"Ka30P" wrote in message
...
Wow, George, thanks for all the links!

The always in the back of the mind question here is Mt. Rainer and will it go
the way Mt. St. Helens goes? The area below it being much more populated..
From
where I live there are two ways easiest to take to get over the mts. and head
to Seattle. One curves right around Mt. Rainer and can be a spectacular drive.
I've stopped driving that route... ;-)



kathy :-)
zone 7, SE WA state

Sorry, Kathy, in zone 7, don't make any large real estate investments in the
vicinity of Mt. Rainier. Mt. Rainier is not dormant, as some people would like
to believe.

Mount Rainier is an active volcano that first erupted about half a million years
ago. Because of Rainier's great height (14,410 feet above sea level) and
northerly location, glaciers have cut deeply into its lavas, making it appear
deceptively older than it actually is. Mount Rainier is known to have erupted as
recently as in the 1840s, and large eruptions took place as recently as about
1,000 and 2,300 years ago. Mount Rainier and other similar volcanoes in the
Cascade Range, such as Mount Adams and Mount Baker, erupt much less frequently
than the more familiar Hawaiian volcanoes, but their eruptions are vastly more
destructive. Hot lava and rock debris from Rainier's eruptions have melted snow
and glacier ice and triggered debris flows (mudflows) - with a consistency of
churning wet concrete - that have swept down all of the river valleys that head
on the volcano. Debris flows have also formed by collapse of unstable parts of
the volcano without accompanying eruptions. Some debris flows have traveled as
far as the present margin of Puget Sound, and much of the lowland to the east of
Tacoma and the south of Seattle is formed of pre-historic debris from Mount
Rainier -- Sisson, 1995

Mount Rainier, highest (4,392 meters - 14,410 feet) and third-most voluminous
volcano in the Cascades after Mounts Shasta and Adams, dominates the
Seattle-Tacoma area, where more than 1.5 million know it fondly as The Mountain.
The Mountain is, however, the most dangerous volcano in the range, owing to the
large population and to the huge area and volume of ice and snow on its flanks
that could theoretically melt to generate debris flows during cataclysmic
eruptions. -- Swanson, et.al., 1989

To answer you question as to whether Rainier will go the way of Mt St Helens - I
usually tell people that in the short run, there could be minor eruptions that
could heat up the mountain, causing the glaciers to melt (an event that in and
of itself would be catastrophic for the region). In the long run, it is much
more likely to have an eruption like that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Phillipines,
which didn't blow up the top 1,000 feet of it's mountain. Mt. Pinatubo blew up
it's entire mountain. The eruption was ten times the size of the 1980 Mt. St.
Helens eruption. I can see that happening at Mt. Rainier, but if you want to
know when this will occur, you'll have to ask God, because it's his timetable.