Important Takeaways:
- The largest active volcano in Washington state has been rocked by a series of earthquakes, putting experts on high alert.
- Mount Adams is a 12,000-foot-tall stratovolcano located in south-central Washington, about 55 miles southwest of the city of Yakima.
- This volcano is considered a ‘high threat’ due to its ability to trigger landslides, debris avalanches and mudflow that can travel up to 50 miles per hour down the slope, which would put thousands of people at risk.
- Although this volcano hasn’t erupted for about 1,000 years, ‘it will assuredly erupt again,’ US Geological Survey (USGS) experts say.
- But it’s impossible to say exactly when it will blow, which is why scientists have established monitoring stations around Mount Adams to track its seismic activity.
- But the biggest threat to people living near this volcano isn’t an explosive eruption.
- It’s actually avalanches, landslides and lahars, or muddy flows of rock, ash and ice that ‘surge downstream like rapidly flowing concrete’ and can occur during eruptive or non-eruptive periods, according to the USGS.
- ‘The ice-capped summit conceals large volumes of hydrothermally weakened rock, and future landslides of this weakened rock could generate far-traveled lahars,’ USGS officials wrote.
- In light of the recent earthquakes, scientists have installed three additional monitoring stations around the volcano to keep a closer eye on it.
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Important Takeaways:
- Among the snow-capped volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest, Mount Adams gets relatively little love.
- There are more glamorous volcanoes to climb (Mount Rainier) or to ski (Mount Hood) or that have exploded in epically dramatic fashion in living memory (Mount St. Helens).
- Seismically, Mount Adams, located in southern Washington state, is relatively calm. The U.S. Geological Survey considers it a “high threat” volcano, but that’s a step below its “very high threat” neighbors, including all of those above.
- Earthquakes are normally detected around Mount Adams once every couple of years, while Mount Rainier could have some 10 to 20 earthquakes per month, said Jon Major, scientist-in-charge at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.
- So the alert earlier this month by the USGS that there has been a flurry of earthquakes around Adams got some attention from volcano watchers. There have been 10 earthquakes recorded there so far this year, including six in September and one this month, Major said, something he described as “a little out of character for this volcano.”
- Does this mean it’s going to blow?
- “Right now, there’s no cause for concern,” Major said in an interview.
- The recent earthquakes have been small — ranging from magnitudes of 0.9 to 2.0 — but the federal government has only one seismometer in the vicinity of Mount Adams, the second-tallest volcano in Washington state, so it is difficult to get precise information about their locations and depths. The agency is using the recent rumblings as an opportunity to learn more about this sometimes-overlooked volcano.
- USGS personnel have installed three new temporary seismic stations on Mount Adams, Major said.
- “If they start to pick up more earthquakes, or if earthquakes start to get larger — if they start to be shallow and more frequent — then we would probably start to take a closer look,” he said.
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