• Mount St. Helens is out of line. The volcano, part of the Cascades range in Washington State, sits about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of other young volcanoes in the region, like Mount Adams and Mount Rainier.
  • Now, researchers have figured out why: Deep in the Earth’s crust, a plug of cooled igneous, or volcanic, rock keeps magma from surfacing between Mount St. Helens and the rest of the volcanic arc. Meanwhile, the crust under the Mount St. Helens consists of an ancient scar caused by two continental plates slamming together.
  • The scar is “almost like a soda straw, which is allowing these deeper magmas to preferentially ascend to the surface,” said Paul Bedrosian, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Lakewood, Colorado, and a co-author of a new study on the region,

 Image result for Strangeness of Mount St. Helens

(Images / video taken from google/IE)