Eavesdropping On A Volcano

Short Wave

NPR

News, Life Sciences, Daily News, Astronomy, Nature, Science

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Volcanoes are "talking" to us all the time. Scientists say the sooner we learn to interpret their normal chatter, the quicker we'll know when something unusual — and potentially dangerous — is happening. But volcanoes often sit on protected land, so that detection work sometimes brings scientists into conflict with conservationists. Today, the tug-of-war over a sleeping giant in the Pacific Northwest.

This episode is part of our series about the science happening on public lands, dropping every Friday the rest of the summer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, my name is Hannah and I am currently in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, getting ready to
0:04.6	visit Wisconsin's High Clips State Park.
0:07.9	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:11.2	Hey, you Shortwaveers, Emily Quang here.
0:14.3	Today, we're joined by Gabriel Spitzer, our senior editor, based out in Seattle.
0:18.5	Hello, Gabriel.
0:19.5	Hey, Emily.
0:20.5	I have a little game for us today.
0:21.5	I've brought some sound and I want you to try and guess what it is.
0:24.8	Okay.
0:25.8	Whoa, that's kind of cool.
0:31.1	It's like rain drops playing the drums, you know, landing on like boom, boom, boom, boom,
0:37.5	boom, boom, boom, boom.
0:38.5	Like an army is coming.
0:39.5	I like it.
0:40.5	To me, it sounds like a chuchu, but it's actually neither of those things.
0:44.8	What you're hearing is a bunch of little earthquakes that are happening underneath a volcano.
0:49.4	And in this case, it's Mount St. Helens in Washington State.
0:53.2	It's not what you would hear if you were there and put your ear to the ground.
0:56.4	It's seismic data that's collected from these seismometers.
1:00.3	And then you can take those seismic waves and speed them up to the frequencies where
1:04.6	human beings can hear them.
	...

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