Mount St Helens Cracked My Window!

[Biddybot]

All of you reading this are surely aware that Mount St Helens has been clearing its throat a bit lately and providing some news fodder thereby. About a week ago, some Mount St Helens stuff was on TV at work when my relief came in to take over the shift and we started talking about the volcano's 1980 blast, the big one that caused some deaths. Suddenly, this guy is trying to tell me that the blast was so powerful, in fact, that it had cracked a window in his wife's family home. When I asked him how a relatively minor eruption (on the geological scale) on the Northwest coast of the United States could possibly cause damage to a house in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the East coast of Canada, he informed me that it was because of "veins in the rock" conducting the shock waves.

There's no denying that volcanoes do seem to exude this strange fascination that can cause an awful lot of people to believe the most preposterous things and behave rather stupidly. Even the experts don't seem to be immune. The most infamous incident probably involves volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, who were killed when they underestimated the range of pyroclastic flows being generated by Unzen, in Japan. The two of them had just finished making an instructional volcano safety film featuring the hazards of pyroclastic flows and how to evade them.

Two good retarded volcano movies out there are VOLCANO, with Tommy Lee Jones making a nit of himself, and DANTE'S PEAK, with Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton making even bigger nits of themselves. Both movies are of the sort that proudly perpetuate Hollywood's notion that lava, like radiation, is only dangerous if you touch it.

Anyone else out there hear any good volcano lore lately that was maybe sparked by Mount St Helens brief splash in the news?

[Korvan]

When I was in grade 4, I made a volcano for a science fair. This was just after Mt. St. Helens so I was able to incorporate actual St. Helens ash into my model. It was a pretty cool volcano too. Not a cheesy baking soda / vinegar reaction, but it used some chemicals (some sort of zinc / ammonium compound mixture) that produced a dense cloud of smoke when a single drop of water was added to it.

I remember driving through Washington state after the eruption and it seemed the entire state was covered in ash.

[El Moose Monstero]

I know when I was little I used to read all the volcano books and then after reading about the one that came out of the Mexican field (forgotten it's name), then had to check under my bed for a while afterwards to make sure there were no small smoking spots.

Some kids have monsters in the closets, I had a volcano under my bed.