Climbing Volcanoes

Climbing Volcanoes

By Elaine Kachala

I waited…and waited. One by one, people descended the mountain. They looked sweaty, red-faced, and they were breathing heavily. But where were my husband and daughter? They’d woke early to hit the trailhead at 6 am. But it was going on twelve hours since they’d left our campsite to hike Mount St. Helens—an active volcano in Washington State. 

The mountain stands at 8,363 (f) (2,549 m). The hike is 10 miles (16 km) with an elevation gain of 4500 ft (1,372 m). At first, the hike seems innocent enough with a gradual 1000 ft (305 m) climb. But it’s no ordinary hike! After the first two miles through forest and open meadows, the challenge to the summit begins. The next 2500 ft. (762 m) is a climb through mega boulder fields dusted with ash and pumice that can shred your skin. Did they remember to take gloves? The last 1000 ft. (305 m) climb to the crater rim is through ash and small rocks. Did they pack enough water and snacks?  At the summit is a cornice—an overhanging ledge caused by layers of wind-blowing snow. If you step on it, it could collapse with any weight. Even standing on rock or dirt near the cornice is risky. How close to the edge did they step for the perfect view? When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 it was one of the most destructive volcanoes in US history. It erupted again in 2008, and it’s still active. When will it erupt again? Scientists are monitoring it carefully. A lot of questions ran through my mind as I waited.

 

Photo by Dylan Klinesteker and Mount St Helens Institute

Alas! Twelve hours and 33 minutes later, they emerged, exhausted but satisfied. At first, they were quiet. I guess they were still processing the experience. They’d climbed a phenomenal beast of a mountain. And, they’d endured the most intense physical test of their lifetime. Back at the campsite, there was an eruption of a different sort: words and photos. 

I heard about their agonizing climb over the boulders and the endless trudge through deep ash. But at the summit, spectacular views were the reward, as Mount. Rainier appeared in the distance.

 

Photo by Dylan Klinesteker and Mount St Helens Institute

Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier are part of the Cascade Range, also known as the Cascade Volcanic Arc. It’s a 1,200-mile (1,931 km) line of volcanoes from British Columbia to northern California.

Washington State has five volcanoes that are part of the Cascade Range, and that have a high or very high potential of blowing. They are Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount Baker, and Glacier Peak. Mount St. Helens is the youngest and most active.  

Will my husband and daughter venture to climb other volcanoes? Yes, actually. They attempted Mount. Adams (12,277 (f) 3,742 m)…but that’s another story!   

Are you ready for an epic volcano climb? If so, don’t wait too long! Strap on your boots, fill your water bottle, and expect the adventure of your life! Even if you’re not ready to climb to the summit, you can still experience these fascinating volcanic monuments with hikes around the mountains.

More about Mount St. Helens:

• It began growing before the end of the Ice Age.

• Captain George Vancouver of the British Royal Navy named the mountain in 1792 in honor of his friend, Alleyne Fitzherbert, a British diplomat.

• Researchers call it a “living laboratory.” For three decades, scientists have been studying how land and life return after eruptions, and how to forecast future hazards. 

References

History. https://www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/mount-st-helens

Mount St. Helens Institute https://www.mshinstitute.org/about_us/

NASA Science. https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/volcanoes2/en/

Smithsonian https://volcano.si.edu/

USGS. Science for a changing world. https://www.usgs.gov/

Washington State Department of Natural Resources. https://www.dnr.wa.gov/

Washington Trails Association https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/mount-st-helens-monitor-ridge#trailhead-map

Could There Be a Volcano Near My House?

By Adrienne Montgomerie

Well, it depends on where you live. There are certain areas on the planet where you might want to set up sensors. Most of those are out in the Pacific Ocean. If your house is in North America, I’m going to say you’re basically volcano free. Unless you’re on the west coast. And only a handful of volcanoes have been active in North America in the last 150 years. Here’s why.

How do volcanoes form?

Deep beneath the Earth’s hard crust is a core of rock so red hot that it has melted. It’s a little like the melted mozzarella in a cheese stick. Except that in the Earth, the molten rock is swirling and rising up, unlike the cheese. This molten rock breaks through the crust mostly at natural seams where continents meet (tectonic plates, actually). That’s why we find some on the west coast of America.

Earth’s crust is about 30 km thick on the continents. It would take you just over 6 hours to walk that distance. In some places on the ocean floor Earth’s crust is thinner, about 5 km thick. At hot spots in the thin crust, molten rock breaks through and spews out onto the surface as lava. As the lava cools and builds up on itself over years and years, it makes a mountain. Because the lava keeps flowing up and out of the Earth in that mountain, we call it a volcano.

The Hawaiian Islands were formed by lava bubbling up over many thousands of years and cooling into island-sized mountains. The tallest of the Hawaiian Islands is actually several hundred metres taller than Mount Everest, if you measure from its base at the bottom of the ocean.

Scientist believe that the hot spot where lava is bubbling up stays in one place as the crust slides extremely slowly over top of it. This is why there is a whole chain of islands in Hawaii. As the crust moves over the hotspot, a new island starts forming. 

Lava flows into the sea, growing the big island in Hawaii in 2006. By Jennifer Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0

Is it dangerous to live near a volcano?

Lots of people live near a volcano. Does that sound crazy? I mean, when it erupts, a volcano can spew boiling hot rock chunks as big as a refrigerator high into the sky. It can send 1200 °C lava flowing down the hillside for many kilometers. The hot gases and ash that get blown out with the melted rock can spread clear around the globe, causing destruction in its path.

When Mt St Helens in Washington erupted in 1980, it caused a medium-sized earthquake and spread ash all the way around the world over two weeks’ time. Besides the many bridges, homes and roads that were destroyed, 57 people were killed by the eruption.

When the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted in 2010, planes could not fly in all of Europe for 8 days because of the ash cloud. Safety officials were afraid the hot ash would damage engines and make the planes crash. Flights in Europe were grounded because of ash several more days over a month.

Why do people even live near volcanoes?

The thing is, volcanoes don’t erupt violently that often. Even the world's most active volcano is just slowly leaking lava down its sides and burning surrounding neighborhoods to the ground. That is the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii and it has been erupting constantly for 35 years. But the Yellowstone volcano only erupts every 700,000 years.

Volcanoes tend to be in very lush environments. Sometimes the environment is lush because of the volcano and all the minerals that lava brings to the surface. That may have attracted people’s ancestors to the area, and they stayed. Some people live near volcanoes because it is affordable—cheap homes because they risk destruction.

In many cultures, volcanoes are thought to have spiritual power or importance. They are expressions of the gods, and bring luck and prosperity as well as destruction. Some people may live near volcanoes for that reason.

Scientists live near volcanoes so they can study them. It’s extremely dangerous, and there are many stories of volcanologists dying at work.

A USGS department geologist takes the temperature of a lava flow on Mt. Kilauea in 1984. Public domain.

Can I visit a volcano safely?

There are about 1,500 volcanoes in the world that could be active. Only about 500 have erupted in recorded history. In Hawaii, you can tour the lava tubes created by lava flows. You can visit the Greek island of Santorini that is still an active volcano with 13,600 people living on it. It has had very small eruptions that build up its sides over the last 70 years. And there are at least 1000 others you can climb on. Take a look at the list of volcanoes and think about which one you’d like to visit.

Santorini, Greece, is built on the rim of a very old volcano. You can tour the centre that is an island now. By Pedro Szekely, CC BY-SA 2.0

Beneath an Arctic Sea - Volcanoes Spewing Mud

By Claire Eamer

Normally, you wouldn’t expect the Beaufort Sea to be a hotbed of volcanic action. It’s covered with ice for much of the year. And during the short spell when the ice is gone, it’s a vast expanse of cold, featureless ocean that washes up on the northern coasts of Alaska, the Yukon, and the western Northwest Territories.

An underwater mud volcano as seen by the research ship's
scanners. Credit: Natural Resources Canada

But beneath that bland surface, the Beaufort holds a surprise – as many as 2000 mud volcanoes, says Steve Blasco, a respected geophysicist formerly with the Geological Survey of Canada. Before he retired, he was part of a research group studying the volcanoes.

They are essentially like any other volcano, but with mud instead of lava, he says. Pressure forces the liquid mud up through the first available weak spot in the more solid layer above it. In the case of the Beaufort mud volcanoes, that solid layer is beneath the seafloor, several hundred metres below the ocean surface. And the solid layer isn't Earth's crust, but permafrost.

Just because they’re out of sight beneath the waves doesn’t mean mud volcanoes are small. Some are more than a kilometre across and rise 10 storeys above the surrounding seafloor. Most have a shallow moat around them. Blasco says that with the right kind of instrumentation, it’s possible to track the volcanic chimneys, through which the mud flows, well down into the thick layer of sediment that covers much of the Beaufort seabed.

The profile of the mud volcano scanned above. The shallower continental shelf
is on the left, and the seafloor drops away into deep water on the right.
Credit: Natural Resources Canada

The Beaufort’s mud volcanoes are a peculiarly northern phenomenon, he says. “It all has to do with the permafrost.”

Fluids – water and hydrocarbons mixed with fine sediments – pool beneath the permafrost that underlies the land and much of the sea around the margin of the Beaufort. The fluids spread through the sub-permafrost layers until they come to a weak point where the growing pressure pushes them up through the permafrost, piling up layer upon layer of thin mud into a spreading undersea mountain.

The mud volcanoes aren’t distributed randomly over the seafloor. The weak spot that allows the mud to break through is often at the edge of the continental shelf, where the relatively shallow sea bottom drops away into the deep ocean, exposing and weakening the permafrost. About a third of the mud volcanoes mapped so far are along the shelf edge, Blasco says. Others are on the shelf itself or along the edges of the Mackenzie Trough, an undersea extension of the Mackenzie Valley.

Most of the volcanoes are no longer active, but about 50 of them still appear to be venting mud, some quite actively. And on a few of those, the Blasco's Geological Survey research group found signs of life: mats of bacteria apparently living off the chemicals in the mud.

Bacterial mats cover deep-sea mud vents in the Beaufort Sea.
Credit: Natural Resources Canada

Another team of scientists discovered even more signs of life on the volcanoes. In December 2015, Charles Paull of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Scott Dallimore of the Geological Survey of Canada and other members of the team published a scientific article describing what they found in a close study of a few of the still-active mud volcanoes.

Some of the sediment the scientists hauled up from the mud volcanoes contained skinny brown tube worms only a few centimetres long at most. The worms are closely related to tube worms found at a mud volcano in the Norwegian Arctic. In both cases, the worms and the bacteria appear to be part of a chemosynthetic community – that is, a community of animals living off the carbon spewed out, usually in the form of methane, from volcanic vents.

Similar groups of animals have been found around undersea vents in many parts of the world, but this is the first time they’re been discovered in the harsh conditions of the western Arctic. And there may be more life down there.

Video from a remotely operated underwater vehicle used in the same study showed that patches of the active undersea volcanoes are thick with bacteria and tube worms, and that shrimp and small fish seem to be especially plentiful at those sites. In fact, it appears that the Beaufort Sea’s mud volcanoes might be hotspots for both geology and biology.

The original purpose of the survey that mapped the volcanoes was to assess geohazards in the Beaufort Sea in preparation for oil and gas exploration. Mountains of mud rising from the ocean floor constitute potential hazards, but Blasco says they’re easy to avoid. Now that it’s known where they’re likely to occur and what they look like to underwater remote sensing instruments, exploration companies survey them and stay clear.

Of course, not everyone wants to stay clear. Oil and gas companies might want to avoid the mud volcanoes, but plenty of scientists would like to learn a lot more about them.

References:

• An earlier version of this story appeared in the Yukon News, 13 January 2016.
• Fox-Skelly, Jasmin. "The strange worms that live on erupting mud volcanoes." BBC Earth, 6 November 2015.
• Paull, C. K., et al. (2015), Active mud volcanoes on the continental slope of the Canadian Beaufort Sea, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 16, 3160–3181, doi:10.1002/2015GC005928.

Hands across the Border

Post by Helaine Becker

Last week I was privileged to attend the Tucson Book Festival as one of the presenters. I did a Zoobots-focused presentation on the main stage. I also helped kids make colour-changing octopus skin, an activity found in The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea.

But perhaps the highlight of my program was co-presenting on a panel about "Science Writing for Children" along with three of the best science writers working in the U.S. today.

If  you don't know them and their work, I'd love to share a little about each of them with you!

Sarah Albee is the bestselling author of Bugged: How 

Insects Changed History and Poop Happened. How can you not love someone who writes about malaria and cholera with such glee? Turns out she is now working on a book about poison. I can't wait til it comes out - though I won't sit next to her during ahem dinner if she is wearing a poison ring....

Loree Griffin Burns is super smart and super passionate. She brings both of these qualities to wonderful books about environmental issues like Tracking Trash: Flotsam Jetsam and the Science of Ocean Motion and  Handle with Care. She is so committed to writing quality books that she

allowed herself to be stung by bees, literally dozens of times, to get the perfect photo for the book.  You can see the photo in question in The Hive Detectives.

Elizabeth Rusch also brings a level of commitment to her work that simply boggles the mind. Yup, that's her, tramping over the still-steaming lava field after a devastating volcanic eruption, determined to get the story for Eruption. And yup, that's her, risking epic seasickness to get the goods for The Next Wave. And once she has the story? She tells it so dramatically, and with such "you-are-there" intensity that you can't stop turning the pages.

I am so pleased - and honoured - to now call these great ladies my friends. I welcome them as honorary Canadians to this Sci/Why blog, and look forward to bringing science fun to as many kids as we can on both sides of the border.

Sarah Albee, Loree Griffin Burns and Liz Rusch, with me  (in purple).