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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
18 years, 11 months ago
That is really amazing! Thanks for posting this!
19 years, 1 month ago
Here is a description of the blast that caused this sound. Scroll about 20% of the way down the page to the section labeled "Lateral Blast": http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Publications/MSHPPF/MSH_past_present_future.html
Here is a sequence of still images of the explosion: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/Landslides/MSHSlide.html
The same images as an animation: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vesuvius/images/sthelensanim.gif
Here is what the sky looked like, 150 miles downwind (Moses Lake, Washington): http://www.grimshaworigin.org/LeahNadineGw.htm#StHelens
Note that at the time, nobody knew if this was just the beginning of something even worse. e.g. would the whole area become completely buried in ash?
Audio of one person's reflections on the impact of the eruption on Moses Lake: http://www.ccrh.org/comm/moses/reflections2.html
In Newport, we didn't receive any ash because the wind was blowing from the west on May 18. However we received a slight sprinkling of ash from a smaller eruption later in the summer.
19 years, 2 months ago
wow!
19 years, 2 months ago
Mt. St. Helens eruption was really destroying. Some photos of that event in:
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/digital-gallery/index.html