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Language: en
I'm Charlie Crisafulli research
ecologist with the u.s. Forest Service
Pacific Northwest Research Station in
Olympia Washington I have worked for the
station for about twenty years and I've
been working on Mount st. Helens for
coming up on 30 years Mount Saint Helens
erupted at 8:32 on may 18th 1980 it was
an unbelievable example of nature's raw
energy being unleashed across the
landscape and into the atmosphere the
heat associated with the blast started
melting glaciers causing mud flows to go
down the sides of the volcanoes
inundating valleys and scouring out
vegetation in its path tremendous
amounts of pumice and ash with being
pushed up into the atmosphere and in
carried aloft on the prevailing winds
off to the north and east and depositing
and blanketing the surrounding landscape
for hundreds of miles with various
amounts of volcanic material we refer to
as tephra when we arrived to Mount st.
Helens and I went out into this
landscape that bears no resemblance to
an old-growth forest which had been
there before I was awestruck by what I
had seen and the absence of trees the
absence of almost all vegetation in 1982
when we were back to the site doing
another reconnaissance for any type of
life that might be out there we were
flying at the time and we looked down
and we saw what appeared to be a plant
so he swung the chopper around and
walked up and sure enough it was a tiny
Lupin plant a prairie Lupin in fact so
what we did is decided to put a plot
around this plant and track the fate of
this individual to see what would become
of what as far as we knew was the single
first colonizer on the pumice plain elk
like the rest of the large mammals at
Mount st. Helens within the areas
influenced by the lateral blast perished
instantly and so all of the mountain
goats the black bear deer and Puma
perished immediately but the elk were
very resilient so they bounce back
relatively quickly and this was in large
part because of the vegetation a tree
sprouted many species
such as fire weed and various grasses
and these are very palatable preferred
forage by the elk the Mount st. Helens
area prior to the eruption had a great
diversity of small and mid-sized mammals
and we were particularly interested in
small mammals also we were specifically
looking for the activity of the northern
pocket gopher because this is an animal
lives beneath the ground and so we had
hypothesized that if one small mammal
would have survived it would likely be
the northern pocket gopher and sure
enough many locations the northern
pocket gopher had indeed survived the
northern pocket gopher is a very
interesting small mammal in that its
fossil meaning it lives beneath the
ground and everywhere it goes for the
most part it has to dig its way there
that's what's so important the gopher in
the process of its burrowing mixes
nutrient-rich old for a soil with the
nutrient impoverished volcanic ash and
puts it on the surface by having now
this topography of the mound on the
surface wind blowing seeds that are
coming across a landscape are more apt
to get trapped the other interesting
fact about the northern pocket gopher is
that over the decades since the eruption
it's created a complex network of tunnel
systems and what we've seen is as elk
walk across the landscape they collapse
these tunnels creating an access route
into the gopher burrows and what we have
seen is a wonderful interrelationship
between Gophers elk and amphibians
because now in Fibby instead our
metamorphosing from the wetlands and
ponds and dispersing out onto the
terrestrial landscape looking for a
forest and there's none to be found
they'll often find these gopher tunnels
and they'll take refuge in these
in-between dry spells Spirit Lake prior
to the eruption was a crystal-clear
ice-cold gem of the Mount st. Helens
area that changed suddenly on the
morning of May 18th 1980 when the
landslide caused by the failure of the
North Face of the volcano slid into the
lake displacing all of the
water and when this huge wave went up
onto the jacent basins walls it brought
down with it the former forests that was
on those valley walls in fact scoured
those valley walls right down to bedrock
so now nearly 30 years later there's
still legacies of the 1980 eruption such
as the enormous log mat that still
remains afloat in the lake surface when
we arrived to Mount st. Helens one of
our expectations or that of all the
different vertebrate groups the group to
be hit hardest by the eruption would be
an fib ian's because they're thought to
be very sensitive to environmental
change and stressors and we were
absolutely shocked when we found 12 of
the 15 species indigenous to Southwest
Washington Cascades had actually
survived in the area influenced by the
lateral blast
another large surprise was the fact that
the northwestern salamander was found in
most of the waters we studied even the
brand newly created ponds some 135 ponds
were created a five-fold increase over
the number of ponds that were in the
landscape before the eruption so Mount
st. Helens actually created in phibian
habitat as well as eliminating it or
reducing it I've been at Mount st.
Helens for 30 years now and I can
honestly say that I do not get bored
I mean it absolutely shaped my life my
world I mean I was a 22 year old kid
when the mountain erupted so what more
could an aspiring young ecologist ask
for than to have a mount erupt and have
the good fortune to be able to work at
Mount st. Helens and spend your career
there from my perspective I would be
elated to see another eruption you know
of course I'm concerned about loss of
life and property but that aside we are
now poised through 30 years of research
to really evaluate the responses of an
eruption to the suite of organisms and
ecological systems around Mount st.
Helens so it would be a great learning
opportunity if we were fortunate to have
another eruption during my career