It seems that there is more than meets the eye where Mount St. Helens is concerned, as this famous volcano that made news headlines in 1980 due to an eruption, in addition to a reawakening in the mid-00s, has something interesting going on underneath the mountain. In a new research that was presented in the previous week at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, it seems that the “imaging magma under St. Helens” or iMUSH campaign was shown off, and in the presentation, it was proposed that a pair of vast and most probably connected magma chambers are located right smack below the mountain – 5 and 12 kilometers underground, respectively.
The shallower chamber happens to be under the eastern flank of Mount St. Helens itself, whereas the deeper one is some distance away, although being proximate to St. Helens and Mt. Adams. The iMUSH project happens to be the first of its kind to check out stuff that is happening far deeper at high enough resolutions, and this is made possible courtesy of the thousands of seismic probes which have been implemented to record the mountain’s normal small earthquake rumblings as well as the acoustic reflections. We do hope to hear more about the magma sea below in due time.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: motherboard.vice