Mt. St. Helens News

It's been a year since the latest eruption of our local volcano here in Portland started. It followed 18 years of quiet.

This eruption has been seemingly uneventful but one dump truck load of new material is being added to the mountain every minute. The graphic on the left gives you some idea of the size of the new lava dome. The Oregonian has an article on the latest eruption with some details.

The volcano has produced a lava dome with a volume of more than 76 million cubic yards, enough to fill more than 200 Rose Garden arenas. In a year, the new dome has grown to about three-quarters the size of the adjacent lava dome that grew between 1980 and 1986.

[....]

"We still have a long way to go to fill up this crater," said Cynthia Gardner, scientist-in-charge of the volcano observatory. It would take 42 years at the current rate of lava flow to rebuild the peak as it was before the 1980 blast, she said.

She expects the rebuilding to continue. "This eruption could go on for quite a while, perhaps months or years, even decades."

Don't forget that during daylight hours on a clear day you can look into the crater here and in fact sometimes at night you can see a white dot in the middle of the picture which is the new dome glowing.