Well, I do not exactly remember the time
that my mother informed me that one of the mountains in Washington—which was a
dormant volcano for a long time, showed signs of spewing magma and small
eruptions---until ¼ of its 9,000-foot summit blew up in the most shocking
massive explosion that you only often see in a blow-up of a bulk storage
facility of a pyrotechnics factory….an explosion so massive that it seemed like
somebody planted a nuclear bomb into the mouth of the volcano and then the
nuclear bomb detonated and blew up almost the whole volcano.
At the first seeing of the time-lapse
photography of that fateful day—when Mt . St. Helens massively blows its summit
and spew large amounts of ashy smoke up to 60,000 feet high that it even
created its own weather (and because the volcanic ash was very hot and it
cooled as it spewed up into the sky to the troposphere to temperatures as low
as -40 to -50F); it created a cumulonimbus cloud great enough and an atmosphere
so unstable enough to create enough separation charges to create thunder and
lightning in that volcanic ash cloud. But I did not know about volcanic
eruptions triggering lightning until I heard that Tom Skilling told me on WGN
that it can happen.
And I learned that even when the ash
spewed upward and you think the eruption is going to be over when the smoke
goes up….but I learned that just like in Amaro, Colombia, the top of the
mountain of Mt. St. Helens—the icecap---melts from the intense heat and the
resultant pyroclastic flows that came with it caused pounds and pounds of ash,
water, and mud to spread towards a large area away from the mountain, uprooting
trees and incinerating almost anything that went in their way.
And the ash cloud itself moved 200
miles to Spokane , Washington
I found out that 61 people died
when all of the hell of the massive eruption was finally over, but we were
lucky.
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