Survival narrative meets scientific, natural, and social history in the riveting story of a volcanic disaster. For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the longquiescent volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died, including newlywed logger John Killian (for years afterward, his father searched...

A napping volcano blinked a wake in March 1980. Two months later, when that mountain roared, Jim Scymanky was logging a slope above Hoffistadt Creek. "Rocks zinged through the woods, bouncing off trees, then the tops of trees snapped off...Suddenly I could see nothing...it got hot right away, then scorching hot and impossible to breathe...I was being cremated, the pain unbearable." Mike Hubbard was further away-sixteen miles northwest, hear Green...

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, every living thing in the blast zone was buried beneath 300 feet of avalanche debris, covered with steaming mud, and topped with a superheated layer of frothy rock from deep within the Earth. It seemed as though Mount St. Helens might remain a wasteland forever. Then, to everyone's surprise, life began to bloom again. A pioneering look at the interplay between biology and geology that may help scientists predict...

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with fury. Triggered by the largest landslide ever recorded, a devastating lateral blast blew off the entire northern side of the volcano. Searing hot gasses, traveling at 650 miles per hour, scorched trees nearly twenty miles away. The mountain instantly lost 1300' in elevation. A slurry of mud, ash and melting ice inundated the landscape, which was then buried in 540 million tons of ash, and fifty-seven...

Photographic and journalistic record of the violent eruption of Mount Saint Helens which killed 70 people and sent tens of millions of tons of hot ash into the atmosphere.

Discusses the 1980 eruptions of Mount Saint Helens, one of the active volcanoes that rings the Pacific Ocean.