Mountain of Fire: Prologue–Chapter 14

In a basement lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, Linda Noson was the first to notice. She knew as soon as she saw the dark marks streaking across the face of the paper: an earthquake. A big one.
Noson ran upstairs.
“We just got a four,” she told Steve Malone, the head of the seismology lab. “From the Mount Rainier station.”

In the Pacific Northwest, there were thousands of earthquakes each year. But few reached as high as a magnitude 4.

Noson was a seismic analyst, an expert in examining the lines and lurches of the recorder’s pen. Straight or jagged, the recorder showed only a black path. Like all of science, it needed humans to translate the data into a meaningful story. Noson went to work.

Malone began to worry about avalanches. There was fresh snow on the ground, and Mount St. Helens was popular with mountain climbers. It might be time to get everyone off the mountain.

They all knew stories of how Mount St. Helens had erupted in the past. Ash had clogged the sky, turning bright day to black midnight. Pumice had rained down. Fire and lava had spewed from the summit. The Toutle River had become so hot that all the fish had died for miles around the mountain.

“It sounded just like a sonic boom,” said Ferrol Fullmer, who managed a hotel nearby.

They heard the boom. They knew that the mountain had been shaking. But to people below the clouds, Mount St. Helens looked like it did any other day.
“There was no sign of molten lava,” one newspaper reported, sounding somewhat frustrated.

“Mount St. Helens, a lady with a 123-year-old tummyache, erupted with a gigantic volcanic burp,” the Spokesman-Review wrote, condescendingly.

“Dozens of light aircraft, filled with sightseers, journalists, geologists and even the governor—all eager for a peek at a real live volcano, flew through mostly clear skies [above the clouds] surrounding Mt. St. Helens Thursday afternoon,” reported the Spokesman-Review.

They were scientists, and their story should be grounded in theory, not guesses.

They were geologists who specialized in mapping previous eruptions. They’d used the records laid down in rock and dirt over centuries and millennia to weave a story of what had happened long ago.

At one press conference, a reporter chimed in wanting to know about the snow-covered sides of the mountain and the glaciers at the top.

Even Johnston couldn’t stop from giving reporters dramatic predictions. He had been scolded for comparing the mountain to dynamite, but still reporters quoted him saying that Mount St. Helens will “just go Bang! Magma will come up from however deep, maybe no warning before the big eruption.”

“Wow…” White breathed out a sigh of mixed relief and disbelief. “I have never seen this strong a volcanic tremor other than when a volcano’s erupting,” he told Malone.

On Sunday, April 13, three miles from the mountain’s summit at the Timberline observation station, Swanson peered through a theodolite, an instrument that measured angles very accurately.