On the morning of May 18, 1980, in southwestern Washington State, an earthquake on the northern flank of Mt. St. Helens released an immense landslide, a blast of superheated gas and rock, and a fifteen-mile-high plume of ash. The eruption, which killed fifty-seven people and destroyed two hundred and fifty homes, was the most destructive volcanic event in U.S. history, and when it began most Washingtonians tried to get as far away from the mountain as they could. But Jerry Franklin, then a forestry professor at Oregon State University, was already wondering how to get closer. Ecologists had plenty of theories about how natural systems reacted to large, intense disturbances; here, at last, was a chance to test them.
Less than a week after the eruption, when Franklin and several other researchers flew over the blast zone, they saw a grayscale landscape quilted with downed trees. “Our working hypothesis was that everything was totally sterilized,” he told me recently. But, in early June of that year, when they were finally able to set foot on the mountain, they saw ants, beetles, aphids, and pocket gophers on the move. Hundreds of fireweed plants were pushing up through the ash. In late July, when Franklin and a colleague took a helicopter trip to Meta Lake, just a few miles from the still-grumbling crater, their pilot caught a trout.
On a cool, cloudy morning late last month, Franklin and a group of his fellow-ecologists stood at the edge of Meta Lake. Thirty-five years earlier, many had interrupted careers, lives, and even marriages in order to turn their attention to Mt. St. Helens. They had fought Forest Service and timber-company plans to rapidly replant and reseed the area damaged by the eruption, arguing in petitions and before Congress that at least some of it should be left undisturbed for research. (Their efforts led to the establishment, in 1982, of Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.) In the years since, they had watched elk wander back into the blast zone, dogwoods grow from seeds hidden in the roots of overturned trees, and lupines sprout on the barren pumice plain, the tongue of cooled ash and rock that extends from the volcano’s crater. Every five years, they have spent several days camped together near the mountain—initially to share their results with one another, but increasingly to share their recollections with younger researchers.
This summer’s gathering began with eulogies: Jim Sedell, a Forest Service researcher who died in 2012, was one of the first researchers to visit the mountain after the eruption, and the first to sample its lakes. John Edwards, a University of Washington ecologist, who also died in 2012, had observed that spiders were ballooning into the blast zone on streams of silk, often from more than thirty miles away. (He somewhat whimsically calculated that they were arriving on the pumice plain at a rate of eight-tenths of a spider per square metre per day). Addressing the gathering, Charlie Crisafulli, a Forest Service ecologist who has studied small mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, and plants on the mountain since the eruption, remarked that he had been twenty-two when he arrived at Mt. St. Helens, and would soon turn fifty-eight. He reminded his colleagues that his office had recently purchased heavy-duty fence posts to mark research plots, and that his crew members were available to record the G.P.S. locations of study sites. “We want to make sure that we transfer this work to a new generation,” he said.
Long-term ecological research is not a glamorous field: its results unfold slowly, often over the course of several careers. For young researchers under pressure to publish new findings, it can be a difficult sell. Still, some are signing up to extend the story of an eruption that they are too young to remember. Cynthia Chang, now a professor of ecology at the University of Washington at Bothell, is one of those people. She was in graduate school when she read a paper by the University of Washington plant ecologist Roger del Moral; she moved across the country to continue and expand his decades of research on the pumice plain. “To have a thirty-year uninterrupted data set—in ecology, that’s amazing,” she told me. Joseph Antos and Donald Zobel, who study the long-term effects of volcanic ash on the forests around Mt. St. Helens, have found a successor in Dylan Fischer, a professor at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. Fischer pointed out that, even thirty-five years later, the forests are responding to the eruption in complex ways. “The only people who think all the questions here have been answered are those who haven’t looked yet,” he said.
Jerry Franklin, now in his late seventies and a professor at the University of Washington, has come to appreciate the importance of persistence. The assortment of plants and animals that happened to survive the eruption underground, or in patches of snow, has had an unexpectedly strong influence on how the forests look today. Had the cataclysm happened in a different season, or even at a different time of day, the present would be different, too; most of the tall firs now surrounding Meta Lake, for example, were young trees at the time of the eruption, and survived only because the snow was still deep enough to protect them. “We expected the story to be one of invasion, of things arriving from elsewhere,” Franklin said. “But, in most places on the mountain, there were also these incredible living legacies.” Understanding the influence of those legacies on Mt. St. Helens has changed the field of ecology, and it has changed Franklin. Even twenty-five years after the eruption, he said, he still thought of the forests around the volcano as recovering from a disaster. “Finally, I looked around and thought, ‘This place is absolutely alive. Why would I want it to recover?’ ”
