Next Mount Rainier Explosion Will Drown Greater Seattle In A Gigantic River Of Hot Mud

Next Mount Rainier explosion will trigger a gigantic lahar that will bury Greater Seattle in a huge river of mud - Strange Sounds

The next Mount Rainier explosion will trigger a gigantic lahar that will bury Greater Seattle…

Strange Sounds

Poor Seattle can’t catch a break.

By Strange Sounds

It is prone prone to giant earthquakes and even more terrible, the entire Greater Seattle is at the risk of being buried under a sea of hot mud.

mount rainier eruption lahar bury seattle, mount rainier eruption lahar bury seattle video, mount rainier eruption lahar bury seattle map, mount rainier eruption lahar bury seattle pictures, lahar rainier map — Mount Rainier and Tacoma, WA. Mount Rainier could bury Seattle in mud after eruption triggers catastrophic lahar. Picture by USGS

We’ve already covered how the mild-mannered city of Seattle is particularly prone to giant earthquakes… But it actually gets worse…

The area lies downstream from Mount Rainier, which carries the questionable honor of being one of the most dangerous volcanoes in existence.

Lahar not lava

However, this particular danger doesn’t come from soot and magma. Sure, there would be some if it was to erupt, but that would be just the icing on the horror cake.

The true killer would be a lahar, whose nerdy name betrays its potential for destruction. Lahars are giant flows of hot mud, trees and water, rolling forward with the consistency of a zillion tons of wet cement and at speeds up to 60mph.

mount rainier greatest dangers are lahars — Mount Rainier greatest harzards are lahars. This map features lahar pathways from events heading on Mount Rainier – map showing three major events from last 10,000 years. Map by USGS

600 Feet Lahar

Urban Seattle could be facing a Lahar as tall as 600 freaking feet. How do we know? Because it’s happened before!

Around 5,000 years ago, a giant lahar called the Osceola Mudflow filled a part of Puget Sound with three cubic kilometers of hot, steamy, gooey mud. What was once a pristine sea was, in a matter of hours, suddenly 200 square miles of new land.

For comparison, the disastrous 1985 Nevado del Ruiz lahar that killed 25,000 people in Colombia only had 2.5 percent of the volume of the Osceola Mudflow.

Lahars doesn’t need a volcanic eruption?

A lahar detection system was installed in 1998, but it remains loose and incomprehensive.

To make matters worse, these mud tsunamis are a right bastard to detect.

A lahar doesn’t need a volcanic eruption as an excuse to kick in. A sector collapse or some magma leakage could be enough to send a mudnami the size of Godzilla into Seattle.