Mount St. Helens

Where is Mount St. Helens?

Mount St. Helens is part of the Cascade Range.

You will find it in: United States.

Summit: 46.191° N, 122.194° W

The story behind it

Before 1980, Mount St. Helens was a nearly symmetrical, snow-capped cone often compared to Japan's Mount Fuji. Then, on the morning of 18 May 1980, an earthquake triggered the largest landslide ever recorded, ripping away the entire north side of the mountain and releasing a sideways blast of superheated gas and rock that flattened forests for many kilometres, killing 57 people and countless animals almost instantly. The eruption sent an ash cloud so high and wide that it darkened skies and dusted towns hundreds of kilometres away, and scientists studying the event learned enormous amounts about how volcanoes actually behave. Astonishingly, life returned to the blast zone far faster than experts expected: within just a few years, plants, insects, and small mammals had already begun recolonising the grey, ash-covered landscape, and today the mountain remains an active volcano, slowly rebuilding a new lava dome inside its huge horseshoe-shaped crater.

Find it on the globe

Mount St. Helens is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.