Mr. Fizzy Magma

Volcano cooking up a mystery: "Volcano cooking up a mystery
St. Helens has been erupting since 2004; cause puzzles scientists"

This might just be the most frightening article I read this week. Excluding, of course news that the Bush administration may be using these massive phone record searches to keep tabs on reporters.

Mt. St Helen's is a long way from Seattle. It's a little over 100 miles. There is no danger to Seattle from and eruption. What's stiking is how little we know about this volcano. This is what they've come up with in the past 25 years.

"It's been erupting almost continuously since late 2004," said Tom Pierson, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver. So it's a good bet it will also erupt today, Pierson said.

The real question that's "driving everyone nuts" in the volcano-watching research community, he said, is what's causing this period of eruption -- and if its peculiarities indicate the mountain is building pressure for another explosive event
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And some think it could be building an increasingly bigger cork on a planet-size, pressurizing bottle of Mr. Fizzy Magma, leading toward another explosive eruption.
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According to standard theory, he said, it is pressurized gas down deep in the hot magma that drives volcanic eruptions. But the ongoing eruption at Mount St. Helens is taking place without the expected amount of gas -- carbon dioxide, water vapor or hydrogen sulfide -- being released.

"Mount Hood puts out more sulfur dioxide gas than Mount St. Helens," said Seth Moran, a USGS seismologist who gave public talks Wednesday at the Johnston Ridge Observatory overlooking the northwest-facing maw of the volcanic crater. "It's a weird one."
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Then there are the drumbeats.
"We really wanted to figure out what those were all about," Dzurisin said
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Volcanoes moving into an eruptive phase typically inflate and bulge. At St. Helens, the GPS showed the mountain was actually deflating.
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The Cascade volcanoes are still pretty unpredictable themselves, noted Moran. St. Helens is perhaps the most well-studied volcano in the contiguous United States, he said, but it still can surprise and baffle the experts.

If other dormant volcanoes such as Mount Rainier or Mount Baker started rumbling
again, Moran said, we could have a hard time figuring what was going on in time.
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A quarter century after Mount St. Helens blew its top, we're still trying to figure out what's going on with the volcanoes in our back yard.