's assimilating that rock, changing the overall composition of the magma.
- 14:08SPEAKER_01: Let me interject and define assimilating.
- 14:09SPEAKER_01: That is basically absorbing, chemically absorbing rock around it.
- 14:13SPEAKER_01: So it's the heat it's bringing in is used to melt the rock around it, and so it changes the composition of the original rock.
- 14:19SPEAKER_01: That's assimilation.
- 14:20SPEAKER_00: I always think of assimilation as like blending in.
- 14:24SPEAKER_00: If somebody escapes from prison, they want to assimilate into society.
- 14:28SPEAKER_00: They want to blend in and not stand out.
- 14:30SPEAKER_00: It be they want to become like everything else.
- 14:32SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens is magma is that it comes in and it's sitting in this shallower chamber.
- 14:38SPEAKER_00: It's uh blending the composition of this country rock with the source magma, therefore making it more felsic or more silica-rich.
- 14:48SPEAKER_00: And that's super important because that uh felsic, uh silica-rich magma is thick and sticky and gooey, and therefore it tends to get stuck.
- 15:00SPEAKER_00: And when magma gets stuck, then it has to build up pressure, it has to accumulate gases, and it erupts infrequently but explosively.
- 15:11SPEAKER_00: Okay, so Jesse, what's our the first conclusion was that the plumbing system is complicated.
- 15:16SPEAKER_00: That leads to the second conclusion where different chemical composition lavas can spew out onto the surface.
- 15:24SPEAKER_00: What is the third conclusion that we took from this paper?
- 15:27SPEAKER_01: The third thing is that these magmas, when they're sitting down at depth, they actually get heated up and cooled down quite a bit.
- 15:34SPEAKER_01: So they get kind of baked, they get heated up, cooled down, heated up, cooled down, heated up, cooled down, and we can look at individual mineral grains that erupt out onto the surface and we can track that heating and cooling cycle.
- 15:45SPEAKER_01: And this is really necessary because the more cooking often leads to more violent eruptions sometimes.
- 15:53SPEAKER_01: And so here at Mount St.
- 15:54SPEAKER_01: Helens, we have we know there was a big eruption, we know what rock type came out, and if we understand the plumbing system or where that magma was cooked and how it was cooked, we can use that to further understand other volcanoes which might not have erupted yet, but might be doing so in the future.
- 16:10SPEAKER_01: So understanding this kind of cooking process is really kind of an important thing to understand, and Mount St.
- 16:15SPEAKER_01: Helens is a great place to do it.
- 16:16SPEAKER_00: What mineral do they use to determine the heating up and cooling down of magmas?
- 16:22SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the in this particular study that was highlighted in this paper, uh, they use zircon, which is something I'm intimately familiar with, but there's a lot of different minerals that they can use.
- 16:31SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you said it's the only way that I got you to agree to do this episode.
- 16:37SPEAKER_00: When I flipped you this paper, you focused it on one word.
- 16:40SPEAKER_00: And you're like, hey, Chris, they mentioned zircon.
- 16:44SPEAKER_01: That's my favorite mineral.
- 16:45SPEAKER_01: I love that mineral.
- 16:46SPEAKER_01: Of course we can talk about this because that's a great mineral.
- 16:48SPEAKER_01: So I must admit though, there are other minerals that people can use to do this similar thing, to understand this cooking, this heating and cooling process.
- 16:56SPEAKER_01: So I think with that, the conclusion here would be that each volcano, you know, is a unique little snowflake, but there are broad similarities amongst groups of volcanoes.
- 17:06SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 17:06SPEAKER_00: I guess when I think of this, I think of when if you take a group of budding young geology students out to Mount St.
- 17:14SPEAKER_00: Helens and you see these chemical differences in the rocks, right?
- 17:18SPEAKER_00: You see day site, andesite, and some basalt.
- 17:23SPEAKER_00: First of all, what a great like learning tool to make this point that each volcano, the way magma may comes up from the source and out onto the surface, it can take a lot of different paths.
- 17:36SPEAKER_00: And those paths then determine the nature of the eruptions, and they can be different for the same volcano.
- 17:42SPEAKER_00: And that's very confusing often to young students because it doesn't fit the box.
- 17:48SPEAKER_00: You know, and that's um that's I think that's such an important thing for students to learn in geology that you know, you know what?
- 17:56SPEAKER_00: Everything has its own individual, and it doesn't always have to fit.
- 18:00SPEAKER_01: That's right.
- 18:01SPEAKER_01: But there are broad similarities that we can use certain volcanoes to understand other ones that are kind of generally similar.
- 18:07SPEAKER_01: So with that, Chris, I'd say that's a wrap here on the Studio Shore.
- 18:11SPEAKER_01: And tune in next week to a longer discussion about the categories of volcanoes and how they work.
- 18:17SPEAKER_01: Yeah, super fun.
- 18:18SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
- 18:19SPEAKER_01: Let's go back to St.
- 18:20SPEAKER_01: Helens sometime soon, man.
- 18:22SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's do it.
- 18:23SPEAKER_01: I'm all in.
- 18:24SPEAKER_01: All right, man.
- 18:25SPEAKER_01: All right, take care.
- 18:26SPEAKER_01: Cheers.
- 18:27SPEAKER_01: You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and hit that like, subscribe, follow button, and leave us a review.
- 18:34SPEAKER_01: We really appreciate it.
- 18:35SPEAKER_01: Take care.