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May 18 1980 Mt. St. Helens Eruption From 140 Miles Away.wav

Overall rating (144 ratings)
D
daveincamas

August 2nd, 2006

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Soundscapes > Nature
Newport, Oregon, United States

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/

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Campus-Gutenberg
catastrophe
earth
Environmental-science
eruption
explosion
field-recording
geology
mt-st-helens
natural-disaster
nature
stratosphere
volcano

Type

Wave (.wav)

Duration

0:43.453

File size

3.7 MB

Sample rate

44100.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Mono

Comments
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G
GoalieGirl13

14 years, 7 months ago

Hi. I'm from Yakima, Wa. And I remember that day very well! I was 6. It's my first major memory. We had a blue Mustang and we were coming home from somewhere. It was dark, scary and exciting all at the same time. I'm 37 now and I would love to experience it now (without the loss of life would be totally great) as an adult. Thanks for the recording as we didn't hear anything. Nothing.

GoalieGirl13

G
GoalieGirl13

14 years, 7 months ago

Hi. I'm from Yakima, Wa. And I remember that day very well! I was 6. It's my first major memory. We had a blue Mustang and we were coming home from somewhere. It was dark, scary and exciting all at the same time. I'm 37 now and I would love to experience it now (without the loss of life would be totally great) as an adult. Thanks for the recording as we didn't hear anything. Nothing.

GoalieGirl13

H
hesley

14 years, 8 months ago

I just came across this sound. Its so incredibly special - I really hope this has been archived properly in some sort of national History archive, etc.
Today, we have so much easy access to various media and tools to document and record any and every event - you should be commended for the foresight and creativity you had at the time to think to record this.
Thank you very much for sharing.

J
jumpyhu

14 years, 11 months ago

Thanks a ton for the cool recording, really amazing to check out!

P
patton303

15 years, 5 months ago

Btw....I used one of your booms as a kick drum in a song I'm working on.

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  2. 64 comments
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