Mt St Helens Geology

Hebrews 11:3

King James Version (KJV)

³ Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

The Davy sisters sent me two DVDs a couple months ago. I was going to watch them earlier but then decided that Sylvia’s Mom would probably enjoy watching them with us. She was here with us for a week recently, and I invited her to watch one entitled Mt St Helens: A Big Bang for Creation. It has several parts, and we chose to watch a one hour lecture.

The St Helens eruption in 1980 was undoubtedly the most carefully observed and documented by scientists of any major eruption to date. The massive eruption saw the top and whole north side of the mountain blown away in a very few minutes. The glaciers on the mountain were melted causing a great river of water, volcanic ash, and mud to rush down the side of the mountain, carving in 20 minutes a canyon as deep as 400 feet in places. This whole new river system, dubbed Hoffstadt Creek, would have been considered to have taken many centuries to form by old style geologists. Hundreds of layers of strata were laid down by the explosion and then carved by the creek to leave cross sections of these layers exposed, much like those in the Grand Canyon and other great canyons in the American west today.

Where the old Spirit Lake had been, the volcano created a new lake−also called Spirit Lake. The bottom of the new lake is roughly at the altitude of the surface of the old lake. Hundreds of square miles of forest were denuded in the first blast from the mountain. This area after the blast was covered by thousands of logs, many of them lying in such a fashion that it looked like the area had been combed. Thousands of these logs covered the surface of the new lake. Over the last thirty years most of these logs have sunk to the bottom of the lake. In the process of sinking the heavy end of the log went down first leaving the trees suspended in the lake in vertical position. They then come to rest in this vertical position on the bottom of the lake.

There is a petrified forest like this preserved in Yellowstone that was regarded as proof positive of a long geological history of that area. A plaque had been erected in the area by the National Park Service stating this. Now, at the suggestion of Dr Coffin from the Geoscience Research Institute, this plaque has been removed since scientists have witnessed another petrified forest like that in Yellowstone form in less than a quarter of a century.

Although the Mt St Helens eruption was extremely powerful, it is regarded by volcanologists as being puny when compared to many volcanic eruptions within the past few centuries. Results from the observations of this mountain are causing geologists to reassess their whole dating systems and to reexamine old estimates of long geological time.

Thank You, Lord, for tipping Your hand just a little in order to give us an inkling of how mighty Your works are.