Hidden away in east Vancouver, in an unassuming red brick building nearly identical to dozens of other office buildings dotting the city’s landscape, Emily Montgomery-Brown works to unlock the mysteries of the Pacific Northwest’s volcanoes.
Montgomery-Brown recently returned from Mount St. Helens, where she co-led this year’s GeoGirls program. The program, a collaborative effort between the U.S. Geological Survey and Mount St. Helens Institute, takes 20 middle and high school girls from Oregon and Washington on a five-day, four-night trip to the mountain. There, the students explored the 1980 eruption, the hazards volcanic eruptions pose to humans, and how scientists study and monitor volcanoes.
The students also installed and monitored global satellite navigation equipment at the mountain that will help Montgomery-Brown know if the volcano is changing.
As the satellites pass over, they “send radio signals down to the antenna, and then we can triangulate very precisely, like millimeter accuracy, where those antenna are and if they’ve moved,” she said.
Montgomery-Brown is a geophysicist. Her work is far different from that of vulcanologists, who are frequently out in the field collecting rock, lava and ash samples.
“I put instruments out at the volcano and then mostly sit at my computer and look at the data,” she said.
Co-leading the GeoGirls trip is one of the few times Montgomery-Brown gets to visit the mountain. She said the program is unique in that it gives students hands-on experience collecting data and using different scientific equipment.
Montgomery-Brown first became interested in volcanoes after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines sent clouds of ash across the globe.
“When I was about 10 or 11, Mount Pinatubo erupted. I don’t think I was particularly aware of it at the time, but I definitely remember seeing these amazing orange and purple sunsets and then learning that the ash had gone all the way around the Earth,” she said.
Initially, she thought about pursuing chemistry or vulcanology, but she found that geophysics suited her better.
“I’m much more of a numbers person,” she said.
‘Likely to erupt again’
Before coming to the U.S. Geological Survey, Montgomery-Brown was a researcher at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, where she studied hydrothermal deformations at the Miyakejima volcano. As a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she studied Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.
In 2013, Montgomery-Brown joined scientists at the Cascades Volcano Observatory monitoring volcanoes in Oregon and Washington. Sister observatories in other states monitor volcanoes in California, Alaska and Hawaii. She said her work is just one piece of a larger effort to explore, understand and monitor the region’s volcanoes.
“We have a lot of different tools we use to monitor volcanoes,” Montgomery-Brown said. “The main things we’re looking for when a volcano starts to get restless — which is what I’m studying and what we did in the survey last week — is how the volcano changes shape.”
For example, if magma comes in from the bottom, “it kind of inflates the whole thing like a balloon,” she said.
She said measuring those changes could help scientists better understand and predict future eruptions. With several active volcanoes in the Cascades region, she said, their focus is on those that are the highest threat.
“Those are the ones that have erupted most recently or have the potential to be very close to city populations,” she said.
Tracking eruptions over the past 4,000 years, it’s not hard to guess which volcano has been the most active.
“Mount St. Helens is our most active historically and the most likely to erupt again. It certainly won’t be as big as the 1980 level,” Montgomery-Brown said. “But there are lots of others that are all still active.”
She said a future event will be more similar to the last eruption from 2004 to 2008, rather than the massive 1980 blast.
