Forest Recovering From Mount St. Helens Eruption

  • Released Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:54PM
  • ID: 10550

The 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption was one of the most significant natural disasters in the US in the past half-century. The eruption laid waste to 230 square miles. Landsat captured the extent of the destruction, with grey tones revealing widespread lava flows and ash deposits. Subsequent Landsat images over the years show the spread of vegetation recovery across the site.

Timelapse of Mt. St. Helens and surrounding area from 1979 to 2010, as imaged by Landsat satellites.

From 1979-1983 the images are shown in false-color, where red indicates healthy vegetation. From 1984-2010, the images are shown in natural-color.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight CenterImages used from NASA's Earth Observatory:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/sthelens.phpLandsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS:
http://landsat.usgs.gov
http://www.nasa.gov/landsat


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

Landsat-2 (Collected with the MSS sensor)
Landsat-3 (Collected with the MSS sensor)
Landsat-4 (Collected with the MSS sensor)
Landsat-5 (Collected with the TM sensor)

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.