Freesound Project

Sample :: May 18 1980 Mt. St. Helens Eruption From 140 Miles Away.wav

Is this sample illegal or abusive? Click here to let us know...

close
Reason:

May 18 1980 Mt. St. Helens Eruption From 140 Miles Away.wav
File added by daveincamas on Aug 2, 2006
please log in to download
Rating
  • Your rating:
Waveform & Preview
waveform view
Type wav, 44100Hz, 1411kbps, 16 bit, Stereo
Duration 0:43
Filesize 3.66 MB
Tags | | | | | | | | | |
  ( add tags | remove tags )
Description by daveincamas This is a truly unique recording. Several years ago I found out that I am the only person in the world who captured audio of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the volcano in Washington state. I was in high school in 1980, living in Newport, Oregon, 140 miles southwest of the mountain. May 18 was a beautiful sunny morning, and as we were eating breakfast we heard several distant "thuds" or booms. We went outside, and noticed that they were coming from the north. We had no idea what they were, and since Mt. St. Helens was so far away, we "knew" it could not be the mountain. But in the back of my mind I thought, "could it be?". So I grabbed a tape recorder and set it in a window box upstairs on the north side of the house. This recording is an excerpt of what I captured. The entire tape is about eight minutes long. Unfortunately the quality is poor, but it was the only tape recorder we owned. I started recording about two minutes after we heard the first boom. In total there were about 10 booms over a period of about ten minutes. I never did anything with the tape because of the poor quality. Also I figured that the USGS, etc. had also recorded the sound. But I found out recently that no one else made an audio recording. The booms were picked up on seismometers, but no audio was recorded. As I understand it, when the mountain first erupted it sent a low-frequency "shock wave" straight up. This wave reflected off several layers of the atmosphere, bouncing back to the ground in a large donut-shaped ring about 50 to 300 miles around the mountain. People within 50 miles of the mountain did not hear anything. I am not sure if what we heard was one "shock wave" reflected many times between layers of the atmosphere and the ground, or a series of waves. The booms are very low frequency, thus you should listen with headphones or larger speakers. On laptop speakers you probably won't hear anything. Many people who heard the booms described them as a series of "thuds". I also believe that this may be the only audio recording of this phenomena from any volcano. I imagine that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sounded similar to this (but louder). I wonder too if anyone knows of any atmospheric audio recorded from a distance greater than this (140 miles/225 km)? If you would like to study the entire recording, please contact me.
Geotag This sample has been geotagged!
25 Comment(s)

License

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

Comments

pitx
Aug 2, 2006
Mt. St. Helens eruption was really destroying. Some photos of that event in:
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/digital-gallery/index.html
FreqMan
Aug 2, 2006
wow!
daveincamas
Aug 10, 2006
Here is a description of the blast that caused this sound. Scroll about 20% of the way down the page to the section labeled "Lateral Blast": http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Publications/MSHPPF/MSH_past_present_future.html

Here is a sequence of still images of the explosion: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/Landslides/MSHSlide.html
The same images as an animation: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vesuvius/images/sthelensanim.gif

Here is what the sky looked like, 150 miles downwind (Moses Lake, Washington): http://www.grimshaworigin.org/LeahNadineGw.htm#StHelens
Note that at the time, nobody knew if this was just the beginning of something even worse. e.g. would the whole area become completely buried in ash?

Audio of one person's reflections on the impact of the eruption on Moses Lake: http://www.ccrh.org/comm/moses/reflections2.html

In Newport, we didn't receive any ash because the wind was blowing from the west on May 18. However we received a slight sprinkling of ash from a smaller eruption later in the summer.
prozaciswack
Oct 26, 2006
That is really amazing! Thanks for posting this!
spong
Dec 11, 2006
Wow a historical recording. You should put this on Wikipedia.
redjim
Feb 7, 2007
Wow, fascinating, what a valuable addition to freesound. Thanks for making it available!
daveincamas
Feb 7, 2007
You're welcome. I'm really kicking myself now for not sharing this back in 1980. Oh well. By the way, thanks to freesound this (or rather, the original raw file) is going to be on the radio tomorrow, Feb. 8, 2007. A radio show producer saw my recording here and contacted me. He did a brief phone interview and we exchanged some files. My voice plus the recording plays for about 10 seconds in a 2-minute program called "A Moment in Time". Here's the list of stations: http://amomentintime.com/stations.asp However I don't know what time of day the show airs. I think you will be able to listen to the story on their website if you sign up as a member (for free).
Sea Fury
Apr 10, 2007
I'll never forget that day. I was about 9. I live in a little town about 300 mi east of the mountain called Milton-Freewater, OR. In the mobile home we lived in at the time, my mom and I, there was a window right over my head in my bedroom. I woke up that morning, and it was the strangest-looking morning I had ever seen: the room was illuminated the way it usually was in the morning, but a glance up out the window revealed a dark sky. Puzzled, I sat up, turned and looked out the window-there was a narrow band of blue sky on the northern horizon, but from the west to the east, it was this wierd, dark, purplish-brown color. What I thought were clouds against the dark sky were actually, upon closer examination, pockets of brownish-grey hanging heavily down from one enormous cloud, just as that photo from Moses Lake shows. I ran down the hall and pounded on my mom's door to wake her up, yelling that "there's something wrong with the sky." Now, my mom was the daughter of dustbowlers, and a child of the Cold War who did the "duck-and-cover" drills in school; she had been raised on stories of deadly dust storms and twisters, and lived most of her life under fear of nuclear attack....so when she heard me yelling about something being "wrong" with the sky, there's no telling WHAT she thought. She woke up and we were down the hall into the living room like a shot, and she turned on the TV. Back then, since we didn't have cable, you could get 6 channels-3 each from Spokane and the Tri-Cities. None of the Spokane ones came through, but the ABC Tri-Cities affiliate was showing a program called "Kids Are People Too"-and there was a tape running across the bottom explaining that Mt. St. Helens had erupted. Now, the mountain had been erupting for a while, so when they said that and we noted the sky outside, we knew: THIS MUST BE THE BIG ONE. We didn't get any major ashfall, fortunately, but my great aunt in Yakima sure did. By that afternoon she said it was like the duststorms had been: black as midnight with curtains of brown pouring out of the skies. I still have some ash she sent us.
themind
Apr 24, 2007
Phenomenal - simply amazing! Thank you so much for sharing this.
HarleyNutzInId
Jul 25, 2007
I remember that day very well. One of the victims of the eruption was a young man my husband & I were acquainted with from our college days at Linfield -- Reid Blackburn -- a reporter for the Vancouver Columbian, who was on the mountain at the time of the eruption. My parents lived high on a hill near Portland, and had a birds-eye-view of the entire event. Hard to believe it is nearly 30 years now -- seems like last week.
digifishmusic
Jul 28, 2007
dave fascinating sound. Curious to extract some of the less audible sounds I have done some processing on it here -

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=38223

and here -

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=38224

digifish
SeattleMedic
Sep 7, 2007
I too will never forget that Sunday morning. I was a firefighter on duty at Bellevue Fire Department station one (97 miles away), and was outside, having just started my 24 hour shift, washing Battalion One's duty vehicle when I heard the blast. At the time it sounded to me like an electrical pole mounted transformer had blown in our response area somewhere south of the station, and I started to hurry up my task to finish before the expected dispatch of Engine One. About a minute or two later the tones went off and to my surprise two of us were sent on an unrelated aid response. Upon returning to the station 45 minutes later with Aid One, we found the rest of the crew watching the eruption on television, and it hit me what my Lieutenant and I were ear-witness to. Of the five people on duty at station one that day, he and I were the only two that heard it - a single blast - apparently because we were outside. Boring story to most, but fun for me to recall the details and share here. Jim Flick, Firefighter/Paramedic retired. I'm the one on the far right in this old picture. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/pulitzers/gay_pulitzer.html
sandyrb
Oct 8, 2007
This is a historic moment captured. It's an eerie, chilling sound - knowing what it actually is. Thank you so much for making this amazing recording available. :-)

Cheers,
Sandy.
afranzoia
Feb 2, 2008
I heard this very low sounding thud while standing in a parking lot in Lynwood, north of Seattle. It was overcast that day and you couldn't see Mt. Rainier. The USGS was monitoring the earthquake activity and everyone seemed to be on high alert that something was going to happen. It was the next day when the overcast had lifted that you could see the ash column roiling sky ward. Awesome!
csengeri
Mar 14, 2008
Did you feel the quaking during the recording? This is one very scary recording!
TheNewMrsB
Apr 14, 2008
Whoa...! Absolutely AMAZING. I have to echo Sandyrb here: "It's an eerie, chilling sound-knowing what it actually is." Thank you for sharing this nearly lost and invaluably important piece of history with us! WOW!
DaveGH
Apr 19, 2008
You have no idea how amazing it is for me to hear this. I was living in Eugene then. I remember that sound jolting me out of my sleep. I've always been a deep sleeper and, at that time, I was a college kid sleeping in on a Sunday morning after a typical Sat. night. So, you know it was powerful. I recall thinking that something had exploded in the garage next door. Only later did I make the connection. Now, after reading your note, I suspect that I didn't hear it as much as feel it. My bedroom was on the ground floor of a house with no basement. My box spring sat directly on the floor - no frame - with the mattress on top. So, I would have been in a good position to feel that shockwave bounce off the ground. Anyway, thank you very much for posting this. It's like a wormhole back to one of the most memorable moments of my lifetime.
Mexicola
Apr 28, 2008
That is incredible - thanks so much for sharing. Quite scary how ominous that sounds even 28 years later.
blowyerbrainsUK
Aug 21, 2008
I've rated it 0 for the simple reason that there is no sound. Even after downloading it there is no sound. It's not a problem with my PC because I'm using it to listen to music right now.
jus
Sep 7, 2008
Oh yes there is a sound. As noted above, "The booms are very low frequency, thus you should listen with headphones or larger speakers. On laptop speakers you probably won't hear anything."

The most astonishing sound. Transcendental almost. Thank you very much for sharing.
chrisgtrumpet
Oct 5, 2008
Wow, this is very fascinating! And to think this may be the only recording of this phenomenon when it happened! Thank you for sharing this!
waveweaver
Oct 11, 2008
Amazing... yes and eerie. Reminds me of the sound we heard a few years back when I was working at Uni of Canterbury in New Zealand and we thought there had been an explosion in the Chemistry Dept or something. Turned out to be a meteorite hitting land very close to us. No damage or injury though, fortunately. Thanks for sharing!
rockalicious
Jan 6, 2009
One of the coolest recordings I've ever heard. I agree that it sounds eerie, and that just adds to the "power" of this recording. Thanks for posting this. I'm glad you had the wherewithall to record it! Nice work!!
S.V.
Mar 24, 2009
Damn, the sound really creeps you out. U can really feel that far away, Something is happening! Something huge!
sfumato
Sep 4, 2009
Interesting that this sound effects people in a very similar fashion ...the word Fear comes up a lot..i also experienced this feeling..the feeling of your heart sinking...a mild adrenaline rush the brains way of telling you to get the fuck out of here ! run! Amazing piece of audio.Thank you

Add a comment...

close

  • You can use [b]text[/b] for bold
  • You can use [u]text[/u] for underline
  • You can use [i]text[/i] for italic
  • URL's will be automaticaly encoded so just type them as http://www.somewhere.com...

Related samples...

Users that downloaded this sample also downloaded...

  •  rbh thunder storm.wav :: (3:30) :: rain and several thunder claps. Stereo.... added by RHumphries
    small thumb | | | | | | | | | | |
    44291 downloads, 399 comments
  •  CinematicBoomNorm.wav :: (0:08) :: A distant and large boom with lots of low... added by HerbertBoland
    small thumb | | | | | |
    16173 downloads, 104 comments
  •  Earth-01.wav :: (1:45) :: Sound of the earth opening up, something like... added by Halion
    small thumb | | | | |
    2032 downloads, 5 comments
  •  evening in the forest.wav :: (2:36) :: Evening choir of black cap warbler, blackbird,... added by reinsamba
    small thumb | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
    18180 downloads, 122 comments
  •  grenade.wav :: (0:05) :: I layered several freesound sounds to get a... added by ljudman
    small thumb | | | | | | |
    18085 downloads, 46 comments

Additions in last 48 hours...

more... | RSS | 78514 files in total

Latest forum posts...

more...

Most active freesounders

more...

Most popular files (last 7 days)

13583811 downloads in total

Highest rated sounds (min. 7 votes)