Abstract
Discoveries made during the 18 May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens advanced our understanding of tephra transport and deposition in fundamental ways. The eruption enabled detailed, quantitative observations of downwind cloud movement and particle sedimentation, along with the dynamics of co-pyroclastic-density current (PDC) clouds lofted from ground-hugging currents. The deposit was mapped and sampled over more than 150,000 km2 within days of the event and remains among the most thoroughly documented tephra deposits in the world. Abundant observations were made possible by the large size of the eruption, its occurrence in good weather during daylight hours, cloud movement over a large, populated continent, and the availability of images from recently deployed satellites. These observations underpinned new, quantitative models for the rise and growth of volcanic plumes, the importance of umbrella clouds in dispersing ash, and the roles of particle aggregation and gravitational instabilities in removing ash from the atmosphere. Exceptional detail in the eruption chronology and deposit characterization helped identify the eruptive phases contributing to deposition in different sectors of the distal deposit. The eruption was the first to significantly impact civil aviation, leading to the earliest documented case of in-flight engine damage. Continued eruptive activity in 1980 also motivated pioneering use of meteorological models to forecast ash-cloud movement. In this paper, we consider the most important discoveries and how they changed the science of tephra transport.
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Acknowledgements
We owe a particular debt to the few scientists who were involved in the 1980 response and were still available to share their recollections during preparation of this report. Among these are Carolyn Driedger, Michael Doukas, Richard Waitt, Thomas Murray, Ed Brown, and Tom Casadevall of the USGS. Spencer Wood (Boise State Univ., retired) drove the north-south transect just east of the Idaho-Washington border in 1980 and kindly sent us the photo of aggregates on the roadway in Fig. 5. Tom Murray and Ed Brown shared their experiences in preparing daily model forecasts in 1980 that are illustrated in Fig. 10a. Carolyn Driedger, Tom Casadevall, Mike Doukas, and Richard Waitt shared their experiences collecting tephra. We also thank reviewers Kristi Wallace Costanza Bonadonna, and Britta Jensen.
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Mastin, L.G., Carey, S.N., Van Eaton, A.R. et al. Understanding and modeling tephra transport: lessons learned from the 18 May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Bull Volcanol 85, 4 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-022-01613-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-022-01613-0