Love may be in the air.
But old mother earth doesn’t want to be forgotten this Valentine’s Day!
The 4.3 magnitude quake that hit north of Mount St. Helens Valentine’s morning around 10:30 was felt all over the metro area. In fact, the USGS which tracks quakes, received more than 900 online reports from people feeling the quake in more than 140 zip codes in Oregon & Washington. You can see where those reports came from by looking at this map.
There’s One Very Strange Fact About The Valentine’s Quake On Mount St. Helens
Here it is: the last timea quake 4.3 or bigger hit this same areas just north of St. Helens was when we had a 5.5 quake on VALENTINE’s DAY 1981. Say what? Is there some weird Valentine’s ritual up there that gets things shaking? The odds of this happening are incredibly low. It’s what I call one crazy fact!
Does the Quake Mean St. Helens Is Waking Up Again?
I talked with geologists today at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver. These are the foremost volcano experts in the world who live and work right here. Here’s what they told me:
- Because this was a 4.3 followed by lots of tiny quakes, it seems like this was just a typical earthquake along a known fault
- A small swarm of 15 tiny quakes happened January 27-29, 2011 in the same area
- Other than these things, there’s no other sign (and usually there would be plenty) that anything is happening with the mountain right now
That being said, they still plan on looking for possible links. The 1981 quake happened not too long after the big eruption on the mountain. They think that was the earth re-adjusting itself after a lot of what used to be below the mountain got blown outta there! Perhaps this is the same thing – only the quake happened three years after our most recent eruption episode. Always interesting. I love Mount St. Helens, I really do!
I’ll let you know if their investigation turns up anything else. And if there’s another big Valentine’s Day quake up there in the future…I want to know what’s really going on!!
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