Extrusion rate of the Mount St. Helens lava dome estimated from terrestrial imagery, November 2004-December 2005

Oblique, terrestrial imagery from a single, fixed-position camera was used to estimate linear extrusion rates during sustained exogenous growth of the Mount St. Helens lava dome from November 2004 through December 2005. During that 14-month period, extrusion rates declined logarithmically from about 8-10 m/d to about 2 m/d. The overall ebbing of effusive output was punctuated, however, by episodes of fluctuating extrusion rates that varied on scales of days to weeks. The overall decline of effusive output and finer scale rate fluctuations correlated approximately with trends in seismicity and deformation. Those correlations portray an extrusion that underwent episodic, broad-scale stick-slip behavior superposed on the finer scale, smaller magnitude stick-slip behavior that has been hypothesized by other researchers to correlate with repetitive, nearly periodic shallow earthquakes.