Lateral blast These photos were taken by photographer John V. Christiansen at 8:32 a.m. local time o
Lateral blast These photos were taken by photographer John V. Christiansen at 8:32 a.m. local time on May 18, 1980. They were later featured in a 1981 edition of National Geographic magazine. The shots were taken from Mount Adams, looking across at Mt. St. Helens just over 50 kilometers away. They capture perfectly the beginning of the lateral blast eruption. Pressure had been building for weeks inside of Mt. St. Helens, deforming the north side of the volcano into a bulge. An earthquake and an avalanche on the morning of May 18th ripped open that bulge and released the pressure on one side of the mountain. The mountain exploded; not upwards like most volcanoes, but sideways, sending an enormous cloud of superheated rock, gases, and large pieces of the mountain out sideways, sandblasting everything in their path. -JBB Image credit: National Geographic -- source link
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