Mount St Helens is a volcano

which is part of the Cascades

Mountain range in Washington
State in the USA
There are fourteen main
volcanoes found in the Cascades
Range. This mountain range
runs along the north west coast
of the USA.

Mount St Helens is the most

famous as it erupted most
spectacularly in 1980.
The Cascades Range is formed as part of a subduction zone where two
plates meet at a destructive plate boundary. The smaller Juan de Fuca plate
is subducted beneath the larger North American Plate. The Juan de Fuca
plate is composed of more dense oceanic crust so it is forced below the less
dense continental crust of the North American Plate.
As the crust is subducted there is
friction between the two plates. This
causes earthquakes.

The land on the edge of the

continental crust gets squashed up to
make fold mountains, like the
Cascades Range.

The subducting oceanic crust melts

as it goes into the mantle. As the
plate is subducted it takes some sea
water with it this makes it less dense
than the mantle around it. This
allows the material from the melting
plate to rise. It goes up through the
crust and explodes at the surface as
a volcano. The trapped sea water
turns into steam and this makes the
volcanoes very explosive. There
isn’t much lava but there is a lot of
ash, steam and gas.
* On 20th March 1980 there was an earthquake under the mountain.
It was caused by the magma beginning to move.
* On 25th March there were 47 earthquakes!
* So, on the 26th March, scientists issued a warning to the local
people that they might need to evacuate the area.
* On 27th March gas and steam belched out of the top of the
mountain.
* On 3rd April a bulge started to appear on the side of the mountain.
It kept growing and by 12th April it was 100m high.
* On 30th April scientists gave another warning and the local
authorities put a 30km danger zone around the volcano that people
were not allowed to enter.
* On 10th May there were several earthquakes under the mountain
and the bulge kept growing by 1.5m a day.
* On 18th May the volcano erupted…………
Problem 1
The volcano did not just erupt from its top. It erupted from its side too. This
is called a lateral blast. It caused the largest landslide ever recorded.
Problem 2
Because the volcano is over a destructive margin there was a lot of gas and
steam in the magma chamber. When the volcano erupted, the gas, steam and
ash burst out and flowed down the side of the volcano like a rolling cloud of
burning gas. This is called a pyroclastic flow.

It moved at 300km/hr.
It flattened and burnt trees over 360 square kilometres!
7000 animals were killed in the forests.
12 million salmon in a fish farm were killed.
61 people were killed.
Problem 3
The hot magma came to the surface next, and melted the snow that had been
on top of the mountain. This made mudslides called lahars that flowed down
river valleys at a speed of 35m per second!
Problem 4
The smoke and dust that was ejected from the volcano made a cloud 24km
high in the sky. Planes had to be diverted. The settled ash formed a layer
15cm deep. Roads were unusable and crops and farm machinery was ruined.
The cost of the damage caused by the ash was $175 million.
The mountain looked very different, the side had been blown out and it was
365m lower than it used to be.

Before the eruption After the eruption

The US Government gave $951 million in aid to rebuild industry in the area
and to compensate people.
The area is now a major tourist attraction. This means the local economy is
wealthier than it was before the eruption.
There is now an increased risk of flooding, due to the shape of the new
landscape.
An exclusion zone was set up around the volcano.