Bush's secret plan to "get" Ralph.

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Oregon assesses The Bulge

Curious growth on South Sister volcano hasn't sent out any eruption signals yet

Saturday, May 19, 2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By JEFF BARNARD THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SISTERS, Ore. -- At the Epicure Exchange Internet coffeehouse, it's hard not to get into a discussion about "The Bulge."

Anyone looking through the windows to the west gets a spectacular view of South Sister dominating the snowcapped skyline of the Cascade Range, rising above this mountain crossroad.

Inside, the latest U.S. Geological Survey updates on the curious bulge growing on the dormant volcano's flank can be called up in an instant on a computer terminal.

"It's a big hoopla in town right now. Everybody's talking about it," said coffeehouse owner Jeannine Smith, who moved her family to this picturesque town of 850 people just to be closer to the majestic volcanic peaks that tower above it.

"It doesn't scare me," Smith said. But she added: "It is something to be considered."

About a dozen USGS scientists are considering it very carefully.

Because the radar satellite images that spotted the bulge can only be taken once a year, a team of scientists plans to fly in to The Bulge in a helicopter next week to set out instruments to see if it is still growing.

"It is clearly not a crisis we are responding to, as if we were having swarms of shallow earthquakes or anything of that nature," said USGS geologist Dan Dzurisin, referring to the telltale signs of an impending eruption.

But even though it shows no danger signs, the bulge "is scientifically the most interesting target we have in the Cascades right now," Dzurisin said.

Ever since Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, the general public has been sensitive to any rumblings in the Cascades, a string of volcanoes stretching from British Columbia to Northern California.

And given the city of Sisters' dependence on tourism for the local economy, one thing a lot of people are wondering about is whether The Bulge becomes boon or bane, drawing more visitors or sending them away.

At the Epicure Exchange, barrista Karen Mills isn't worried. She has loved these mountains all her life. But she figures there is little to worry about, since The Bulge is about 20 miles away, on the other side of the mountain, and pointed down into the Willamette Valley.

"It's very cool, and it's going to spark a lot of interest," she predicted.

When the USGS announcement of The Bulge hit the newspapers, Nate Turner, who works at The Flyfisher's Place, got a call from an East Coast flyfishing pal with a second home in Sisters who read about The Bulge on the train to New York and immediately called on his cell phone to see what was up.

"I told him I'd throw a sprinkler up on his roof if something was really going down," said Turner.

Turner knows a little more about the local volcanic activity than most of his neighbors. In eighth grade he did a report on a USGS laser survey of South Sister to establish a network of benchmarks to monitor just this sort of thing.

The work was done by the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory in 1985, shortly after it was established to keep a closer eye on the Cascades, said Dzurisin.

When it was resurveyed in 1986, the bulge hadn't shown up yet. But when a new technology, radar satellite imagery, was trained on the South Sister, The Bulge came into startling view.

Volcanologists began using the European Space Agency's Interferometric Satellite Aperture Radar satellite, known as InSAR, in 1991 on Mount Etna in Italy.

Two months ago, USGS geophysicist Chuck Wicks was in his office in Menlo Park, Calif., going over some InSAR images of South Sister, when the bulge popped out at him in a bullseye ring of rainbow colors on his computer screen.

An Oregon native, Wicks had hiked through the Sisters Wilderness and made a mental note that the open landscape and past volcanic activity on the west side of South Sister made it a good candidate for InSAR. The most recent eruptions were small, spitting out glassy rhyolite and obsidian about 1,500 years ago, and oozing basalt about 2,000 years ago.

Wicks compared a digital image of the west side of the volcano taken in 1996 with one taken in 2000, and the computer revealed a rise of four inches spread over a 10-mile diameter in the headwaters of Separation Creek.

It is too soon to tell exactly what is going on, but the best guess is that a relatively small amount of magma is moving about 12 miles underneath the surface. Wicks is hoping that the InSAR satellite holds out long enough to give another image this summer, when the snow is gone.

In the meantime, scientists had to get a special permit from the U.S. Forest Service to fly into a wilderness area to install a very sensitive global positioning system monitor and a seismometer.

InSAR has detected lots of bulges on volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, and none of them has led to an eruption.

That would be fine with Jim Wills, who has a view of South Sister over his shoulder when he is setting out tubs of strawberries and blackberries at Richard's Produce stand.

"I remember Mount St. Helens," he said. "I don't want to see that around here."

-- (Dumby@Fucks_up.again), May 21, 2001

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