Speaker 1: Everyone. It's Josh.
Speaker 2: For this week's s YSK Selects. I've chosen our January
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three episode on the Mount Saint Helen's eruption.
Speaker 2: It seems like just last year. It's a really good
Speaker 2: episode that's packed with science, action, adventure, heroics, life and death, danger,
Speaker 2: It's got it all. It's one of my favorite episodes,
Speaker 2: so I hope you enjoy it as well.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry
Speaker 2: today is our great friend and co producer Dave Sea,
Speaker 2: and the C stands for cool. Say hello Dave, Hi, everybody,
Speaker 2: that's pretty. That's a really great Dave impression.
Speaker 3: He's a troll.
Speaker 2: Yes, I always hear him.
Speaker 3: As Dave is great. I wish you all knew him,
Speaker 3: but we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have
Speaker 3: to take our word for it. That's right.
Speaker 2: Speaking of take our word for it, Chuck, I have
Speaker 2: to say to all the people who don't know much
Speaker 2: about Mount Saint Helen's, prepare to have your socks knocked.
Speaker 3: Off, or your lid blown.
Speaker 1: Or your skin seared off of your your muscle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a good one. This is I mean,
Speaker 3: this is so bread and butter stuff. You should know
Speaker 3: it is. I don't know why it took us almost
Speaker 3: sixteen years to get to it.
Speaker 2: And none of that margarine stuff are low fat. It's
Speaker 2: like full milk fat butter. Man bread and butter stuff.
Speaker 2: You should know salted butter even you like salted huh.
Speaker 2: It depends what you're using it for. I like just
Speaker 2: plain unsalted butter, even on a bread and butter piece
Speaker 2: of like bread with butter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's
Speaker 3: when it matters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I gotcha. What's your brand?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Boy?
Speaker 3: It depends. I mean I love to get the heat
Speaker 3: to be that guy, but I do love to get
Speaker 3: the local butter when we go to our farmer's market
Speaker 3: and get it from our CSA.
Speaker 1: What's wrong with that?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know. Can't you say, park Ca?
Speaker 1: Can you right?
Speaker 2: You must be a social justice warrior you buy local butter.
Speaker 3: I do you like that? What's the stuff? The Irish
Speaker 3: butter in the grocery store?
Speaker 1: That's my brand? Carry Gold?
Speaker 3: Carry Gold. That's good too, Like I've.
Speaker 2: I've researched it, like I've literally researched the butter because
Speaker 2: I want to get the most bang for my buck,
Speaker 2: and it is at the top of basically every list.
Speaker 2: It's good of like any butter of any kind, it's
Speaker 2: really really good butter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally agree. I love carry gold. I take
Speaker 3: that stuff camping.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I carried it around in my pocket.
Speaker 3: Well, I like it. You can get a tub. It's
Speaker 3: a smaller tub, but I do like a spreadable tub
Speaker 3: as opposed to a stick.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen the tub. We have a stick because
Speaker 2: we have a cute little butter dish that.
Speaker 1: We use, so we use the sticks.
Speaker 2: So anyway, back to Mount Saint Helens the episode today.
Speaker 2: I was four years old when this happened, so I
Speaker 2: mean I didn't know what was going on, but I imagine
Speaker 2: you were like, holy cow, this is one of the
Speaker 2: most amazing things I've ever seen on my TV.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was nine, and I remember it being a
Speaker 3: big deal. But it's funny when I was researching this
Speaker 3: and then watching there's a really really great thing on
Speaker 3: YouTube that I recommend that A and E put out
Speaker 3: years ago. It had to be it was called minute
Speaker 3: by minute colon. The eruption of Mount Saint Helen's really
Speaker 3: gripping stuff. As A and E used to do. You know,
Speaker 3: they probably still do that kind of stuff. But I
Speaker 3: don't know all of the media around it. I was thinking,
Speaker 3: like man, and I don't know if it was more
Speaker 3: regional or if it truly was nationwide. But I remember
Speaker 3: the eruption, but I didn't remember like the six weeks
Speaker 3: leading up to it, which was a very big deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although I think it was more of like a yeah,
Speaker 2: regional thing for this the lead up. And then also
Speaker 2: if you were a geologist, a volcanologists, a seismologist, anything
Speaker 2: that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then
Speaker 2: it would have been a big deal to you too.
Speaker 2: And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And
Speaker 2: because there was so much warning and it was able
Speaker 2: to buy it, I mean, Mount Saint Helens was able
Speaker 2: to kind of draw to it like a magnet. All
Speaker 2: of these amazingly well trained researchers. They were there when
Speaker 2: it went off, and it's probably the most best documented
Speaker 2: volcano in history because of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, because like you said, the Mount Saint
Speaker 3: Helens is basically saying it's coming everyone. Would you like
Speaker 3: to document this? Yeah, I'm telling you again it's coming,
Speaker 3: and I'll show you in lots of different scary ways
Speaker 3: that it's coming. And people left, people stayed, people came there,
Speaker 3: people like tourists came to see this thing. So for sure,
Speaker 3: let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Okay, So just a real quick refresher, we've done volcanoes,
Speaker 2: and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that
Speaker 2: sounds like us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty ten was volcanoes, twenty seventeen with super volcanoes.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in
Speaker 2: those episodes, So if you want to know a lot
Speaker 2: more in depth, go check those out. But just as
Speaker 2: a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that mount
Speaker 2: Saint Helens is. It's a stratovolcano, and it's created when
Speaker 2: one younger plate is subducted under an older plate, and
Speaker 2: as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of
Speaker 2: the Earth, all of the rocket carries with it gets
Speaker 2: heated up. Same with water too, and that stuff travels
Speaker 2: upward because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle down below.
Speaker 2: And as it gets closer and closer to the crust,
Speaker 2: it wants to pop out of there. Yeah, but it
Speaker 2: can't necessarily, sometimes it can, and when it can, it
Speaker 2: just spews out all sorts of molten lava and that
Speaker 2: builds the volcano in it kind of a cone shape,
Speaker 2: which is what Mount Saint Helens was up until May eighteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a part of the cascade arc arranged there
Speaker 3: in the Pacific Northwest. And all of this happened and
Speaker 3: you know, geologically speaking, pretty quickly. Yeah, it happened over
Speaker 3: the course of about forty thousand years in the case
Speaker 3: of Mount Saint Helens, which is pretty speedy. And Ed
Speaker 3: helped us out with this when did a great job
Speaker 3: on this article, and Ed points out that you know,
Speaker 3: in the Pacific Northwest, that's why you see so many
Speaker 3: you know, sort of coney mountains like that is because
Speaker 3: of this cascade arc and how these mountains were formed,
Speaker 3: you know, not too long ago.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe less.
Speaker 3: Forty thousand for Saint Helens, and I think the whole
Speaker 3: arc is less than one hundred.
Speaker 2: Right, So the whole thing that's driving Mount Saint Helens
Speaker 2: and apparently also there's some other I guess volcanic mountains
Speaker 2: in the area, like Adams. I think Mount Adams is
Speaker 2: one is well. Yeah, there's a there's a magma chamber
Speaker 2: somewhere under there, I think possibly miles and miles below
Speaker 2: the surface. But under normal circumstances, like I said, when
Speaker 2: a straddo volcanoes formed, the lava just kind of is
Speaker 2: able to find cracks in the crust and like it's
Speaker 2: released through there and it builds the mountain up slowly
Speaker 2: and slowly. But if there's not a crack in the crust,
Speaker 2: as in the case where Mount Saint Helens is, that
Speaker 2: magma starts to back up. It hits the crust and
Speaker 2: it starts to back up below and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden you have a lot of stuff going on that
Speaker 2: makes things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber
Speaker 3: is well is and was quite large, and like you said,
Speaker 3: it's it's looking for a place to go. But if
Speaker 3: it doesn't have a place to go, what will happen?
Speaker 3: And as you'll see, this is what happened in the
Speaker 3: case of Mount Saint Helens is it starts bulging, and
Speaker 3: like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting
Speaker 3: to see this happen, even though it's very scary and dangerous.
Speaker 3: But when a geologist sees an actual mountain start to
Speaker 3: bulge out in a direction and we're talking, you know,
Speaker 3: hundreds of feet of bulge over the course of a
Speaker 3: pretty short period of time, then it's pretty like it's
Speaker 3: a pretty notable thing. And that's exactly what was happening
Speaker 3: in the case of the magma chamber there in Washington.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like this pressure is building up so much it's
Speaker 2: causing a boil on the mountain. The mountain grows a
Speaker 2: goiter basically, and that's just full of pressure and magma
Speaker 2: just waiting to go off. It doesn't always go off,
Speaker 2: And in fact, Mount Saint Helen's had two bulges also
Speaker 2: called cryptodomes, which is pretty awesome from previous volcanic eruptions.
Speaker 2: One was called Goat Rocks bulge and then the other
Speaker 2: one was called the Sugar Bowl bulge, and they just
Speaker 2: never like the magma found its way out other ways,
Speaker 2: but the bulge was left. This is a new bulge,
Speaker 2: and like you said, it was growing I think about
Speaker 2: six feet a day. Every day it kept growing another
Speaker 2: six feet, which is really fast for a mountain to grow.
Speaker 2: And that was one of the big signs initially that
Speaker 2: something was going on. And one more thing before we
Speaker 2: started to get into Mount Saint Helens itself, Chuck, I
Speaker 2: think we need to say, like Mount Saint Helens was big.
Speaker 2: It was a big eruption, but it was not the
Speaker 2: biggest eruption Saint Helens has ever had, And apparently the
Speaker 2: biggest eruption it's ever had came just about four thousand
Speaker 2: years ago, which is within traditional like folk tale memory.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean it had been an active volcano for
Speaker 3: forty thousand years, but the big one before nineteen eighty was. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you said, for I was trying to look at
Speaker 3: a specific year, but let's just say four thousand years ago. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because once you get back that far, you know who cares?
Speaker 3: Who cares? But it became, like you said, part of folklore.
Speaker 3: The indigenous people there, especially the puyall Up people, called
Speaker 3: the mountain Lewittowit, and there was a LeWitt Brewing company,
Speaker 3: so I wanted to shout them out. This is one
Speaker 3: of those things where I thought, I wonder why, because
Speaker 3: there's been such a push to change names of things
Speaker 3: over the past like decade or so, this is one
Speaker 3: that was. It seems so like sort of egregious that
Speaker 3: we should call it LeWitt and not Mount Saint Helen's.
Speaker 3: That I'm pretty curious. I'm sure there's been pushes over
Speaker 3: the years to get it changed. But the Europeans, of
Speaker 3: course named it Mount Saint Helens in seventeen ninety two
Speaker 3: after Captain George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell,
Speaker 3: it should gave the name of it because of a
Speaker 3: diplomat name. Allan fitz Herbert didn't call it fitz Herbert
Speaker 3: Peak or anything like that because his noble title was
Speaker 3: Baron Saint Helen's, thank god. But here's the rub is
Speaker 3: that Allan fitz Herbert never even saw Mount Saint Helens,
Speaker 3: the mountain named after him. So like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe let's call this one LEWITTT Yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that's a great idea actually, And the reason they call
Speaker 3: it LeWitt that was she was named after a like
Speaker 3: a famous volcanic fire tender woman and Lewett and a
Speaker 3: couple of other men who fell in love with her
Speaker 3: and fought for her became LeWitt, became Mount Saint Helens
Speaker 3: or Lewett, if you want to call it that.
Speaker 2: And then the other the other men who were fighting
Speaker 2: for became Mount Hood and Mount Adams. They were smited
Speaker 2: by the Creator God and turned into mountains for fighting.
Speaker 2: And there's legends not just from the puyol Up but
Speaker 2: other indigenous tribes around the area that something really big happened.
Speaker 2: And it looks like what it is is a geo myth,
Speaker 2: which we've talked about before. And I think the Great
Speaker 2: Floods episode that has been handed down generation after generation
Speaker 2: that describes this enormous eruption four thousand years ago pretty
Speaker 2: good stuff, Yeah, for sure. And it was a big
Speaker 2: eruption too. There's just one other thing. There is a
Speaker 2: layer of tephra of basically volcanic ash and debris and
Speaker 2: stuff that is so thick and so wide it goes
Speaker 2: up into British Columbia and sixty two miles away from
Speaker 2: Mount Saint Helen it's still twenty inches thick, almost two
Speaker 2: feet thick of ash sixty two miles away. That's how
Speaker 2: big that four thousand year ago eruption was that's huge.
Speaker 3: And all this to say that Mount Saint Helen's, which
Speaker 3: has an s by the way, did you know that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I did.
Speaker 3: You keep saying, Helen. I just wondered.
Speaker 2: I'm being short. I don't want to take up too
Speaker 2: much time talking about certainly.
Speaker 1: That's good.
Speaker 3: That reminds me of the guy in college who fell
Speaker 3: on the sidewalk and his books splayed out and then
Speaker 3: he acted like he was reading.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that story. I forgot about him.
Speaker 3: All this to say is that Mount Saint Helen's had been,
Speaker 3: you know, active, had a long history of activity. So
Speaker 3: it's not like anyone ever thought, well, that thing is
Speaker 3: done and it's never going to happen again.
Speaker 1: No, definitely not.
Speaker 2: Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot
Speaker 2: of eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian artist
Speaker 2: named Paul Caine who painted an eighteen forty seven eruption. So,
Speaker 2: I mean, starting in the nineteenth century, Mount Saint Helen's
Speaker 2: was documented pretty clearly scientifically too, as being an eruptive volcano,
Speaker 2: a disruptive volcano.
Speaker 1: You can almost say.
Speaker 3: All right, shall we take a break. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: nice prelude, I think so too. All right, we'll be
Speaker 3: back right after this, softy.
Speaker 1: Josh so.
Speaker 3: Okay. So we got a nice background on Mount Saint Helens.
Speaker 3: It had been very active for about or on and
Speaker 3: off active for forty thousand years, including I believe the
Speaker 3: last sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven.
Speaker 3: Not too long after that, in nineteen oh eight, about
Speaker 3: a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest,
Speaker 3: which was hence renamed Gifford Pinchhot or Pinchot. I never
Speaker 3: know how to say that the Bronson Pinchot National Forest
Speaker 3: National Forest, and that was in nineteen forty nine, and
Speaker 3: Mount Saint Helens is inside that National Forest. All this
Speaker 3: is sort of a long way of saying it wasn't
Speaker 3: like super populated. It didn't have wasn't surrounded by neighborhoods
Speaker 3: and suburbs and stuff like that. But there was something
Speaker 3: or is still something called Spirit Lake there near the
Speaker 3: base of the mountain, which is they have like youth
Speaker 3: camps there, People had cabins here and there. There were
Speaker 3: recreational activities that all over the place. So it's not
Speaker 3: like no one was there, but it wasn't heavily populated.
Speaker 2: Right well put, so the whole thing starts. Actually even
Speaker 2: before the whole thing started, and I saw in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five the two volcanologists published a paper saying that
Speaker 2: it was very likely Mount Saint Helens was going to
Speaker 2: erupt in the twentieth century at some point, like a
Speaker 2: big one.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And five years later, on March twentieth, nineteen eighty, the
Speaker 2: whole thing was kicked off by a four point zero earthquake,
Speaker 2: which is nothing to sneeze at, and it was at
Speaker 2: the mountain, Like this earthquake took place at the mountain,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, within five days there were
Speaker 2: quake storms. There was twenty four quakes of four point
Speaker 2: zero or greater within eight hours. Oh man, when a
Speaker 2: volcano starts doing that and you're detecting it, that's when
Speaker 2: the geologists come running from far and wide.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So they you know, the word gets out, and
Speaker 3: they did cone running from far and wide, and they
Speaker 3: you know, set up camp there at various places. Other
Speaker 3: just sort of as I learned from watching this an
Speaker 3: e special, that there are like volcano chasers even that
Speaker 3: they hear about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I
Speaker 3: guess it's just sort of amateur geo enthusiasts. And people
Speaker 3: started kind of coming in there because they got wind
Speaker 3: that something may be brewing at Mount Saint Helen's including
Speaker 3: and this is you know, there are all kinds of
Speaker 3: people we could feature story wise, but one gentleman we
Speaker 3: are going to feature. His name was David Johnston, and
Speaker 3: he was a volcanologist at the USGS, the United States
Speaker 3: Geographical Survey, and he was one of the There were
Speaker 3: some great interviews with him in this A and E special.
Speaker 3: He was very young guy, super excited to be there,
Speaker 3: and he was one of the ones kind of sounding
Speaker 3: the alarm along with his partner and this guy named
Speaker 3: Don Swanson about hey, like you know, the s is
Speaker 3: getting real here everybody, and it looks like thing like
Speaker 3: people need to start leaving.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the thing is is there were the people
Speaker 2: who did live on the mountain were not the kind
Speaker 2: of folk who listened to like you know, the governmental
Speaker 2: net and college boys or the government to be told
Speaker 2: like leave your home. And then also there was those
Speaker 2: youth groups that were like you're going to ruin our week.
Speaker 2: At Spirit Lake, there was also Weyerhaeuser exactly, it's like
Speaker 2: a roller rink over there. And then there was Weyerhauser
Speaker 2: who had a contract to be able to log on
Speaker 2: the on the mountain. They definitely didn't want to have
Speaker 2: to shut down operations. So there's a lot of pressure,
Speaker 2: a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you
Speaker 2: would think, to keep the mountain open. And David Johnston
Speaker 2: and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like,
Speaker 2: you really can't do this, and they managed to convince
Speaker 2: the governor of Washington that it was the right move.
Speaker 2: And then later on, as we'll see, there was even
Speaker 2: more pressure to reopen because things didn't go as fast
Speaker 2: as everyone thought, and they managed to push that back
Speaker 2: as well, and as a result, David Johnston is frequently
Speaker 2: credited for saving thousands of lives. Yeah, potentially, which is
Speaker 2: pretty cool. I mean, and everything I've seen about him,
Speaker 2: he was a genuinely great person and also like a
Speaker 2: really great pioneer in volcanology too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah. They did eventually set up what they
Speaker 3: called a red zone, and a lot of people did evacuate.
Speaker 3: There were some notable people who didn't. Certainly, we need
Speaker 3: to mention Harry Truman obviously not the president, but he
Speaker 3: was this old codger who ran the lodge there, and
Speaker 3: he became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his
Speaker 3: nose and stayed and said, you know, I'm a part
Speaker 3: of this place. It's a part of me. If the
Speaker 3: mountain goes, I'm going to go with it. Art Carney
Speaker 3: played him in the movie version. He got a lot
Speaker 3: of media attention along with his sixteen cats, which is
Speaker 3: the only part of the story. Like, hey, man, I'm
Speaker 3: all for people evacuating and keep people safe, but I'm
Speaker 3: also like some old old mountain man wants to stay
Speaker 3: up there and go go down with a volcano. Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't say
Speaker 3: like I'm gonna go down and kill these sixteen cats
Speaker 3: at the same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of like being buried in like you know,
Speaker 2: medieval times and having your live horse buried with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I just I don't know. Man. Once I heard
Speaker 3: about the cats, because I was all into this guy, right,
Speaker 3: and then I heard about the cats, I was like, oh, dude,
Speaker 3: you should have at least sent the cats away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no way, not a lodge codure. So Harry Truman
Speaker 2: will come back in. This is Harry ar Truman, by
Speaker 2: the way, everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him.
Speaker 1: He'll come back in later.
Speaker 2: But so the last thing that we happened on the
Speaker 2: mountain March twenty fifth, in eight hours, there's twenty four
Speaker 2: four point zero or greater magnitude earthquakes, and that brought
Speaker 2: everybody running. This whole thing was so perfectly planned that
Speaker 2: on the day of the eruption there was the mineral
Speaker 2: and gem show in Yakima, like I think, less than
Speaker 2: one hundred miles away from Mount Saint Helens. So anybody
Speaker 2: who had anything to do with geology just happened to
Speaker 2: be in the area or was purposefully in the area.
Speaker 2: And then on March twenty seventh, it's just getting more
Speaker 2: and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this was I mean, compared to what eventually
Speaker 3: ended up happening, you could call this sort of mini eruption.
Speaker 3: Even though it sent it made a big boom. Apparently
Speaker 3: it was a pretty cloudy day so it wasn't super visible,
Speaker 3: but the ashcolumn went up sixty five hundred feet into
Speaker 3: the air.
Speaker 1: It's nothing to sneeze it.
Speaker 3: And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew
Speaker 3: to about sixteen hundred feet wide, so it was a
Speaker 3: major thing. There was another one on the twenty eighth,
Speaker 3: again throwing ash into the air. And this is like
Speaker 3: basically from that point through the big one in mid May,
Speaker 3: it was just constant warning, constant upheople, mud slides, avalanches,
Speaker 3: craters growing, and like the mountain is saying, like it's
Speaker 3: going to happen people, This is not a false alarm
Speaker 3: until things calm down. And that's what you were talking
Speaker 3: about earlier, Like things kind of settled down.
Speaker 1: On what was that like May around the fifteenth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, around the fifteenth of May to where the people
Speaker 3: got antsy that were evacuated and said, hey, listen, we
Speaker 3: want to go back and check on our stuff. And
Speaker 3: the governor eventually was like all right, I think it,
Speaker 3: you know at the time, and I think Washington still
Speaker 3: is a little bit of one of those like not
Speaker 3: quite live free or die, but you know, like all right, listen,
Speaker 3: these people pay taxes, they want to go back to
Speaker 3: their homes, sign a waiver that you're not going to
Speaker 3: sue us, and let them go back there. And that's
Speaker 3: what they did.
Speaker 1: They did.
Speaker 2: There's footage of them signing waivers on the hood of
Speaker 2: a car with some obvious state lawyer in a three
Speaker 2: piece suit of canning people a pen being like signed here.
Speaker 2: It's really hilarious, but they did. They started some people
Speaker 2: started to trickle in, and that's actually why there were
Speaker 2: you know, I think, And we ended up with fifty
Speaker 2: seven casualties. Fifty seven people died and that was one
Speaker 2: reason why it was actually that high. Could have could
Speaker 2: have been less, but people were allowed to trickle back in.
Speaker 2: They still kept like a perimeter, but I think it
Speaker 2: was kind of porous. If you wanted to get through,
Speaker 2: you could get through. And there are stories in that
Speaker 2: minute by minute episode of People. There's this one backpacker
Speaker 2: who is probably hilarious at parties because he makes like
Speaker 2: a funny a funny voice for the police when the
Speaker 2: police is talking, when he's recreating a conversation he had
Speaker 2: he's stuck through with friends. There are a lot of
Speaker 2: people on the mountain that otherwise might not have been
Speaker 2: had they kept it closed. But they did open it
Speaker 2: up a little bit, and it was because nothing had
Speaker 2: happened for a little while and then about three days
Speaker 2: later everything happened. You said, you said S was getting real.
Speaker 2: This is when the s hit the fan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this, I guess.
Speaker 3: Let's back up one half second and let you know about, OK,
Speaker 3: what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had
Speaker 3: moved from their initial base at Coldwater one, which was
Speaker 3: about I think eight or nine miles away, took their
Speaker 3: second station, which was called cold Water two, which is
Speaker 3: about five to six miles from the mountain, And notably
Speaker 3: it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which
Speaker 3: turned out to be the wrong spot to be. But
Speaker 3: you know, these guys knew what was going on. They
Speaker 3: know it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping
Speaker 3: taking shifts, and Don Swanson got the call from Johnston
Speaker 3: and he said, hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow
Speaker 3: if you come and relieve me the next day. And
Speaker 3: then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was
Speaker 3: there when everything went boom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think there have been other colleagues and
Speaker 2: grad students and everything around cold Water too, and Johnston
Speaker 2: sent them away. He's like, this is outside the red zone.
Speaker 2: It's still potentially dangerous. There's no reason for more than
Speaker 2: just one of us to be here at a time.
Speaker 2: So you guys go So at eight thirty two am
Speaker 2: on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Mount Saint Helens like blew up.
Speaker 2: And there's like a typical idea that people have of
Speaker 2: a volcano going off, and most of the time it's
Speaker 2: shooting like a huge thing of ash and magma straight
Speaker 2: into the air from its top. Yeah, but that is
Speaker 2: not what happened with Mount Saint Helens. Mount Saint Helens
Speaker 2: was a very specific and unusual type of eruption because
Speaker 2: it didn't go out of the top. It came out
Speaker 2: of the side, and it came out in what was
Speaker 2: known as a lateral blast eruption. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is
Speaker 3: building up a lot under the surface. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of moisture down there. Some of it was, like you mentioned,
Speaker 3: from that initial plate subduction, that's called magmatic water. Some
Speaker 3: of it is just regular old groundwater from rain and
Speaker 3: snow and everything. Because it is the mountains, that's called
Speaker 3: meteoric water, and all of that stuff is just heating up.
Speaker 3: It's got pressure from below because it's heating, it's got
Speaker 3: pressure from above because all of that weight of the
Speaker 3: rock is just pushing it down, and all of this
Speaker 3: magma is just like boiling under there. But I know
Speaker 3: we talked about this before. I guess it was in
Speaker 3: one of the volcano episodes. But it's not allowed to
Speaker 3: turn to steam because there's no room for it. Like
Speaker 3: steam is expansive and it can't expand So it's just
Speaker 3: this superheated, beyond the boiling point level of liquid that's
Speaker 3: just distributed all throughout the upper half and notably sort
Speaker 3: of the north side of this mountain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that created that bulge that kept growing by
Speaker 2: about six feet a day. That was what the it
Speaker 2: is because like it's as violent as as you can
Speaker 2: imagine that a bulge, and something that could make a
Speaker 2: bulge on the side of the mountain would be and
Speaker 2: sound under other circumstances, a pliny an eruption where volcano
Speaker 2: explodes out at the top, like you typically think of
Speaker 2: that pressure that magma's going to basically force the top
Speaker 2: of the mountain open and that's how it's going to explode.
Speaker 2: This is not what happened with Mount Saint Helens that
Speaker 2: kind of I guess the hump was on one side.
Speaker 2: It was on the north flank, wasn't it. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: it was on the north flank. And the thing that
Speaker 2: kicked off Mount Saint Helens eruption wasn't the volcano. It
Speaker 2: was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that earthquake
Speaker 2: caused the largest landslide and recorded history on Earth. More
Speaker 2: than half of a square mile of Mount Saint Helen's
Speaker 2: suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped off the side
Speaker 2: of the north side of the mountain.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And it's like, you should really go check out
Speaker 3: the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing,
Speaker 3: like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen, just to
Speaker 3: see this mountain and then that you know, especially in
Speaker 3: the ane thing, to see people interviewed describing like seeing
Speaker 3: this with their eyeballs. It was just like it was
Speaker 3: incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large
Speaker 3: and part of it just going away immediately.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons they were able to witness it,
Speaker 2: and we have such great documentations because at eight thirty
Speaker 2: two am, a pair of geologists husband and wife geologists,
Speaker 2: happened to be flying in a plane. Yeah, because they'd
Speaker 2: hired a plane to go look at Mount Saint Helens
Speaker 2: because they'd heard that, you know, it was there's some
Speaker 2: stuff going on, and they happened to make one more
Speaker 2: pass right as the mountain that earthquake dropped the side
Speaker 2: of the mountain. They were like right above it in
Speaker 2: a plane.
Speaker 1: As a matter of.
Speaker 3: Fact, Yeah, what's where's your quote? Should we read that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: This is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel in twenty nineteen. She said,
Speaker 3: the whole north half of the mountain that we were
Speaker 3: flying just five hundred feet above, began churning, and a
Speaker 3: mile long fracture shot across the mountain faster than our
Speaker 3: minds could absorb. The north half of the mountain just
Speaker 3: became like fluid and slid away.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 2: I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper
Speaker 2: opening along the mountain.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know, there were amateur photographers around for
Speaker 3: some of this stuff. Some of these hikers like that
Speaker 3: guy you mentioned that was telling the story and funny voices,
Speaker 3: and volcano chasers like they got some like some one
Speaker 3: guy got like twenty two pictures in a row, and
Speaker 3: this is when it eventually blew. The other guy got
Speaker 3: like six or eight pictures. There was a family camping
Speaker 3: with their two young daughters. Oh Man, and that guy.
Speaker 3: They were you know on the north side, you know,
Speaker 3: well below it, but you know, within the range. And
Speaker 3: he was like, you know, speaking to how it didn't
Speaker 3: blow from the top, he said, it looked like somebody
Speaker 3: shot a shotgun right out of the side of this
Speaker 3: mountain pointed at us. So ash was raining down, but
Speaker 3: it was raining like at people unless down from the
Speaker 3: sky right exactly.
Speaker 2: It wasn't going up and then coming back down. It
Speaker 2: was coming straight at you if you were anywhere north
Speaker 2: of the mountain.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the reason why the north of the mountain was
Speaker 2: so dangerous is because that's where that hump had been.
Speaker 2: That's also where the earthquake moved a good portion of
Speaker 2: the mountain, which meant that all that pressure that was
Speaker 2: keeping that pressurized, superheated water from boiling under the mountain
Speaker 2: was suddenly exposed. It was that pressure was gone, and
Speaker 2: so all of that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam.
Speaker 2: And when that happens, that expands, Like you said, The
Speaker 2: reason that one of the reasons steam can't exist in
Speaker 2: that situation is because it's too expansive. When it does
Speaker 2: have the chance to expand, it does so within incredible force.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's what happened.
Speaker 2: That's why Mount Saint Helens blew out the side rather
Speaker 2: than the top, because there had been a weakening and
Speaker 2: the pressure that allowed all that to just blow out
Speaker 2: and blow.
Speaker 1: Out it did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was If you look at it,
Speaker 3: it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something.
Speaker 3: It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast
Speaker 3: that you might think of in your head. It happened
Speaker 3: kind of all at once, and it was a twenty
Speaker 3: four mega ton blast, which I know everyone always tries
Speaker 3: to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was sixteen hundred
Speaker 3: times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Speaker 2: Good lord, but I mean that's what it would take
Speaker 2: to move zero point six square cubic miles of mountain
Speaker 2: all of a sudden too, you know. Yeah, and that
Speaker 2: blast chuck, that twenty four mega ton blast. It was
Speaker 2: described as like a fast moving cloud of heat in stones,
Speaker 2: moving at some points pretty close to the mountain three
Speaker 2: hundred miles an hour. He did to like six hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty degrees celsius, just blowing northward away from the mountain,
Speaker 2: and everything within eight miles of that of the mountain
Speaker 2: was in that blast zone. And if you'll recall correctly,
Speaker 2: David Johnston's cold Water to camp was within about five miles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he obviously didn't make it. They found I think
Speaker 3: they found pieces of his trailer. Like a decade later.
Speaker 3: He had time to send out one signal which was
Speaker 3: over his radio Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only
Speaker 3: person to pick that up was a Ham radio operator nearby,
Speaker 3: and they renamed that Aria Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously,
Speaker 3: Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen cats, and he
Speaker 3: was close enough to where I saw that. They said
Speaker 3: that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized,
Speaker 3: Like he wouldn't have felt anything. It would have happened
Speaker 3: his death, and vaporization would have happened in like less
Speaker 3: than a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have the impression the same thing happened to
Speaker 2: David Johnston, and also that Ham radio operator who was
Speaker 2: volunteering to kind of document it he documented David Johnston
Speaker 2: getting covered up. He said, he said, gentlemen, the camper
Speaker 2: and the car that's sitting over to the south of me.
Speaker 2: He was talking about David Johnston is covered is going
Speaker 2: to hit me too. And that was Jerry Martin, that
Speaker 2: Ham radio operator and that was his last transmission. He
Speaker 2: was vaporized as well. Essentially everything everything north of the
Speaker 2: mountain within eight miles was just destroyed, just destroyed, like
Speaker 2: entire one hundred foot trees that were like ten twelve
Speaker 2: feet in diameter just completely flatten and also denuded.
Speaker 1: Of any bark on the way as well.
Speaker 2: And this was just a blast that the landslide that
Speaker 2: was created from the earthquake that initially triggered the eruption
Speaker 2: that had in some incredible effects as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because what you've got, you know, beyond this avalanche happening,
Speaker 3: is you've got all of a sudden, all this heat
Speaker 3: happens in a place where there's a lot of snow,
Speaker 3: so that snow melts, all that glacier ice melts, and
Speaker 3: you have flooding and you have mud slides, and you
Speaker 3: have a word that I had never even heard of before.
Speaker 3: Ed included it in here, which was Lahar, which sounds
Speaker 3: like just a mud slide on steroids. Yeah, like a
Speaker 3: mudside carrying ammunition with it. And this is just raining
Speaker 3: down everywhere and like causing a path of destruction that
Speaker 3: hasn't been seen in like modern times in this country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like it had so much power chuck
Speaker 2: that slide did that one part of it was carrying
Speaker 2: chunks of rock as big as five hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: eight feet or seven hundred and seventy meters across. Wow,
Speaker 2: that's as big as a fifty story building. It was
Speaker 2: moving rocks that size just fast as you can imagine,
Speaker 2: down the mountain into the valleys. And I saw it
Speaker 2: described as if you were watching it from a ridge,
Speaker 2: as some.
Speaker 1: People were, like far away.
Speaker 2: You would see the cloud the debris starting to come
Speaker 2: at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, it would come up over the
Speaker 2: ridge and keep going. It was just filling valleys with
Speaker 2: rocks and debris. It's just it's unimaginable trying to grasp
Speaker 2: what happened. And it's even crazier that some people were
Speaker 2: actually there watching this happen.
Speaker 3: Crazy.
Speaker 1: It is crazy. You want to take a break.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit
Speaker 3: more about the after effects right after this.
Speaker 2: Okay, and we're back, And as Chuck promised everyone, it's.
Speaker 1: After effect time.
Speaker 3: Well, we talked a little bit about it. Obviously, Spirit Lake,
Speaker 3: which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the
Speaker 3: base of the mountain, has a very strange effects on
Speaker 3: bodies of water. It did two things. It made the
Speaker 3: lake larger, but it also made it shallower, because it
Speaker 3: just flooded all this water down there and raised it
Speaker 3: such that the outlet was basically dammed up, and so
Speaker 3: the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced
Speaker 3: its depth by about eighty feet. I think five years
Speaker 3: later they built a spillway tunnel to control the depth
Speaker 3: of the lake. Two hundred homes and cabins and about
Speaker 3: two hundred miles of road and railways were completely obliterated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also saw that lake was now two hundred
Speaker 2: feet higher in elevation than it had been before, as
Speaker 2: if like there was so much debris it like raised
Speaker 2: the lake two hundred feet, even though it also made
Speaker 2: it shallow or it's nuts.
Speaker 3: And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount
Speaker 3: Saint Helens.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I can't remember. I think by like six
Speaker 2: hundred meters or something like that. Some ridiculous amount of
Speaker 2: height just blown off. And that was another thing too,
Speaker 2: like the after effects of it. If you look at
Speaker 2: Mount Saint Helens today or especially like right afterward, it
Speaker 2: turned into like an amphitheater. Yeah, like the north side
Speaker 2: was blown out and the other sides were kind of
Speaker 2: curved around and what was neat is one of the
Speaker 2: huge after effects of Mount Saint Helens. One of the
Speaker 2: more positive ones is I saw it described as like
Speaker 2: a crash course for volcanologists, Malls and everybody who are
Speaker 2: now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in,
Speaker 2: and that the eruption, because it was the lateral blast,
Speaker 2: opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain
Speaker 2: that they could study. Now it's past history from the
Speaker 2: inside out, which I thought was pretty neat.
Speaker 3: And a young tray Anastasia said, one day I shall
Speaker 3: play at the bates of that amphitheater. Oh did he
Speaker 3: and bore people with noodling on.
Speaker 1: My guitar they played there?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there.
Speaker 3: I was just kidding.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that was just completely made.
Speaker 3: I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish.
Speaker 1: I'm with you.
Speaker 3: So ash is raining down and out. It literally darkened
Speaker 3: the skies. When this ash, if you were close enough
Speaker 3: to it, it would literally burn you alive. If you're
Speaker 3: far away, it can just create a lot of problems,
Speaker 3: everything from you know, just equipment not working, electrical ottages
Speaker 3: and blacks and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. As
Speaker 3: far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out by
Speaker 3: this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them did
Speaker 3: a little bit better because they just got a little
Speaker 3: bit of the ash and it ash will help promote
Speaker 3: rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently
Speaker 3: wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was surprising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also saw and there was a lot of devastation.
Speaker 2: Any big game animal in the blast zone was I said,
Speaker 2: big game animal, by the way, was in the blast
Speaker 2: zone was killed without question. But they they were very surprised.
Speaker 2: Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found there
Speaker 2: were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and plants, microbes,
Speaker 2: fungi that had survived just fine. And we're among the
Speaker 2: first to recolonize, and we're part of the reason why
Speaker 2: Mount Saint Helen's ecosystem started to bound so quickly.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's what'll happen, right if the Earth ever
Speaker 3: just burns up into a fiery ball, that'll just become
Speaker 3: a big mushroom field, right.
Speaker 2: Probably, and then the animals that lived underground will come
Speaker 2: above ground and say it's our.
Speaker 1: Time, baby. I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 2: For some reason, what else happened? Oh, I saw that
Speaker 2: the ash cloud that blew finally out of the top.
Speaker 2: We should say that the lateral blast was followed by
Speaker 2: a plinium blast, and that shot, like you know, that
Speaker 2: was the money volcano shot that everybody was looking for.
Speaker 2: A plume of ash and smoke rose eighty thousand feet
Speaker 2: into the air, and it was moving so fast that
Speaker 2: it circled the globe in fifteen days, came back to
Speaker 2: square one in fifteen days. And of course that was
Speaker 2: like affecting air traffic. Do you remember that icelandic volcano
Speaker 2: that affected air traffic in Europe for like weeks?
Speaker 1: Yeah, weren't you stranded by that or something. No, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Okay, It like they knew what to do in part
Speaker 2: because of how Mount Saint Helen's affected air travel at
Speaker 2: the time. They were like, this is brand new to us,
Speaker 2: but it helped lay the ground work for understanding what
Speaker 2: to look for, how to deal with that kind of
Speaker 2: stuff later on.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The the other thing I wanted to point out
Speaker 3: too about Spirit Lake was if you look at footage
Speaker 3: of the lake and now these kind of rivers that
Speaker 3: were just happening, and it literally like re routed you know,
Speaker 3: the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, but
Speaker 3: it looks like it looks like a logging operation is happening. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and like you could almost and may have been able.
Speaker 3: Well obviously it's been too dangerous, but it looks like
Speaker 3: you could have walked over these logs. They were so
Speaker 3: like packed and these were just trees, you know, an
Speaker 3: hour before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you could do that lumberjack log rolling thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could have probably made it across the light.
Speaker 1: We could have, but they're in that minute by minute.
Speaker 2: But so there was a pair of like high school
Speaker 2: sweethearts who've been camping. Yeah, and they had a harrowing
Speaker 2: experience because they both got thrown into Spirit Lake and
Speaker 2: the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend is like
Speaker 2: the logs were starting to close in on him. He
Speaker 2: pulled her out from the lake and they were hanging
Speaker 2: on to logs when they finally made it out and
Speaker 2: were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody.
Speaker 3: They were in their car.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's how they got in the lake. They were
Speaker 1: in their car. Yeah.
Speaker 3: They said it just picked them up and all they
Speaker 3: were driving and then they were floating and they said
Speaker 3: that they're you know there, she said, like my instinct
Speaker 3: was to get out of the car, but there was
Speaker 3: like nowhere to go.
Speaker 2: Right yeah, because there were trees everywhere floating around beside them.
Speaker 3: Right yeah. And this is you know, these are just
Speaker 3: sort of That's what's so cool about the special is
Speaker 3: it really brought in the human element of these people
Speaker 3: that were around there, right and they you know, they
Speaker 3: all survived because they were being interviewed. Obviously Dorothy Stoffel,
Speaker 3: who was the geologist that was flying. I guess was
Speaker 3: her husband Keith or was that her brother her husband Keith?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Okay, they survived that plane flight like they got out
Speaker 3: of there. There were stories of people that literally it
Speaker 3: was like it from a movie, drove, you know, one
Speaker 3: hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running this
Speaker 3: ash debris slide coming out right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some people didn't make it. So there was
Speaker 2: one guy who was chronicled in that that was driving
Speaker 2: as fast as he can in the blasts just caught
Speaker 2: up with him and buried him in the in the
Speaker 2: ash and he probably died pretty much instantly. But like again,
Speaker 2: that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a
Speaker 2: house just flowing down like a newly engorged mud slidey river,
Speaker 2: moving so fast that you probably could have towed water
Speaker 2: skiers from the house. Essentially, it was moving that fast
Speaker 2: just down the river. So I mean again, it was
Speaker 2: one of the most doc documented volcanic eruptions of all times.
Speaker 2: So there's really amazing footage on there or just on
Speaker 2: the internet, is what I mean. But that wasn't the
Speaker 2: last time that Mount Saint Helens has erupted. I think
Speaker 2: it erupted a few times between nineteen eighty and maybe
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six, I think, yeah, and then the biggest
Speaker 2: one recently was between two thousand and four and two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it started sort of getting a little more active
Speaker 3: again this time though. You know, one of the things
Speaker 3: that to the benefit of the surrounding area when a
Speaker 3: volcano blows like that is that pressure is released and
Speaker 3: it's going to take a long time to build back
Speaker 3: up to that level again, kind of depending on how
Speaker 3: it reforms on top of it. But this time, apparently
Speaker 3: there are there are more ways for this pressure to
Speaker 3: be released. So I think it's just sort of the
Speaker 3: pressures being released a little more gradually since the two thousand.
Speaker 1: And four that's my impression too.
Speaker 3: But they do say that like, oh no, like it
Speaker 3: will happen again, like things are there is a new
Speaker 3: lava dome growing, and the pressure is going to build up,
Speaker 3: and it could be in a thousand years or it
Speaker 3: could be in ten years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just don't know.
Speaker 3: Now, but they are studying it. Like there there's a
Speaker 3: lot of active research and study going on at Mount
Speaker 3: Saint Helens now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe, you know, the eruption was such a
Speaker 2: big deal that they've opened the USGS opened a research
Speaker 2: station nearby, and also that two thousand and four activity
Speaker 2: basically ran from two thousand and four to two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight. Like you said, they've been studying the mountain closely.
Speaker 2: So there's amazing time lapse footage of those four years,
Speaker 2: and it's astounding how fast and how big Mount Saint
Speaker 2: Helens just grows from that eruption activity called time lapse
Speaker 2: Images of Mount Saint Helen's dome growth. It's on YouTube
Speaker 2: and I recommend checking that as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just be careful when you google dome growth.
Speaker 1: Or bulge growth.
Speaker 3: Oh boy.
Speaker 1: So man, we are so juvenile sometimes, aren't we?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: And by we I mean me?
Speaker 3: No, me too.
Speaker 2: But like we said, Mount Saint Helens bounce back, Spirit
Speaker 2: Lake open back up and the cold Water two station
Speaker 2: has been renamed after David Johnston and there's an amazing
Speaker 2: memorial too. I saw on some trip Advisor post that
Speaker 2: somebody so that it was like the one of the best,
Speaker 2: like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that
Speaker 2: the person's ever been to.
Speaker 1: So I would like to go there, Right, You got
Speaker 1: anything else?
Speaker 3: I got nothing else? All?
Speaker 1: Right, we go.
Speaker 2: Forth and research Mount Saint Helen's with an S. And
Speaker 2: you can start doing that by watching Dante's Peak. Since
Speaker 2: I said Dante's Peak, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3: This is following up on an email that you particularly
Speaker 3: from our spectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly enjoying the most
Speaker 3: recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius. Megal, do you
Speaker 3: want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect I'm
Speaker 3: going to bring Migal back every now and then. By
Speaker 3: the way, I just want to prepare you in the audience.
Speaker 3: I wanted to address a couple of eighteen hundred's diction
Speaker 3: issues that cause some puzzlement when you got talked about
Speaker 3: toilet It's basically what Josh said. I've always thought of
Speaker 3: it as a refreshing as freshening up in the bathroom,
Speaker 3: washing her face and hands when first waking up or
Speaker 3: going to bed. I double check with Merriam Webster, though,
Speaker 3: and it's more generally dressing and grooming.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. On the other hand, the strangers in the
Speaker 3: beverage from the toll House is a lot more puzzling. Yes,
Speaker 3: I had no idea what it meant. And although Josh's
Speaker 3: guess that beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't
Speaker 3: really make sense, just as a reminder, the sentence is
Speaker 3: talking about some men drinking tea in an inn and
Speaker 3: pausing to quote discover the sex and dates of arrival
Speaker 3: of the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the
Speaker 3: beverage end quote. I think I found the answer, though, guys,
Speaker 3: in a dictionary of Scottish dialect. We love this stuff.
Speaker 1: By the way, yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 3: Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are
Speaker 3: considered omens that you will meet someone new, So these
Speaker 3: tea leaves are called strangers. If you pick up a
Speaker 3: stranger and bite it, the toughness will tell you whether
Speaker 3: the new acquaintance will be male or female. Amazing, amazing.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna guess there's also a way to predict the
Speaker 3: date you meet this person, although I didn't see reference
Speaker 3: to that. So that's what the characters are doing, guys,
Speaker 3: using tea leaves to predict the future. By the way,
Speaker 3: other omens can also be strangers, like unburned candlewicks or
Speaker 3: soot on grates. I've loved the show for years, look
Speaker 3: forward to many more. That is a great email. Nat
Speaker 3: Jacob's fantastic sleuthing yep, and we are super grateful.
Speaker 2: Top to bottom, start to finish. Wonderful email. Also just
Speaker 2: put so nicely too, not like you big dummies, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess.
Speaker 2: But I mean that was really hard like you. That
Speaker 2: was obscure, you know very much. Anyway, I love knowing
Speaker 2: that now. That was one of my favorite emails. So
Speaker 2: thanks a lot, Nat, And if you want to be
Speaker 2: like Nat and get in touch with us in the
Speaker 2: best way possible, you can send us an email to
Speaker 2: Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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