Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Modern Mount St. Helens: Author Steve Olson (GeoShort)

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Modern Mount St. Helens: Author Steve Olson (GeoShort) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, this week we're excited to release a little preview to our full interview with author Steve Olsen.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Steve has been around science writing for a long time, has written for the National Academy of Sciences, and is the author of books such as The Apocalypse Factory, Plutonium in the Making of the Atomic Age, Countdown, a book about the toughest math competition in the world, and Mapping Human History, Discovering the Past Through Our Genes.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: He's also written a book called Eruption, The Untold Story of Mount St.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Helens, and that's the book that brought the three of us together here.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: As always, you can follow us on all the social medias.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: We are at Planet Geocast.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: And please, please share Planet Geo with your friends, leave us a rating and review, and follow on your podcast app.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Tune in next week to hear our full interview with author Steve Olson.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: And until then, enjoy this short discussion.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, Steve, I'm curious.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited to read your book on plutonium.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: What are you working on now that's not out right now?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you care to divulge it.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like what's, you know, what's your 3,000 hours being spent on?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes I go a long time between books because I have to wait for that one topic that's really going to capture my imagination.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so at the moment, I'm going between books.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm floating.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about what is the next thing on which I'm really willing to devote 3,000 hours of my time.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know yet.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have some ideas, but they just they're not compelling enough to me yet.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any ideas, send them my way.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to write about more about the geoscience.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm really interested in your job, I guess.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it sounds very in interesting to write for a living.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Do you write articles for uh magazines and things like that?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Are you I mean, I'm guessing you're still writing frequently.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do you write for the National Academy at the moment?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what does your day-to-day look like, I suppose?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of a lot of my work right now is for the National Academy of Sciences still.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh some magazine articles, but less than I used to write when I was uh when I was a kid, uh back in my 20s and 30s.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm starting to slow down a little bit.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now that I'm not uh writing quite as much, I've rediscovered backpacking.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: My wife and I have started uh doing a lot of backpacking here in Washington State and elsewhere when we can get to those various places.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, amazing.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And though I didn't do a lot of that while I was raising kids, now that my kids are older, they'll sometimes come on these backpacking trips with me.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just a wonderful thing to do, as I'm sure you guys do some of it too.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But here in Washington State, I have uh enough backpacking and day trips to do to for the rest of my life.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I've I've got to get busy before my uh knees and hips get out.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a beautiful area.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: It is, yeah, it's good inspiration too for uh cool geoscience books to write.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you've got many more in you.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's lots of great hikes in Pennsylvania.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I used to do them when I was in living in Maryland.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I remember some very distinctive ones.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It it rained as I remember, one of the times we were in Pennsylvania.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: It rains and it gets sometimes unbearably hot to go hiking, but uh, you know, I'm from I'm a Michigander and absolutely.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Steve, you wrote this article.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: We alluded it alluded to it before.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I I loved the article.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: I first came across it a a number of years ago.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And when was it written?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, 2018, was it?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, two years after the book came out.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: This is a Scientific American uh article.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: So can you tell us a little bit about that?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like what was your you got to interview scientists and talk to them about like can you tell us first of all what iMush is and what this paper was really all about?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: iMush, yes, there are lots of I words, of course, small I, capital M U S H, and it stands for Imaging Magma under St.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the acronym for iMush.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a multidisciplinary effort to try to figure out what was going on with Mount St.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Helens because it's a very strange volcano when you think about it.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I live here in the Pacific Northwest, and I can look out my windows.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I live on the 15th floor of a high rise here in Seattle and can see two of the five active volcanoes here in Washington.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, from the top of this building, I can see a third one.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So three of the five active volcanoes in Washington State are visible from my building.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at them, four of the five are pretty much in a straight north-south line.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a reason for that.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It relates to the ways in which these volcanoes are generated by a tectonic plate that is diving under the North Atlantic plate to the west of here, which someday will cause a very large earthquake.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope this building will be standing after that earthquake uh occurs.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: It remains to be seen.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: However, Mount St.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Helens is unusually far to the west.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, Mount St.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Helens isn't on that north-south line of the other four, the other four of Washington State's five volcanoes.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So why is it displaced so far to the west?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's one big question about Mount St.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The other one is why is it so active?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why should that one volcano, which is in an unusual spot, be the most active in Washington State?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the IMESH project was an effort to bring people who would look at the volcano using many different means to try to understand the way that magma was moving all the way from the deep in the earth up to Mount St.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and the path that it was taking to get into that volcano.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So they would look at it using seismology, they would do chemistry on the various uh uh lavas that have been erupted from Mount St.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, the magmas that have come from Mount St.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Helens that are preserved in the rocks around there.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: They would look at the magnetic signals that were being sent and take all of these different pieces of information, the gravity signals, put them together to try to come up with some comprehensive picture of what was happening under Mount St.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Helens.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: The effort is in some ways still underway.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's revealed a lot about the characteristics of Mount St.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and why it has some of the features that it does.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they've also started now to extend this analysis to other volcanoes, especially unusual volcanoes, or particularly active volcanoes.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can take again some of the lessons that are learned in Mount St.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and apply them elsewhere to be able to under both understand volcanoes and then issue predictions about what those volcanoes might do.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So have those lessons, have you followed along after this paper?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: And have these discoveries been translated to other volcanoes actively?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: They have.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, a lot of them is through meetings like the ones you guys attended, the AGU meetings.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: They'll have big IMUSH sessions and people will come there from all over the world.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, having studied volcanoes in their local areas, and uh we'll go to these sessions where people try to try to explain what's happening with Mount St.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Helens and then draw conclusions from that.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the scientific literature that has been generated on this is expressly on that topic.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is just trying to explain Mount St.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Helens, but other other articles that have been written are what does this mean for other volcanoes?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: What can we learn from that?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: The people who study volcanoes, they always have these big, well, great acronyms, first of all.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the better ones, IMUSH.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Some acronyms are less clear like that.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a big initiative.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's SZ4D, subduction zone 4D, a huge NSF initiative that, as far as I can tell, anybody who's ever thought about a subduction zone or a volcano associated with a subduction zone is part of this pro this project.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it sounds like it's very interesting.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they've got they're, I think they're in the planning period now.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I guess we'll see where it goes.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's gonna be an interesting one too, especially because those subduction zones have such a big influence on daily life here in Seattle, where we have to worry all the time about a 9.0 earthquake that could happen because of the subduction zone off our coast, which at the time of Mount St.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Helens eruption in 1980, uh, people knew much less about that potential hazard and about other hazards that exist in Washington State that could also cause earthquakes.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have all kinds of faults that could bring this building down.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of drama out there, geoscience drama out there in the Pacific Northwest.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Makes up for it with the beauty, though, and the hiking you're referring to, I suppose.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the beauty and the hiking are the product of the same processes, right?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I look out my window and see these mountains, and yeah, if you're gonna get one, you have to take the other.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's it.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Again, tune in next week to hear the full interview with Steve Olson and follow us on all the social medias.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're at Planet Geocast.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's at Planet Geocast with a C.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: Please share with your friends, leave us a rating review, and follow us on your podcast app.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: Cheers,