The mountain: take a look at Mount Rainier, America's most dangerous volcano

Science News, Nov 24, 2001 by Sid Perkins

Just after dusk on Aug. 14, at an amphitheater in Mount Rainier National Park's Cougar Rock campground, a deep grumbling sound began to drown out a park ranger who was regaling visitors with an interpretive lecture about the park's natural wonders. The rumble quickly grew to a freight-train-like roar. That's when the ranger ran to a creek near the amphitheater and saw a large flow of mud and debris surging down the normally placid channel.

"It rumbled up on the ridge until about 10:30 [p.m.]," says Jill Hawk, chief ranger at the national park. Although the camp-ground was never threatened, large pulses of rocky mud continued to sweep down the mountainside for more than 5 hours that evening, and smaller clumps followed for the next 5 days. It was a natural wonder all right.

Park rangers and scientists flew over the area on Aug. 15 and determined that the event was simply a landslide, not something worse--like an earthquake or volcanic eruption. A week or more of hot, sunny weather had accelerated the melting of a glacier on the south side of the mountain. The excess water had saturated a steep slope of earth and rock. The soggy mix eventually broke away and raced downhill.

The landslide was small in geologic terms, says Hawk, but it was plenty big enough to scare campers. She notes that the ranger's interpretive lecture that balmy evening turned into an opportunity to discuss the hazards of living in the shadow of a glacier-covered volcano.

Mount Rainier, locally known simply as "the mountain," is the tallest peak in the Cascades, a chain of mountains that parallels the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to northern California. Mount Rainier's summit bears the largest crest of glacier ice on any mountain in the lower 48 U.S. states.

Scientists say the height, steepness, and cubic mile of ice make the steep-sloped peak worth watching. However, they're most concerned about the rapidly growing population in the picturesque valleys of the region, which earns the currently dormant Mount Rainier the title of most dangerous volcano in America.

The landslide of Aug. 14 provides an example of the many powerful surprises that mountains like Rainier can drop on those nearby. The slump of debris began at an altitude of about 2,740 meters above sea level and didn't halt until it had dropped to an altitude of about 762 m, says Patrick T. Pringle, a geologist with Washington State's Department of Natural Resources.

Similar but larger phenomena, called glacial outburst floods, also strike from on high. These torrents, which are sudden releases of water stored within or at the base of glaciers, can contain about 100,000 cubic meters of water, says Joseph S. Walder, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. That's the volume of several dozen Olympic-size swimming pools. At peak discharge, these glacial outbursts often match stream flow rates experienced only in the worst of floods.

At least three dozen glacial outburst floods have occurred in Mount Rainier National Park during the past century. Bridges, roads, and park facilities have been damaged or destroyed on at least 10 occasions. Even so, Walder notes, the effects of such floods don't normally reach beyond the boundaries of the park.

Mount Rainier's most far-reaching and therefore most dangerous threats derive not from landslides and glacial outburst floods but from its volcanism.

As with most volcanoes, the mountain's past behavior gives a preview to its future hazards. Written history in the area goes back only about 180 years--a period much too short to adequately represent the activity of a volcano that's hundreds of thousands of years old. Indeed, the documentary evidence includes a record of only one eruption, in the 1840s. But the sedimentary evidence--including deposits rife with pumice and volcanic ash, or tephra--suggests that Mount Rainier has erupted at least 11 times in the past 10,000 years.

The 1980 eruptions of southwestern Washington's Mount St. Helens showed that even relatively thin accumulations of tephra can disrupt social and economic activity over a broad region. Downwind, in the eastern part of the state, the communities of Yakima, Ritzville, and Spokane received between 1 and 8 centimeters of ash and came to a near standstill for up to 2 weeks.

More dangerous than tephra are so-called pyroclastic flows, which roll down a volcano rather than towering above it (SN: 1/13/01, p. 21). The hot gases, ash, and rock particles form a dense fluid that travels at 10 to 100 m per second and typically hosts temperatures above 300 [degrees] C. The flows' high densities, velocities, and temperatures blow down, bury, or incinerate everything in their path.

Scientists have found only a few deposits near Mount Rainier that resulted from pyroclastic flows. One such layer that's about 2,500 years old shows up about 12 kilometers southwest of the volcano's summit, and another, 1,000 or so years old, appears about 11 km northeast of the mountain. However, pyroclastic deposits near the mountain may be rare only because the ash flows were often converted into something more dangerous before they left the mountainside, Walder says.