Thank you, I just read the Wikipedia summary of the event, and I can’t believe this isn’t even as big as the “Big One” everyone talks about for Yellowstone.
It’s neat seeing someone learn about Mt St Helen’s for the first time. It was such a big deal in the 80s that I can’t remember not knowing about it. It makes me excited to discover major events I know nothing about…
Anyway… The thing with it wasn’t necessarily the size of the eruption. There have been much, much bigger eruptions. It’s that it was one of the first with really good footage (since it was one of the earlier predicted eruptions), it occurred in the US, and it blew out sideways instead of the top.
Haha, yea, I wasn’t born in the right decade on the right continent to know about this, so I had a really good time learning about something new!
The only reason I even know about the Yellowstone caldera eruption zone is because my American cousin once told me about it in the form of a horror story when we were both younger, and I started crying because I thought the world was going to end while we were visiting Connecticut, lol.
The Yellowstone volcano is about 8 times larger than the entirety of park that has Mt St Helens in it (~860,000 acres of volcano vs ~110,000 acres of park).
