First hand accounts of Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption

Author’s Note: This part of a weekly series on geology for a class I am taking this semester at BYU-Idaho. This week’s prompt required students to interview somebody who had firsthand experience with a volcano. I interviewed my grandparents, who lived in Kennewick, Wash. when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. Other posts from this […]

Continue Reading

Earthquakes in the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Author’s Note: This part of a weekly series on geology for a class I am taking this semester at BYU-Idaho. This week’s prompt required students to find a news article, post it on our blogs and explain how plate tectonics played a role in the situation. Other posts from this assignment can be found under […]

Continue Reading

Wet year in Utah helps the Great Salt Lake

Note: Lake levels mentioned in this article are from the Saltair Boat Harbor, near I-80 Exit 104. The last time the Great Salt Lake’s surface elevation was at its historical average of 4,200 feet above sea level was in the early 1990s. At that elevation, the lake is roughly 33 feet deep at its deepest […]

Continue Reading

Warm system for Thanksgiving week

An atmospheric river is set up to douse almost the entire West Coast. Raising freezing levels today and tomorrow will aid Thanksgiving travelers the next couple of days, keeping snow off of the major passes. By midnight Monday night, the freezing level in much of Oregon will be above 9,000 feet with freezing levels remaining near […]

Continue Reading