Del: Steve, it looks like we're overlooking a lake down there,
but it’s not like any lake I've ever seen.
What has happened here?
Steve: This is Spirit Lake, north of the volcano.
At 8:32 in the morning on May 18th, 1980, a giant
earthquake occurred under the mountain,
dislodging the North Slope. And the mountain collapsed
into the lake.
Del: So, the debris from the mountain came
into the lake? Steve: Came into the lake
and deposited on the bottom of the lake
about 200 feet of deposit. Simultaneously,
it pushed the water of the lake up onto the north slope, here.
We see on the north shore of the slope
this gigantic scour deposit. So, the landslide debris lands
in the lake, pushes the water up 860 feet above
the pre-eruption level, there is scour on the slopes
of Mount Margaret. And then it went around in a circle
in this basin, right here, and created this kind
of scour vortex.
Del: And that scar vortex is what brought all that
timber down into the lake?
Steve: Yeah. So,
the logs that are in the lake were growing up on this slope.
Del: So, we had a forest here before the explosion.
Steve: Yes. Over here in the blowdown area,
the trees were just blown over. But in the scour zone —
the water scours zone — they were actually ripped loose
from the surface and they landed back in the lake.
Del: That gives you an amazing picture of the power of water.
Steve: Yes. Water... the power water to erode
a landscape is right here. We can see grooves and furrows
and you can actually see the vortex where the water went
around in a circle to make this basin in front of us.
If it can do it here, could it do it on a larger scale
like on a global flood? What would it do?
Water is able to sculpt and bevel rock with ease. And
that's what we see here, and that's what we can imagine
on a larger scale during a global flood.
Del: So, what we see here is just a small part
of what massive water can do compared to what would have
happened in a huge global tsunami.
Steve: Yes. And this is a scale model —
a little living laboratory — for the study of catastrophic
erosion of bedrock.
Del: Ah ha. Steve, these logs have been floating
for about 35 years. What have you seen over those 35
years in terms of those logs and how they float
and the action of all of them?
Steve: The logs, of course, float —
most of the logs float horizontal,
prone on the surface of the lake, and then they sink.
But we've been trying to watch how they sink to the bottom.
Half of the logs have been redeposited.
And so what we discovered is they float upright
at the surface. The root end of the log usually gets
soaked with water, becomes heavy, and sinks —
but they float in upright position.
Then we noticed that they fall and disappear.
And they stand upright on the bottom of a lake.
When I did my diving at the bottom of lake,
discovered large logs with root mass flaring out at the bottom
of the lake, just standing there as if the tree grew there
in the bottom of the lake — but it didn't.
It grew on the slopes up here. The log was ripped loose
by the water wave. It floated on the lake
a little while, probably prone and then went vertical,
and then finally fell to the bottom and replanted in
the bottom of the lake. We did sonar study of the bottom
of the lake. We had sonar contacts with hundreds
of upright logs on the bottom of the lake. There's evidence —
if extrapolated the bottom the lake — maybe there
were 10,000 logs standing vertical.
What would Spirit Lake look like if you drained it?
It would look like a forest that grew there. But, no,
it didn't grow there. It's been replanted.
And the implications of that are enormous.
Del: Steve, do these logs sink at the same time or
at different times?
Steve: We've been watching the log mat, here, for 35 years.
But we've discovered that all the different species of forest
logs do not float with the same duration.
The first logs to be deposited were the Noble Fir
the Silver Fir. And we noticed that they didn't survive very
long in the floating log mat. But the Douglas Fir —
they continued to float and they're the resin
impregnated logs that are today on the surface of the lake —
almost 100 percent of the logs, now half a million logs
that are floating there, are the remaining
Douglas fir logs. The other logs have fallen and
the Douglas Fir start falling out. So, if you think
about the bottom of the lake, there's a whole bunch
of standing redeposited trees and they've been deposited
in species stratafied layers. Del: Over time?
Steve: Over time — over the years.
Del: So, Steve, we have these trees that are sinking
at various times, sediment layers laying up —
Steve: And different types of trees sinking
at different times. OK.
Del: So, let's say three, four, five hundred years from now,
Spirit Lake is gone and someone is trying to analyze
what happened here, what would it look like?
Steve: It might look like a series of forests
that grew one on top of another.
Isn't that the natural way to think?
Here's the forest growing here today.
There's the ancient forests that grew there on the flatland
thousands of years ago. You know,
that would come naturally, wouldn't it, if we saw that?
And seeing a species stratified deposit on the bottom
of the lake… Yeah, that would imagine climate
change in an ecological succession of forests —
something like that.
Del: And that sounds a lot to me like what I used to see
in Yellowstone Park — Specimen Ridge.
Steve: Now, at the Yellowstone National Park
at Specimen Ridge, there's a sign or it was a sign
that talked about the petrified forests.
And there's 27 different layer levels superimposed
on one another. Each one of those was thought to be
an independent or a succession of forest, one on another.
And the study of the log mat, here at Spirit Lake,
has helped understand the layers buried in mud flows there at
Yellowstone. And the very beautifully petrified sequoia
trees that are standing upright don't have radiating root mass.
They're not sitting on soil. There's all kinds of interesting
tree ring correlations between logs with root ends at different
levels arguing that the trees all grew at one time
and were buried in successive layers. So,
that reminds us almost immediately —
Del: So, what we see at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone has
for years and years been viewed as a long succession
of different forests. It's very similar
to what we're seeing here.
Steve: Yes. And so Mount St. Helens provides a laboratory
for studying how species stratified logs get buried and
could be petrified like at Yellowstone.
So Mount St. Helens has enormous applications
to geology elsewhere, like at Yellowstone Petrified Forest.
Del: Well, I'd like to get a closer look at that log mat.
Can we go down there and see them?
Steve: Yeah, we have a trail down there and it is a really
good way to go. Del: All right.
It's even more impressive when we get down here.
All of these logs. They're just incredible.
Steve: A million logs floated on Spirit Lake the day
after May 18th. The lake was covered with logs.
They thought the lake was gone. It looks like a beach,
doesn't it? Del: It does.
Steve: But it's logs floating over deep water.
Del: You know, the thing that, I guess, I first noticed
when I got down here is how these things appear
to be almost milled. I mean, they're rounded —
they're smooth. What causes all that?
Steve: They floated for years — now, 35 years these logs have
been floating in this lake and they rub against one another
and they're milled. Obviously,
the big observation to make here is the bark is gone
after 35 years.
Del: Why don't we see… I mean, all this bark has been stripped
off and these logs have been milled.
Why don't we see all of that residue floating?
Steve: It's obviously waterlogged and soaked.
In 1979 I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the floating mat
model for the origin of coal at Penn State University.
What I was interested in was how a coal bed in Kentucky formed.
And as I studied the coal bed, it became evident to me
that it did not grow in place in a swamp, but that the coal bed
formed from logs rubbing and making bark — bark falling
to the bottom and accumulating sheets of tree bark underneath
a floating log mat. That was the model
that I defended for my Ph.D. dissertation.
Del: And that was before all this happened?
Steve: 10 months before Mount St. Helens exploded,
I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the floating log
mat model for the origin of a coal bed in Kentucky.
Del: And then, all of a sudden, you had one here.
Steve: And then right here at my favorite volcano, at Mount St.
Helens in Washington State, we have a floating log
mat for study. Now, it became a concrete reality,
so I had to go diving. And I had to go explore this log
mat in this unusual environment.
Del: So, are you telling me you've been down to the
bottom of Spirit Lake?
Steve: I'm trained scientific diver and I've done the dives to
the bottom of the lake — up to 100 feet.
Del: And what did you find there?
Steve: I’m looking at the bottom of the lake to see
what the sediment is like that’s accumulated there since 1980.
Well, yeah. It's as you might imagine,
it's abundant sheets of tree bark.
That's where the logs deposited their bark, is on the bottom
of the lake. The water soaked exterior of the tree rubs
against another tree and peeled off. Water soaked,
it swells, it sinks to the bottom, and you build up
this thick spongy layer of plant material called peat.
But it's formed underneath the floating log mat.
Del: Was it a thin layer or a thick layer? How thick was it?
Steve: Yeah, the organic material that accumulated under
the floating log mat was up to three feet in thickness
and over a wide area of the lake.
There was not an area like that didn't have a large
quantity of plant material. And the primary plant material
is sheets of tree bark. And it reminds me of the coal
beds that I was studying in Pennsylvania
and in the eastern United States in Kentucky, where abundant
sheets of tree bark are found in the coal bed itself. So,
the plant material that accumulated in the bottom
of this lake is very much in the texture and composition
like the coal beds in the eastern United States.
Del: So, what you're seeing here,
does it look like we have the precursor to a coal bed,
right here?
Steve: This is the first step for the formation of a coal bed.
We haven't completed the coal bed operation — we need another
volcanic eruption to bury the bottom of the lake to make
the plant material be compacted to form coal.
But we have seen the first step for the formation of a coal bed.
Del: So, let's suppose we had another volcanic activity
here and we had — what would it be, a mud flow,
then, that might come in and….
Steve: Yeah. Yeah, or another summit avalanche deposit
could very abruptly bury this. And… but… or what was down on
the bottom of Lake in 1980 that was buried?
Could that be coalified, sitting down there already? So —
Del: So do you think it can… that process can produce
coal in that short of a time?
Steve: I think it can. What we need is burial
to squeeze out the water and then we need a little
bit of heat. We don't need a lot of pressure to make coal.
But in the laboratory we can make a coal —
coaly-like substance — very rapidly, in weeks just
by compacting the water away and then generating a little
bit of heat. Internally wood generates heat
when it's sitting away from oxygen — the idea
of the hay in the barn, kind of thing. And so… but yeah,
wood can be coalified and that's known from laboratory experiment.
Del: So, all we need is a peat layer like we see
formed right here, another layer on top
to provide the pressure, squeeze out the water
and we have coal.
Steve: Yeah. My Ph.D. dissertation supervisor…
my advisor worked on the coalification of wood.
And it happens in weeks in the right pressure
and temperature situations. Doesn't take millions of years
to make coal, just a little bit of heat and pressure makes
the thing happen. And coalification is one
of the ways that wood is preserved in the earth —
fossilized, if you will. The other way, of course,
is petrification, where mineral
infiltrates the wood.
Del: So, Steve, what caused you to have such interest in coal
in the beginning?
Steve: As a kid, early age, I had lumps of coal
and I was always wondering how did the plant material get
accumulated to make the thick, hard mass that's now coal.
What was the process like that formed it? As a kid,
I was very interested in that subject
and I was looking at the glassy bands running through coal,
realizing those are solid plant fragments in coal.
What was the story that a lump of coal has to tell?
Del: And what was the story you were told as a kid?
Steve: Yeah, as a kid they told me it took thousands
and thousands of years to build up the thick spongy plant
material called peat, which was later compacted
in a swamp. And a swamp environment accumulated
and compacted to make a layer of coal.
Since the organic material in a swamp — a
freshwater swamp — is antiseptic it allows
the plants not to completely decay.
And you're able to build up this thick spongy layer of peat.
I was told it took about a thousand years to form
an inch of coal. That was the conventional explanation
for the origin of coal. And I was out there at
Penn State University in 1979 to test that particular
explanation for the origin of coal.
Del: And how did you test it?
Steve: Did the study of the Kentucky coal bed,
and I pretty much disproved the swamp theory
for the origin of coal. Well, in the explanation
and the process of going through a Ph.D. thesis and dissertation,
the university said, ‘You can't turn in a thesis
disproving a theory. You need to turn in a thesis
proving a theory or generating a new theory
for the origin of coal. So, don't tell us what's wrong with
the old theory for the formation of coal.
Generate a new theory for the formation
of coal.’ Well, the day before Christmas 1978,
I was taking a bath thinking about the plant material
and especially the tree bark accumulated in coal
and the thick layering in coal. And I was thinking about
the root penetrated, very disorganized structure
of modern swamp peats. As I thought about this,
I was playing with soapsuds and imagining logs floating
on an ocean. And I imagined an ocean full of logs and these
logs would rub against one another and the bark would peel
off and sink to the bottom. And that's what I call
the floating mat model for the origin of a coal bed.
What we see here, essentially, is the first step
for the formation of a coal bed like the coal beds in Kentucky.
And the modern swamp peats are intensely root penetrated
and create this homogenous texture that's quite different
than the coal beds that we have in the world today.
And those coal beds are better explained
by this type of environment.
Del: So, having studied what's going on here,
what would you conclude now, and help people understand
as to how the coal beds around the world might have formed?
Steve: I was told that it takes thousands of years to form
an individual coal bed and millions of years to form
the strata with multiple coal beds. Instead, I think
that coal beds and the strata around the coal beds can form
rapidly like in an ocean. And these logs could float
around in an ocean with the marine organisms and
the logs could be peeled off, bark could fall to the bottom,
and thick sequences of plant material and non-plant material,
like sand and lime sediment, could be accumulated to make
the coal layers that we see all over the world. And so, this
log mat environment is a piece of a puzzle that helps us
understand the rapid and catastrophic processes
that form coal and coal bearing strata.
And I think this helps us understand the global flood
of Noah's day and even the catastrophic process that
was going on on a colossal dimension.
Del: So, this provides for you a continual lab, doesn't it?
Steve: Yeah. So, this is a living laboratory
for the study of coal formation. And Mount St.
Helens just happened to make this laboratory for us to study.