Mount St. Helens revisited

[Jim Eshelman]

37 years ago today, Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington, its entire northern face collapsing as it spewed an eruption column of hyper-heated ash 15 miles into the atmosphere. This spread over 11 states and much of Canada, and caused 57 deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage (almost $3 billion in current dollars).

The mundane charts were quite distinctive. Though not perfectly matching the usual volcano profile, they were quite convincing, with strong Uranus driving from front to end. (See the details in the Volcano chapter of SMA), with an angular Mars for the eruption day. I thought I'd use a "fresh look" opportunity to explore Uncle Aries' possible discovery, that parallels to the meridian in altitude are viable and important.

We get a good start on this with the chart for the moment of eruption. Though Saturn was widely foreground, a fresh look shows it 0°45' from the same altitude as IC of the event chart.

The already very good Capsolar places a stationary Mars 0°31' from the same altitude as MC. The dormant Arisolar has Pluto 0°40' from the same altitude as MC. The adequate Caplunar adds nothing new by this look.

On the other hand, the already-adequate Arilunar is weakened more than it is strengthened. Primarily a Uranus-Pluto chart already, it shows Jupiter 0°06' and Mars 0°51' from IC in altitude.

Altogether, it is as pretty good showing, and, by itself, encourages us to keep looking.

Turning back to our usual way of examining these events, the Capsolar, with a close Moon-Neptune conjunction for the world, had these two planets in mundane square to Saturn for Mount St. Helens. Additionally, the most famous "collapsed mountain face" in modern times has the exact mark of structural collapse events, a Jupiter-Uranus aspect right on the angles.

Bridging to a time of year, the overlap of Uranus' transit of Cansolar ad Capsolar angles, and the more universal transit o Neptune to Capsolar Moon and CapQ Moon square ingress Saturn. These narrowed the likely date range to April 10 to May 25.

The Caplunar had Uranus rising. The Arilunar had a foreground Uranus-Pluto conjunction tied into Moon. Besides the important Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn bridge factors mentioned above, the CanQ through Mars and Neptune to angles on the day of the event. (The details of all of this are given in SMA.)