In 1978, a college student in Wisconsin read a new government report that made a surprising prediction: the “quiet interval” at Mount St. Helens was about to end, “perhaps even before the end of this century.”
John Ewert, working toward his geology degree, was struck by the declaration, made by U.S. Geological Survey scientists Dwight Crandell and Donal Mullineaux.
“Without having much in the way of eyewitness information, they were making this very bold statement that it would be the next to erupt,” he said. “For me, as a kid geologist in Wisconsin, that you could take the geological science and look in a forward sense — that was a revelation.”
Two years later, in May of 1980, Ewert graduated from Beloit College — and Mount St. Helens blew. Ewert was, predictably, among the many scientists who flocked to the remade landscape to study the aftermath of the eruption.
For the next year and a half, he spent his days cramming into small planes and buzzing around the plumes emanating from the St. Helens crater, using instruments to measure gas outputs that were found to correlate to dome-building eruptions. Ewert has spent most of his 37-year career since then in the shadow of St. Helens, working at the forefront of volcanology — and writing the reports that guide volcano threat assessments today.
“It was and is a really good gig, because you’re always seeing something new and different, watching the landscape around St. Helens grow over that time, watching the lava flow grow, plants and animals coming back,” he said. “It gave me or anyone else who studies active Earth processes a sense of the planet really being a dynamic place.”
Last month, headlines around the country proclaimed the results of a new report ranking the threat levels of every volcano in the U.S. — with St. Helens and Mount Rainier holding the No. 2 and No. 3 spots. Ewert was the lead author of that report, an update to his assessment from 2005.
Ewert’s official title is the supervisory geologist at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver. He calls himself a “generalist,” which is a modest way of saying he knows a lot about of lot of things. Ewert can tell you how measurements of gas particles give clues about magma activity below the ground. He knows how laser imagery reveals the path of flows from past eruptions. He’ll tell you which batteries keep instruments running on frigid, glaciated peaks.
Much of Ewert’s work today he attributes to the “revolution” in volcanology that followed the St. Helens eruption. Microcomputers and low-power electronics allowed for massive advances in remote-sensing equipment. Computer modeling opened up new information. The continuing dome-building eruptions that lasted until 1986 served as a “laboratory” for the scientists working at St. Helens.
Perhaps most importantly, the unexpected nature of the lateral blast and debris avalanche that caused so much destruction around St. Helens made many in the field reevaluate their understanding. Suddenly, they started looking around at volcanoes that had erupted before recorded history and seeing similar features.
“It was almost like this group a-ha moment,” Ewert said. “You can use that past as the key to the future. Just so many threads came together at St. Helens and came out of it. … People got really hooked on the idea that explosive volcanism was something we didn’t understand well.”
Ewert had left USGS and returned to graduate school when Nevado del Ruiz erupted in Colombia in 1985, killing 23,000 people. It was determined that better monitoring and communication could have moved them out of harm’s way. Following the eruption, Ewert left college to help found the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, a rapid-response “SWAT team” of scientists that deploys to volcanic incidents around the world.
The warehouse at the Cascades Volcano Observatory is filled with VDAP’s equipment, seismometers, gas-measuring equipment and other instruments, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. One of these tools is a “seismic spider,” a metal box mounted on three legs that can be dropped by a helicopter into dangerous terrain and deliver remote readings.
Essentially, VDAP is a small team of scientists armed only with odd-looking equipment that produces only data — perhaps not the reassuring presence of Red Cross or the National Guard. If anyone doubted the value of Ewert’s team, though, it got the chance to prove its worth in 1991.
Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines began showing signs of life, and Ewert deployed with VDAP to the area, with the mountain looming over Clark Air Base. For more than a month, they monitored seismic activity, gas levels and fluctuations in the terrain. They established hazard maps showing the areas likely to be hit with ash and mudflows.
Finally, they made the call, as earthquakes and ash emissions on the mountain increased. The base and surrounding areas were evacuated, and days later Pinatubo blew up, an eruption 10 times larger than St. Helens. Flows of searing-hot gas and volcanic matter reached the Air Base, which was covered in ash. All the bridges in the area were wiped out. Had Ewert’s team not given the evacuation order, something like 20,000 people would have been in the path of destruction.
Just more than a decade after the St. Helens eruption, Ewert said the advancements made studying the Southwest Washington volcano made the difference when Pinatubo went active in 1991.
“If that volcano had reawakened in say the ‘70s, it would have gotten to a much more advanced state of progress toward an eruption before anyone knew what was going on,” he said. “We were able to analyze the data and say, ‘This volcano looks like it’s moving toward a significant eruption.’ We kind of did the proof of concept that a science team could be deployed to a reawakening volcano and do something really constructive. That success that we had in getting people out of the way and in forecasting a rather large volcanic eruption really validated the entire VDAP project.”
VDAP has continued its work, helping to successfully evacuate tens of thousands of people before eruptions in Chile, Colombia and Argentina. Ewert still counts June 15, 1991 as one of the most memorable days of his career, as Pinatubo erupted at the same time as Typhoon Yunya struck the island.
“If someone had told me before I went over the Philippines, ‘You’re going be on Clark Air Base on the day one of biggest eruptions of 20th century happens at the same time a typhoon comes over top,’ I would have said, ‘No, that’s not a real scenario. That’s beyond Hollywood.’”
The memory is still vivid.
“We had the classic darkness in the middle of the day, pumice stones falling, huge pyroclastic flows extending out from the volcano for 10 miles or more coming to the edge of the base where we were at,” he said. “The cyclonic winds and the rain from the typhoon. It was this amazing — that experience probably stands out more than any other just because it was so over the top.”
In the early 2000s, Ewert started working on determining which U.S. volcanoes posed the biggest threat, building on work he’d done internationally in evaluating the 1,550 active volcanoes worldwide.
“Having a way to prioritize objectively with what you know about volcanoes and what’s around them is an important thing to do in a world with non-infinite resources,” he said. “It’s important that we be able to say, ‘These are the areas that we as a society and a global community need to be concerned about.’”
That work resulted in the first National Volcanic Threat Assessment in 2005, which looked at not only which volcanoes are most likely to erupt, but at their proximity to population centers and threat to aviation from ash plumes. The update to that study was published a few weeks ago.
In between, Ewert has continued to work at the Cascades Volcano Observatory with both the USGS and VDAP. From 2010 to 2015, he served as scientist-in-charge at CVO, responsible for the wide variety of work conducted by its 75 or so personnel. The facility has laboratories to study sediments and gases, a command center with live seismic readings, a warehouse chock-full of field equipment and a facility where engineers build advanced tools in-house.
“We have seismologists, we have geophysicists, we have geologists, we have hydrologists, we have applied mathematicians, we have physicists, we have GIS experts, we have geographers, we have electrical engineers, we have software engineers, we have field engineers, we have geochemists,” Ewert said. “We have an amazing cross-section of science and technical disciplines who work here with basically one object, which is to understand how volcanoes work and how to work with communities on disaster risk reduction.”
Part of his work has also included binational exchanges, bringing together officials from Washington with international counterparts who have experienced devastation in their own communities. That work has helped create a sense of urgency; meeting an eruption survivor is “better than 1,000 PowerPoints,” Ewert said. As a result, county and regional officials have created emergency plans, set up response communications and hazard maps and conducted training exercises.
As a geologist, Ewert’s science background operates on a scale of millions of years. Volcanoes in the Cascades have a lifespan of 500,000 years. Volcanoes can be considered active even if they haven’t erupted for 10,000 years. It’s easy for that to all become abstract, more difficult to think of volcanoes in terms of today. But just because they’re unpredictable doesn’t make them any less real, and if Ewert needs a reminder, he needs only to look at the crater on Mount St. Helens where he’s spent so much of the past four decades.
“Geologists have a really different sense of time,” he said. “Having that perspective on it, but then seeing the changes happen so rapidly at a volcano that’s ready to erupt, and seeing those changes happen on a month-to-month basis … keeps us grounded in the present and the human scale of time.”
Within a human lifespan, any given volcano is unlikely to erupt. Even experts like Ewert can’t say with certainty when a behemoth like Rainier will reawaken. Maybe that’s why civilizations have sprung up in the danger zones of so many volcanoes — the risk to any given generation might be small. But the fact remains that cataclysmic events are inevitable, and that’s why he believes his work is so important. With so many people living near volcanoes, they need to know when an eruption is coming and what to do.
“The volcanoes have been doing their thing for the past half-million years,” Ewert said. “What changes is what we as people do in terms of developing close to those areas. That makes our jobs as scientists hard. … If you can give people six weeks advance notice that there’s something cooking, rather than six days or six hours, it’s that much more time to prepare and educate. We’re trying to lengthen the teachable moment.”
