41 Years Ago Today, Volcanic Hazards Awareness Expanded With A Boom

I’m middle-aged now, but back then I wasn’t even in kindergarten yet. That sunny May day, I was inside, glued to a television screen filled with a roiling gray haze of volcanic ash. Mount St. Helens had erupted with spectacular violence after a couple of months of unrest.

Mount St. Helens in eruption on May 18, 1980. Mount Hood, a Cascades sibling, looks on in the background. Credit: USGS

There was only one thing I could do once the shock of it wore off: I promptly grabbed construction paper and crayons and drew the volcano a get well card. She looked like it hurt.

It would be a couple of years before I began to grasp the scope of what had happened, and decades more before I knew how much the 1980 awakening, eruption, and aftermath had advanced the science of volcanology.

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