Mount St. Helens Still Oozing Lava

Mount St. Helens Still Oozing Lava: "
Mount St. Helens Still Oozing Lava
By Peggy Andersen
Associated Press
posted: 30 December 2005
01:31 pm ET


SEATTLE (AP) -- For more than a year now, Mount St. Helens has been oozing lava into its crater at the rate of roughly a large dump truck load -- 10 cubic yards -- every three seconds. With the sticky molten rock comes a steady drumfire of small earthquakes.

The movement of lava up through the southwest Washington volcano is “like a sticky piston trying to rise in a rusty cylinder,'' U.S. Geological Survey geologist Dave Sherrod said Thursday in a telephone interview from the agency's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash."