Robert Goette
Picture 1:
Taken August 28, 1990, from Bear Meadow, 10 miles from Mount St. Helens and looking into the crater left by the May 18, 1980, explosion.
The Explosion And Aftermath
On May 18th 1980, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.1 occured at Mount St. Helens, precipitating an avalanche of more than one-half cubic mile of rock and ice down the north face. (This face had been expanding upward at the rate of 5 feet a day for several weeks and by then had bulged 320 feet.) Observers reported that the north face appeared to ripple and then “liquefy.” Inside the volcano, superheated water flashed to steam, like popping the top off a warm soda bottle. The eruption was equal to 20 million tons of TNT, blowing 1300 feet off the top of Mount St. Helens [Picture 1]. The resulting crater, 1 mile wide, 2 miles long and 2000 feet deep amounted to 12% of the mountain being blasted away—the largest rock slide witnessed by modern man. There was a lateral blast of ash-laden air heated to 500º C (or 932º F) moving out at a speed of up to 200 mph. The blast violently spread a 20-mile halo of death in its suffocating, ground hugging flow. When the lateral blast died down, a gigantic mushroom cloud 95 miles in diameter and 30 miles high rose up to the stratosphere.
This volcanic blast, and the following events associated with it, challenges our thinking about how the earth’s surface developed to what we observe today. That is, how it was formed, how it changes, the time frame we have to work with, and how the geological strata developed.
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Need For A New Geological Timetable
The evolutionary geologic column or table, seen in most earth science texts, implies that millions of years were necessary for the formation of fossil-bearing sedimentary layers. This article will examine some of the evidence from the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption and following events, all of which indicate that large-scale geological changes can happen very rapidly. Some have called this eruption “the greatest geologic event in this decade.” Much of the material in this article is based on the work of geologists, Dr. Steven Austin,1 Institute for Creation Research (ICR), and Harold G. Coffin.2 Geoscience Research institute.
Four significant discoveries at Mount St. Helens will be examined: (1) rapidly-formed stratification, (2) rapid erosion, (3) upright-deposited logs, and (4) a peat layer in Spirit Lake.
First, though, a summary of some of the events which took place on May 18, 1980 will be helpful. While there had been 371 earthquakes registering over 4.0 magnitude between March 20 and May 18, 1980, the strongest one occurred on May 18th and has been described above. Explosions continued to rip through Mount St. Helens for 9 hours throwing fist- to house-size boulders and blocks of ice up to 10 miles. The total force of the 9 hours of eruptions equaled 20,000 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. As hot volcanic gases and steam were expelled horizontally through the fractured mountain, ridges were scoured and forests were leveled as far as 17 miles away [See pictures 1–4]. In just 6 minutes the blast leveled 3.2 billion board feet of trees (equalling the lumber used to build 320,000 three-bed-room houses) in a 150 square mile area [See pictures 2–4]. Trees 8 feet in diameter and 150 feet tall, were toppled over, uprooted, or snapped off above the roots [See picture 2].
As the avalanche debris from the north face smashed into Spirit Lake, it produced monstrous waves up to 850 feet high and scoured the northern slopes (seen in the right center of picture 4) of all trees and topsoil. Lesser waves did the same to the opposite slope. A 320-foot-thick deposit was produced on the bottom of Spirit Lake. It raised the level of the lake by over 200 feet. Much of the surface of Spirit Lake was as a
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Picture 2:
Taken August 28, 1990, at Meta Lake, 8 miles from Mount St. Helens.
10 years later [picture 4], there are still many of these floating logs.
Stratification Forms Quickly
First of all, Mount St. Helens was the scene of rapidly-formed stratification. Some 23 square miles of the North Fork of the Toutle River Valley was filled 150 feet high with debris. In some areas up to 600 feet of strata have formed since 1980. According to researcher Austin. “These deposits accumulated from the primary air blast, landslide, waves on the lake, pyroclastic flows (also called hot pumice ash flows), mudflows, air fall, and stream water.”3 As a result, mudflows formed as ice and snow melted from contact with the hot rocks and saturated the soil and ash, carrying logs and other debris as fast as 90 mph, destroying bridges and everything in their path. Some of these water-borne deposits formed beds 1 millimeter thick to over 1 meter thick, each representing a brief period of accumulation. One 25-foot-thick deposit actually accumulated in less than one day. Today it consists of many thin laminae (layers) and beds, whereas conventional evolutionary geology assumes that such strata represents much longer seasonal variations and believes that the layers accumulate very slowly. But events at Mount St. Helens demonstrate the contrary, Austin counters, “The stratified layers commonly characterizing geological formations can form very rapidly by flow processes.”4 In the past, experiments in laboratory sedimentation tanks had indicated this to be the case, but now it is confirmed at Mount St. Helens on a much larger scale!
Rapid Erosion—The Next Surprise
The second significant event to occur at Mount St. Helens was quite rapid erosion. Here, according to Austin, “Erosion during volcanic eruptions at Mount St. Helens was accomplished by scour from steam blast, landslide, water waves, hot pumice ash flows (pyroclastic flows), and mudflows”5 (Pictures 1, 3–5]. As the shoreline of Spirit Lake was eroded during the first year, the lake level stabilized and a cliff of pre- 1980 volcanic deposits located at the base of the north slope was now eroded by water, mudflows and pyroclastic flows (of rocks fractured by volcanic
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Picture 3:
Taken August 28, 1990, about 6 miles NE from Mount St. Helens. Mount Adams can be seen in the upper left, 35 miles east of Mount St. Helens.
action). Once the eruptions subsided, sheet flooding, channelized water flows, and mudflows have been the major causes of erosion in the area. The 23 square miles of the North Fork of the Toutle River Valley has been rapidly eroding since 1980 [Picture 5]. In some places, explosion pits were reamed by jetting steam formed from buried water and ice under hot (330ºC or 626ºF) pumice. The accompanying mass-wasting (slumping of the sides) processes at the margins of the pits, produced rills and gullies over 125 feet deep [Picture 5]. According to Austin, the largest steam explosion pit, 2300 feet long by 1000 feet wide, was formed on May 23, 1980. It extended 125 feet deep into the pumice deposit laid down May 18th. But twenty-six days later, the same pit had been given a flat floor by 25 feet of pumice deposited in a June 12, 1980 eruption. An elaborate dendritic (treelike) pattern of rills and gullies [Picture 5] on the sides of the pit resembled that of badlands topography. Austin adds,6 “Geologists have usually assumed such topography required many hundreds or even thousands of years to form. Virtually all of these gullies and rills formed within the first five days after May 18th by the retrogressive slumping of the rim, not by water erosion.”
By themselves, mudflows from Mount St. Helens have caused considerable erosion and devastation. One of these is a sheetlike flood of mud that took place two years later, on March 19, 1982. It was produced by a tremendous blast which melted a thick snowpack which had formed in the crater. An eroded canyon system up to 140 feet deep in the headwaters of the North Fork of the Toutle River Valley was the result [Picture 5]. This very deep canyon seen on the left of the picture includes the breached remnant of the large steam explosion pit mentioned previously. Likewise the fiat pumice plain deposited on May 18, 1980 was eroded to a depth of more than 100 feet in little more than four years.
As ICR and other creation scientific teams surveyed these new formations, consideration was given to the processes which might have formed the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.7 Dr. Austin concludes:8 “The little ‘Grand Canyon of the Toutle River’ is a 1/40th scale
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model of the real Grand Canyon. The small creeks which flow through the headwaters of the Toutle River today might seem, by present appearances, to have carved these canyons very slowly over a long time period, except for the fact that the erosion was observed to have occurred rapidly! Geologists should learn that, since the long-time scale they have been trained to assign to landform development would lead to obvious error on Mount St. Helens, it also may be useless or misleading elsewhere.”
Events at Mount St. Helens have thus proved a unique laboratory in which to observe a variety of erosional features formed within a miniaturized, but intensely studied area. However, the individual features are not unique, but are similar to those observed elsewhere. Other examples of rapid erosion have been observed at: (1) Kanab Creek in southern Utah, where a flash flood in 1866 cut a channel 49 feet deep and 262 feet wide in less than 8 hours and (2) Lituya Bay, Alaska where the greatest wave ever recorded, 1720 feet high, stripped four square miles of forest from a spur of land on August 9, 1958.
Upright-Deposited Logs Contradict Geological Theories
The third significant happening taking place at Mount St. Helens is the occurance of upright-deposited logs. In 1980 the waves created on Spirit Lake, as a result of the Mount St. Helens rockslide, stripped whole forests from the slopes surrounding the lake and created an enormous log mat, part of which can still be seen today [Picture 4]. This mat, made up of millions of prone floating trunks, initially occupied about 2 square miles of the lake surface. The free-floating logs move on the lake’s surface as the wind blows them. During one 2 hour period of picture taking in August 1990 showed how much the log mat had shifted. That the trees are gradually sinking to the lake floor is obvious from the decreasing size of the log mat. Even 10 years later, there are still many floating logs [Picture 4] since the half-life of a floating log is 9 years (this means that after 9 years, half the logs still remain floating and after 18 years there will be half of a half or one-fourth of the initial number of floating logs on the lake’s surface).
Creation scientists9 have observed that many trees in the log mat float in upright position, with a root ball submerging the root end of the trunk, while the opposite end floats out of the water. These same scientists have found hundreds of upright floated and deposited logs grounded in shallow water along the shore of the lake. Because of this Dr. Austin comments,10 “These trees, if buried in sediment, would appear to have been a forest which grew in place over hundreds of years, which is the standard [evolutionary] geological interpretation for the upright petrified ‘forests’ at Yellowstone National Park.” It should also be noted that the trees found at Yellowstone have very little root structure, exactly like these found in Spirit Lake!
Recent data has shown that spruce, fir and hemlock trees in Spirit Lake have been sinking at different rates. Thus, if the area were examined several hundred years from now using evolutionary presuppositions, one would falsely assume that the layers of forests found buried represent three different forests having grown one after the other. What has been observed at Spirit Lake gives scientists an alternative explanation
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for the formation of successive forests. They obviously do not need a long time frame!
To obtain more information on the upright deposited logs in Spirit Lake, creation scientists surveyed the lake bottom, using sonar and SCUBA gear. Hundreds of upright, fully submerged logs were located by sidescan sonar. SCUBA divers verified that they were, indeed, trunks of trees which the sonar detected. A large stump, 7 feet in diameter and 45 feet tall, was transported by debris flow and left standing on the ground surface. Those found underwater are similar.
Comparing the area of lake floor surveyed to the entire lake bottoms the ICR research team, working with Dr. Harold Coffin of the Geological Research Institute, estimated that more than 19,000 upright stumps existed on the floor of the lake in August 1985. These investigators reported,11 “The average height of an upright deposited stump is 20 feet. Sonar records and SCUBA investigations verified that many of the upright deposited trees have root masses radiating away from the bases of the trunks. Furthermore, the trees are randomly spaced, not clumped together, over the bottom of the lake, again having the appearance of being an in situ forest.”
During the SCUBA investigation, deposited trunks were found already solidly buried in more than 3 feet of sedimentation. Yet others were found with no sediment at all around their bases. These observations confirm that the upright trunks had been deposited
Picture 4:
Part of Spirit Lake with its floating log mat. Taken August 28, 1990, from Windy Ridge, 3 miles from Mount St. Helens.
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at different times, with their roots buried at different levels as additional sediment was brought into the lake from various sources. The conclusion is:12 “If found buried in the stratigraphic record, these trees might be interpreted as multiple forests which grew on different levels over periods of thousands of years. The Spirit Lake upright-deposited stumps, therefore, have considerable implications for interpreting ‘petrified forests’ in the stratigraphic record.” Coffin adds.13 “The petrified trees and forests often found in the geologic record may or may not represent trees in situ. Only careful examination of each situation will allow final conclusions to be safely drawn.”
A Peat Layer Is Forming In Spirit Lake
The fourth occurance at Mount St. Helens is the formation of a peat layer at the bottom of Spirit Lake. Over time, the enormous log mat [Picture 4] floating on Spirit Lake lost its bark and branches as wind and waves caused the floating logs to abrade against each other. Austin reported that SCUBA investigations of the lake bottom indicat that water-saturated sheets of tree bark are especially abundant on the bottom of the lake, where, in areas removed from volcanic sediment added from the lakeshore, a layer of peat several inches thick has accumulated. The Spirit Lake peat resembles, both compositionally and texturally, certain coal beds of the eastern United States, which also are dominated by tree bark and appear to have accumulated beneath floating log mats.14
His interpretation of these findings is,
Coal is supposed, conventionally, to have formed from organic material accumulated in swamps by growth in place of plants and then burial. Because the accumulation of peat in swamps is a slow process, geologists have supposed that coal beds required about one thousand years to form each inch of coal. The peat layer in Spirit Lake, however, demonstrates that peat can accumulate rapidly. Swamp peats, however, have only very rare bark sheet materials because the intrusive action of tree roots disintegrates and homogenizes the peat. The Spirit Lake peat, in contrast, is texturally very similar to coal. All that is needed is burial and slight heating to transform the Spirit Lake peat into coal. Thus, at Spirit Lake, we may have observed the first stage in the formation of coal.”15
From this we can see that log mats existing during and immediately after Noah’s Flood could well have been the source of peat forming the Kentucky No. 12 Coal Bed (Dr. Austin did his doctoral studies on this while at Penn State University—before Mount St. Helens erupted). This bed can be traced from western Kentucky into western Indiana, southern Illinois, and eastern Missouri. It is composed of Vitrain, a black, vitreous coal which occurs as distinct bands. Possibly it too was formed from mummified sheets of tree bark from lycopod trees and that rapid deposition and burial were required to preserve the bark in its present condition.
Conclusion
What are the lessons of the eruption at Mount St. Helens? Perhaps the eruption and subsequent events there are a God-given opportunity, “to study transient geologic processes which produced, within a few months, changes which geologists might otherwise assume required many thousands of years. The volcano, therefore, challenges our way of thinking about how the earth
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Picture 5:
The “Little Grand Canyon of the Toutle River.” Taken August 29, 1990, in the rain, about 5 miles north of Mount St. Helens.
works, how it changes, and the time scale we are accustomed to attaching to its geologic formations.”16
Remember that Mount St. Helens was a relatively small explosion compared to some other volcanoes in recorded history. Enormous clouds of ejected airborne ash and pumice for only a few volcanos in cubic kilometers are:17 42 for Mt. Masama in 4600 BC, 4 for Mount St. Helens in 1900 BC, 3 for Vesuvius in AD 79, 1 for Mount St. Helens in 1500, 80 for Tambora in 1815, 18 for Krakatoa in 1883, 12 for Mt. Katmai in 1912 and 1 for Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. Indonesia’s Tambora killed 12,000 people and its airborne ash cooled the earth enough to cause the “year without a summer” of 1816.
Mount St. Helens and similar catastrophes give us an idea of what the Biblical Flood of Noah’s day may have been like and the challenges he faced after the Flood receded.