Mount St. Helens: The Perfect Laboratory
Lupine at Mount St. Helens
"No biological legacy."
The phrase John Bishop uses to describe the effect of Mount St. Helens's eruption on the main blast zone, the pumice plain, holds an understated charm.
By now, everyone has heard the story of Mount St. Helens-how it blew on a Sunday morning in May 1980, after rumbling for weeks, an earthquake triggering an enormous landslide, hot gas and rock debris blasting across the landscape at 1,100 kilometers an hour, devastating 60 square kilometers and killing 60 people. But it is impossible to accept the immensity of the mountain and the eruption's legacy, unless you are able to stand beneath the enormous crater on the pumice plain-and hear Bishop, an ecologist at Washington State University at Vancouver, talk about lupines.
No biological legacy. Trees, birds, elk, bacteria, spring flowers, humans-all simply vaporized. A whole region was completely sterilized.
But this devastation left a rare and perfect laboratory, a clean slate on which to observe the fundamental process of "primary succession," the reestablishment of life where there was none.
Here on the pumice plain, on a perfect August morning 23 years after the eruption, plumes of dust and ash blow off the volcano's rim, now 1,200 feet lower than it was before the eruption. The students working for Bishop have scattered across the plain, checking experiment sites. Grasshoppers clatter around us, and a raven whoosh-whooshes overhead, toward Spirit Lake to the south. Elk scat is everywhere. The occasional rumble of rockfalls in the crater drifts across the plain. Life has returned to the pumice plain, but the echoes of cataclysmic drama are very much with us.
Imagine how startling it must have been, when in the midst of this devastation, scientists discovered a lone lupine plant barely a year after the eruption. How could it possibly have gotten there?
Click here for the full story from Washington State Magazine.