Publications

Northwest hikers frequently hand down rich traditions of favorite trails to younger generations. While these multi-generational traditions provide the illusion of landscape permanence, observant hikers often witness geologic change in progress—rockfall, water erosion, and glacier change. You might recognize that your views of mountain landscapes are a little bit different from the views...

The dynamic stresses that are associated with the energetic seismic waves generated by the Mw 9.0 Tohoku earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan triggered bursts of tectonic tremor beneath the Parkfield section of the San Andreas fault (SAF) at an epicentral distance of ∼8200  km. The onset of tremor begins midway through the ∼100‐s‐period S‐wave arrival, with a minor burst...

In active, shallow, sub-volcanic magma conduits the extent of the dehydrogenation–oxidation reaction in amphibole phenocrysts is controlled by energetic processes that cause crystal lattice damage or conditions that increase hydrogen diffusivity in magmatic phases. Amphibole phenocrysts separated from dacitic volcanic rocks erupted from 1980 to 1986 and in 2005 at Mount St. Helens (MSH)...

A vigorous swarm of over 1000 small, shallow earthquakes occurred 20–22 September 2009 beneath Mount Rainier, Washington, including the largest number of events ever recorded in a single day at Rainier since seismic stations were installed on the edifice in 1989. Many events were only clearly recorded on one or two stations on the edifice, or they overlapped in time with other events...

Mount St. Helens seized the world’s attention in 1980 when the largest historical landslide on Earth and a powerful explosive eruption reshaped the volcano, created its distinctive crater, and dramatically modified the surrounding landscape. An enormous lava dome grew episodically in the crater until 1986, when the volcano became relatively quiet. A new glacier grew in the crater...

Deep aseismic roots of faults play a critical role in transferring tectonic loads to shallower, brittle crustal faults that rupture in large earthquakes. Yet, until the recent discovery of deep tremor and creep, direct inference of the physical properties of lower-crustal fault roots has remained elusive. Observations of tremor near Parkfield, CA provide the first evidence for present...

This digital product comprises a collection of age and isopach data for the Holocene tephras of the Mono-Inyo Craters, California. Data on the most recent eruptions from this volcanic chain are relatively comprehensive, getting less so the further back in time. For the most recent eruptions to about 1,500 years ago, tephra beds within separate eruptive sequences have been studied and...

We observed several swarms of repeating low-frequency (1–5 Hz) seismic events during a 3 week period in May–June 2010, near the summit of Mount Rainier, Washington, USA, that likely were a result of stick–slip motion at the base of alpine glaciers. The dominant set of repeating events ('multiplets') featured >4000 individual events and did not exhibit daytime variations in recurrence...

The 10-day explosive phase at the start of the 2008–2009 eruption of Chaitén volcano in southern Chile (42.83°S, 72.65°W) blanketed the steep, rain-forest-cloaked, 77-km2 Chaitén River drainage basin with 3 to >100 cm of tephra; predominantly fine to extremely fine rhyolitic ash fell during the latter half of the explosive phase. Rain falling on this ash blanket within days of cessation...

Shallow seismicity between 0 and 3-km depth has persisted at Mount St. Helens, Washington (MSH) during both eruptive and non-eruptive periods for at least the past thirty years. In this study we investigate the source mechanisms of shallow volcano-tectonic (VT) earthquakes at MSH by calculating high-quality hypocenter locations and fault plane solutions (FPS) for all VT events recorded...

Hawaiian-style eruptions, or Hawaiian fountains, typically occur at basaltic volcanoes and are sustained, weakly explosive jets of gas and dominantly coarse, juvenile ejecta (dense spatter to delicate reticulite). Almost the entire range of styles and mass eruption rates within Hawaiian fountaining occurred during twelve fountaining episodes recorded at Mauna Ulu, Kīlauea between May and...

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images reveal a pre-eruption deformation signal at Kizimen volcano, Kamchatka, Russia, where an ongoing eruption began in mid-November, 2010. The previous eruption of this basaltic andesite-to-dacite stratovolcano occurred in 1927–1928. InSAR images from both ascending and descending orbital passes of Envisat and ALOS PALSAR satellites...