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I know it’s not the same branch of science, but . . .
This is a bit poignant to me because one of my geology professors told about Dr. Johnston on the ridge facing Mt. St. Helens and knowing there was no point to saying “Get out of there!” – they knew that the pyroclastic flow from the collapsing mountain would reach him before he could move more than a few steps.
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The view from the visitor center that was his observation station is haunting.
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Definitely. One of my geology professors had a poster of the view from there with the pre-eruption peak sketched in.
What’s really daunting is a video someone made of what Johnston would have seen that morning, with his voice saying, “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” patched in.
BTW, quite unofficially some geologists from Oregon and Washington universities who knew him borrowed a private plane and dropped a big memorial piece on the spot where he called from as soon as they could manage it.
He was one of the most daring volcanologists of the time, climbing down into the developing summit crater before the eruption – something robots were developed to do since then – to get samples from the pond at the bottom, trying to figure out why the gas readings they were getting via long-distance spectrometers were so much lower than he had predicted. A lot of remote instrumentation was developed in the years following partly indirectly in his memory, so no one else would need to take risks like that.
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The geologist originally scheduled to be at that site on the day of the eruption had something come up. However, he got killed by a different volcano. Volcanology is one of the higher-risk areas within geology.
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Yeah, I forget his name . . . can’t dredge it from memory, blast it!
Not nearly so much now. Johnston was using a long-range spectrometer to analyze gases over the crater; now there are small enough spectrometers they have drones that can be flown right over the volcano – and they don’t even have to leave their university (or other institution) office to run them. He also hiked down into the caldera to get water samples; there are robots now that can get not just water or rock samples but can actually scoop up some lava. Then there were the two geologists who died in a boat while sampling the highly acidic water, which was quite the mystery until the Lake Nyos massive gas discharge showed how deep lakes in volcanic regions can have gas layers deep down that just stay there until something disturbs the layer, triggering the release of thousands of tons of CO_2, methane, and sometimes sulfur compounds (there have been proposals to run pipelines down to the bottoms of suspect lakes to try to bleed off the gas slowly, but I don’t know if any have been done and if they have how successful they were – I hope they’ve worked it out given that there is a lake in Africa, Lake Kivu, which if it underwent an eruptive release of gases would make the Lake Nyos disaster look like a fight between a pair of toddlers).
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Harry Glicken was the geologist who missed being the victim for Mt. St. Helens but was killed by Unzen. Lake Nyos does now have some vent pipes installed, though sustaining maintenance is an issue. How dangerous is Africa’s explosive Lake Kivu? has a discussion of the situation at Lake Kivu, with mention of the others.
Although there are many more techniques these days to safely study volcanoes remotely, that doesn’t guarantee that volcanologists keep out of harm’s way. Back in grad school, fellow students claimed that a study found that geologist ranked extremely high relative to other careers for job-related deaths, frequency of divorce, and job satisfaction, a curious combination. I did not see said study myself.
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I know that was true in the early 1990s. There was one exception to the negatives: geologists married to geologists, working together.
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Ha! He can still make me laugh even after he is gone. So long, friend!
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Dr. Joel Duff, is this a personal attack or something? lol
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One day I shall write about the origins of homeopathy and how it worked to generate effects in Hahnemann’s hands. he generated a phase separation on the air/water interphase and scooped off the extract from the top using a spoon, nothing to do with dilution.
If we where to publish some data in a scientific experiment we could break the spell of the “aberglaube” about homeopathy