PORTLAND, Ore. – Seventeen new sensors will be placed around the moving and shaking Mount St. Helens in the next few weeks, in hopes of giving scientists more of a clue about what’s going on under the surface of the restless volcano – and perhaps, be better able to forecast future eruptions.
The sensors will include four deep-hole strainmeters, four tiltmeters and nine global positioning stations. All 17 will be linked to a national network that detects the most subtle movement in the earth’s crust.
Mount St. Helens began signaling its current nonstop eruption with hundreds of earthquakes two years ago Saturday.
“Knowing more about a volcano’s underlying mechanisms eventually could lead to techniques for predicting when eruptions will occur,” said Sarah Venator, a geologist and engineer with the Plate Boundary Observatory, which is installing the instruments
Venator and other engineers with the national observatory this week finished drilling an 800-foot hole near the Windy Ridge viewpoint about three miles northeast of the volcano’s crater. Today, they will lower a sensitive strainmeter into the 6-inch-wide hole to detect ground deformation at extraordinarily small levels.
An earthquake-detecting seismometer also will be placed in the hole, and a GPS station will detect ground movements at the surface.
Data from the instruments will be transmitted continuously to the observatory’s headquarters in Boulder, Colo., where it will be accessible to all scientists.
Though Mount St. Helens is one of the world’s most studied volcanoes with more than 50 instruments tracking its activity, it and other volcanoes aren’t the primary target of the Plate Boundary Observatory, a component of the federally funded EarthScope project that is blanketing the United States with seismometers and other motion detectors.
The observatory is placing 103 strainmeters and 852 GPS receivers across the West to take a better look at the North American tectonic plate and where it grinds against the ocean tectonic plates, including the Juan de Fuca Plate off Oregon and Washington.
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