Lassen Peak Volcano essays

Lassen Peak Volcano essays For about three million years, the earth has been erupting and creating new land forms. Lassen Peak Volcano was formed about twenty-seven thousand years ago, by eruptions of magma. It was not until the 1830s, a Danish Blacksmith named Peter Lassen led the first immigrant past Lassen Peak into the Sacramento Valley. Geologists would name this mountain after him, and little did they know it would be one of the most destructive volcanoes on earth. As the largest volcano in a group of thirty domes that have erupted in the past three-hundred thousand years, throughout California, it is also the most recent to have erupted (with exception to Mt. St. Helens in 1980). Following the official exploration of Lassen Peak, in 1864 a woman named Helen Tanner Brodt made the endeavor to be the first woman to ever reach the summit of Lassen Peak. Because of her courageous effort, the geological society named a basin (tarn) in her honor. On the morning of May 30, 1914, a small phreatic eruption happened and created a new crater that is forty feet wide and one-hundred and fifty feet long. Throughout the following year, about one-hundred and fifty small and large explosions happened. By May 1915, lava flowed about one-hundred meters over the crater walls, which resulted in an avalanche of hot rock onto a snow field. This lava was a Potassium- Argon, that turned more silicic. On May 15, 1915, a dacite flow oozed down the west side of Lassen Peak and boiled for two hours. It destroyed a deep crater by filling it with lava and also created a lahar that filled Hat Creek. On May 22, 1915, an explosive eruption created pyroclastic flow and the fall of fine ash got as far as Elko, Nevada. They call this The Great Explosion because a mushroom cloud led to the pyroclastic flow that burned and shattered trees. The explosion destroyed the city of St. Pierre on the island of Martinique a ...