Fire and Ice

Mount St. Helens, Washington Minibum Koo

The Mount St. Helen volcano is characterized by the continuous interaction between extreme elements—hot magma and cold ice. This project explores thermal transformation in the layers of the Earth in Mount St. Helens at the moment of eruption when these thermal layers were punctuated and melted and then returned to a stable state. Mount St. Helens is a strato-volcano rising 8,366 feet above sea level, where it is covered with glaciers causing an extraordinary explosion in a volcanic eruption when liquid magma meets the solid ice of the glacier. This process has a profound and diverse impact on the Earth, affecting the ground, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Mount St. Helens’s eruption in the spring of 1980 happened in two stages, with a first explosion followed by a second one about seven weeks later when the magma reached the bottom of the glacier and blew up one third of the mountain. Since 1980, lava from ongoing eruptions has added over 200 million cubic yards of material to the crater floor, and the crater glacier has also grown with snowfall and avalanches. New volcanic activity began in 2004. Based on this, a provocative scenario is proposed on a possible future interaction at Mount St. Helens as a bigger explosion triggered by an acupunctural approach of inserting the glacier into the magma body. A great eruption would then burn up all the magma in the northwest area of the volcano, eliminating the risk of another explosion. As an epilogue, a caldera would form on the top, with the width of 9.21 kilometers, four times larger than the current crater.