This is a truly unique recording. Several years ago I found out that I am the only person in the world who captured audio of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the volcano in Washington state. I was in high school in 1980, living in Newport, Oregon, 140 miles southwest of the mountain. May 18 was a beautiful sunny morning, and as we were eating breakfast we heard several distant "thuds" or booms. We went outside, and noticed that they were coming from the north. We had no idea what they were, and since Mt. St. Helens was so far away, we "knew" it could not be the mountain. But in the back of my mind I thought, "could it be?". So I grabbed a tape recorder and set it in a window box upstairs on the north side of the house. This recording is an excerpt of what I captured. The entire tape is about eight minutes long. Unfortunately the quality is poor, but it was the only tape recorder we owned. I started recording about two minutes after we heard the first boom. In total there were about 10 booms over a period of about ten minutes. I never did anything with the tape because of the poor quality. Also I figured that the USGS, etc. had also recorded the sound. But I found out recently that no one else made an audio recording. The booms were picked up on seismometers, but no audio was recorded. As I understand it, when the mountain first erupted it sent a low-frequency "shock wave" straight up. This wave reflected off several layers of the atmosphere, bouncing back to the ground in a large donut-shaped ring about 50 to 300 miles around the mountain. People within 50 miles of the mountain did not hear anything. I am not sure if what we heard was one "shock wave" reflected many times between layers of the atmosphere and the ground, or a series of waves. The booms are very low frequency, thus you should listen with headphones or larger speakers. On laptop speakers you probably won't hear anything. Many people who heard the booms described them as a series of "thuds". I also believe that this may be the only audio recording of this phenomena from any volcano. I imagine that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sounded similar to this (but louder). I wonder too if anyone knows of any atmospheric audio recorded from a distance greater than this (140 miles/225 km)? If you would like to study the entire recording, please contact me.
UPDATE 6/8/2014: I have uploaded the original, untouched recording here: http://www.freesound.org/people/daveincamas/sounds/240257/
Type
Wave (.wav)
Duration
0:43.453
File size
3.7 MB
Sample rate
44100.0 Hz
Bit depth
16 bit
Channels
Mono
Comments
18 years, 5 months ago
Phenomenal - simply amazing! Thank you so much for sharing this.
18 years, 5 months ago
I'll never forget that day. I was about 9. I live in a little town about 300 mi east of the mountain called Milton-Freewater, OR. In the mobile home we lived in at the time, my mom and I, there was a window right over my head in my bedroom. I woke up that morning, and it was the strangest-looking morning I had ever seen: the room was illuminated the way it usually was in the morning, but a glance up out the window revealed a dark sky. Puzzled, I sat up, turned and looked out the window-there was a narrow band of blue sky on the northern horizon, but from the west to the east, it was this wierd, dark, purplish-brown color. What I thought were clouds against the dark sky were actually, upon closer examination, pockets of brownish-grey hanging heavily down from one enormous cloud, just as that photo from Moses Lake shows. I ran down the hall and pounded on my mom's door to wake her up, yelling that "there's something wrong with the sky." Now, my mom was the daughter of dustbowlers, and a child of the Cold War who did the "duck-and-cover" drills in school; she had been raised on stories of deadly dust storms and twisters, and lived most of her life under fear of nuclear attack....so when she heard me yelling about something being "wrong" with the sky, there's no telling WHAT she thought. She woke up and we were down the hall into the living room like a shot, and she turned on the TV. Back then, since we didn't have cable, you could get 6 channels-3 each from Spokane and the Tri-Cities. None of the Spokane ones came through, but the ABC Tri-Cities affiliate was showing a program called "Kids Are People Too"-and there was a tape running across the bottom explaining that Mt. St. Helens had erupted. Now, the mountain had been erupting for a while, so when they said that and we noted the sky outside, we knew: THIS MUST BE THE BIG ONE. We didn't get any major ashfall, fortunately, but my great aunt in Yakima sure did. By that afternoon she said it was like the duststorms had been: black as midnight with curtains of brown pouring out of the skies. I still have some ash she sent us.
18 years, 8 months ago
You're welcome. I'm really kicking myself now for not sharing this back in 1980. Oh well. By the way, thanks to freesound this (or rather, the original raw file) is going to be on the radio tomorrow, Feb. 8, 2007. A radio show producer saw my recording here and contacted me. He did a brief phone interview and we exchanged some files. My voice plus the recording plays for about 10 seconds in a 2-minute program called "A Moment in Time". Here's the list of stations: http://amomentintime.com/stations.asp However I don't know what time of day the show airs. I think you will be able to listen to the story on their website if you sign up as a member (for free).
18 years, 8 months ago
Wow, fascinating, what a valuable addition to freesound. Thanks for making it available!
18 years, 9 months ago
Wow a historical recording. You should put this on Wikipedia.
