7Wonders of Mount St. Helen’s

3. Badlands formed in five days. Badlands topography is found in South Dakota and in the Southwest. It occurs where loose material has been

eroded in areas of rock structures, leaving a jagged but picturesque landscape. The standard explanation for such landforms is that water, over the centuries, washes away the loose materials, leaving free-standing towering rock patterns. 
   At MSH the massive landslide carried huge amounts of ice and snow with it, burying them in the deep valley to the north. Throughout the day 30’ of 550 degree F. ash was also deposited, which quickly melted that ice, causing it to “flash” to steam. This is the same energy process that caused the explosions up in the mountain throughout the day. Water expands 1700 times when it turns to steam. When this happens instantaneously, it is an explosion. Eventually through similar explosions all the water was used up

  The red hot ash covering the buried ice and snow in the valley caused the ice to melt and “flash” to steam, forming steam explosion pits (pits up to 125’ deep). They had nearly vertical sides until gravity collapsed them to produce a “rill and gully” effect, one of the features of badlands topography. This remarkable process produced badlands features in just 5 days. 

4. Layered strata formed in three hours. On June 12, 1980, a third explosive eruption produced 25’ of stratification that amazed geologists. Successive layers are traditionally thought to require long periods of time to form; yet at least 200 layers accumulated between the nighttime hours of 9 and 12. A plume swiftly ascended seven miles above the mountain. The rock falling back to earth produced wave after wave of pyroclastic flows that roiled out over landscape to the north, each dusting the valley below with another lamination. Measuring from a fraction of an inch to a yard in thickness, each took from a few seconds to a few minutes to form.

   Geologist Steven Austin described these pyroclastic flows as ground-hugging, fluidized, turbulent slurries of fine volcanic debris. They moved down the mountainside at hurricane speeds and left deposits of 1000 degrees F. One would expect each deposit to be homogenized & thoroughly mixed. Remarkably these high-velocity slurries of red-hot ash and pumice separated into coarse and fine particles of perfectly defined layers. Such features follow laws governing flows demonstrated in laboratory sedimentation tanks.

   Similar thin layering appears in the Tapeats Sandstones of the Grand Canyon. Conventional wisdom says they were formed by slow and continuous sedimentation over long ages. Both gas-charged slurries which formed the MSH strata and water-charged slurries which formed the Tapeats strata follow the same laws of physics. The volcano has demonstrated that such formations can be formed rapidly. A global flood would have produced Tapeats in a brief time. 
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