Volcano 'cowboys' who ride a ring of fire

From the lookout on Coldwater Ridge, Mount St. Helens seems relatively benign. Puffs of white steam drift languidly into a brilliant blue sky. Aside from the occasional hawk's whistle, the only sound is of Lilliputian aircraft buzzing around the giant crater, bearing scientific instruments sniffing for gases that might be portentous.

Has North America's most famous volcano gone back to sleep? Or is it merely dozing, preparing to snort and grumble toward another major eruption?

Experts who study volcanoes and the earthquakes that attend them can't be sure. Like TV weathermen they hedge their pronouncements.

"We prefer 'forecast' to 'prediction,'" quips geologist William Scott, a 30-year veteran with the US Geological Survey (USGS). "There's more room to hide."

But compared to 1980, when Mount St. Helens suddenly became 1,300 feet shorter in a violent, expulsive spasm, scientists today are much better equipped to take the mountain's pulse, to understand what may be happening deep inside. And to offer - if not predictions, exactly - better-informed warnings about imminent volcanic activity.

With things like Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, space-based radar imagery, microtechnology, and much more powerful computers they can do far more now. Like measuring earth movement in millimeters, analyzing gases to determine the content of magma (underground lava), evaluating such information in real time and communicating it instantly to other scientists around the world as well as to civil defense officials in nearby communities potentially vulnerable to volcanic blast and subsequent landslides and flooding.

Following the military's lead, they're also experimenting with unmanned aerial vehicles - tiny ground-controlled airplanes packed with instruments - to monitor the mountain at night and in bad weather.

"With these new tools we're literally seeing things we could not have seen before," says USGS geologist Dan Dzurisin, who began his career studying volcanoes in Hawaii then came here shortly after St. Helens blew, killing 57 people in the largest landslide in recorded history.

In September, the first major activity since the mid-1980s started with thousands of small earthquakes per hour, new lava being pushed up from underground, substantial ground deformation inside the crater, and large burps of steam and ash.

Since then, things have settled down some. Still, the equivalent of a large dump truck full of new molten rock continues to reach the surface inside the crater every second, creating a bulge in the glacier there and spitting steam when it hits snow and ice. This lobe - upwards of 1,000 degrees and glowing at night - is now nearly the size of an aircraft carrier. Or as William Steele at the University of Washington seismology lab in Seattle puts it, "The mountain is still chugging along merrily."

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