Mount St Helens crater steaming dome
— the mountain still building.
Not only on a wall.
“Mount St Helens has been rebuilding inside its own crater since the 1980 eruption. The dome at the centre is the volcano's quiet work: steam rising on cold mornings as groundwater and gas vent through the hot rock below. The whole crater opens northward, the shape of the lateral blast that took the summit down by roughly thirteen hundred feet. From the rim, from a low-flying plane, or from Johnston Ridge five miles to the north, the new dome reads as a low grey hump under a thin column of steam.
Mount St Helens crater steaming dome, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
Mount St Helens stands in Skamania County in southwest Washington, the most active volcano in the Cascade Range and the centerpiece of the 110,000-acre Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, designated by Congress in 1982 and managed by the United States Forest Service. The current summit sits at 8,363 feet, roughly 1,300 feet lower than it stood before the May 18, 1980 eruption removed the upper cone in a north-directed lateral blast. The crater, open to the north, holds two lava domes, Crater Glacier, and ongoing seismic and gas monitoring stations operated by the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory.
The dome is dacite, a silica-rich volcanic rock that extrudes slowly and stacks rather than flows. Two domes have grown inside the crater since the eruption. The first dome built between 1980 and 1986 in a series of small extrusion episodes. The second grew between October 2004 and January 2008, adding about 93 million cubic metres of new rock and creating distinctive spine-like extrusions that climbed and crumbled as they rose. Crater Glacier, which began forming in the cold shadow of the crater walls after 1980, now wraps around both domes, and is one of very few growing glaciers in the Lower 48.
The steam visible from the dome is mostly meteoric water: rain and snowmelt that work down through fractured rock, meet the hot interior, and rise as vapour. The USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory also measures small ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide from the summit area. Mount St Helens has sat at aviation colour code Green and ground alert level Normal since the 2004-2008 episode ended, though instrumented monitoring continues around the clock. Cold mornings make the steam carry; on a warm afternoon the same volume of gas can be nearly invisible against a clear sky.