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By Cade Barker / For The Chronicle
A large team of scientists in Vancouver are regularly on hand to monitor volcanic activity in the Cascades of Oregon and Washington.
As a result, the team has the capability to produce early warnings out of its Vancouver office if a volcanic eruption were imminent.
A team of 80 employees make up the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver’s Columbia Tech Center. The observatory opened in 1982 in Vancouver to monitor Mount St. Helens specifically, said Holly Weiss-Racine, geologist and outreach coordinator for the observatory.
The volcano observatory is one of five in the United States, with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory also housed at the Cascades observatory in Vancouver.
“We’re actually the biggest. We have the most staff here, and that’s because we’re partially Cascade Volcano Observatory, and we also have the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program located here within our office,” Weiss-Racine said. “They do international work on helping support countries that don’t have the funding or the equipment to monitor their volcanoes.”
She added that the observatory has three primary objectives: research, monitoring and outreach. The team staffs scientists who go in the field to examine historic deposits and the geology of the landscape to determine what happened in the past to help inform what could occur in the future. The monitoring staff actively watches all the volcanoes for earthquakes, ground deformation, gas and more.
“So we have some kind of heads up if the volcano’s going to start waking up again,” she said of the monitoring staff.
The third component, outreach, is where Weiss-Raccine comes in.
“That’s making sure that everyone that needs all of this information has access to it, and so that’s a lot of community planners, emergency managers, first responders, things like that, so we have clear lines of communication for when the next eruption does happen,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Recently, Mount Adams lifted an eyelid, rather than fully waking up. Weiss-Raccine called the Adams earthquake episode from September kind of exciting.
“It didn’t turn out to be very much,” she said. “But we’ve been monitoring Mount Adams for over 40 years, and it typically has about one earthquake every two to three years, so not very many. Other volcanoes like Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, have many per day, so they just each have their own personalities. So based on what we’ve seen of Mount Adams’ personality, it doesn’t have very many earthquakes. So when we started to see about six in one month, it was exciting and interesting, but not necessarily concerning.”
She added that when a volcano is going to erupt the mountain will rattle off hundreds of earthquakes per month.
“But six was unique enough to get our attention,” Weiss-Raccine said of Mount Adams. “So we went out, deployed some temporary equipment with permission from the Forest Service, and then, as usual, a classic like when you grab an umbrella, then it’s not going to rain. We put out the equipment and they stopped.”
Mount Adams has since gone back to sleep, she said. The six little earthquakes prompted the Mount Adams volcano working team to regroup for the first time since COVID started.
With seismic monitoring equipment on each volcano in the Cascades of Oregon and Washington, the observatory receives data live streamed from an antenna tower outside. With technology advancements just in this century, scientists can monitor from anywhere with digital capabilities. The operations room houses a monitor broadcasting live data of each volcano on site, 24/7.
“So if it happened in the middle of the night, they could pull it up on their iPad at home, and so this room is more of where we come to meet and discuss things that are going on,” Weiss-Racine said.
When looking at the monitors of each volcano, some registered activity may be as simple as hikers passing by the station or wind. Volcanos in Oregon all registered a similar sized earthquake between Wednesday, Jan. 29, and Thursday, Jan. 30, which tells scientists that it was a regional episode compared to a volcanic earthquake, which is actually an explosion, in Prineville, Oregon, at a quarry that produced a 2.7 earthquake.
Weiss-Racine said Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier are very well monitored, while Mount Adams, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak are monitored with just one seismic station. All three volcanoes are high priority, however, but permits for additional instrumentation take roughly five years to receive as each volcano is on federal land.
“We have our permits for Mount Adams,” she said. “We just got them, and so we’ll be able to do the Mount Adams permanent station installations. The Glacier Peak permit we received. We do need to modify it a little bit because to install that equipment, it is about a three-day hike each way.”
In May, the Cascades Volcano Observatory will host its first open house in over five years. Weiss-Racine said staff anticipates over 1,000 visitors coming through between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on May 10.
“We’re a really diverse office in the types of science that we do, and so we’ve got people that do geodesy and people that do mathematical modeling, and we’ve got seismic groups and gas groups, and so every single group is going to have their own station demonstrating their equipment and their types of research,” Weiss-Racine said. “In the past, we’ve had as many as 24 different stations for people to come in and visit.”
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