A raft of dead trees has been floating on Spirit Lake for 45 years — and when the wind shifts, the whole thing crosses the lake in under an hour.
Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption stripped an entire forest off the surrounding slopes and swept it into the water below. The logs never sank: cold, low-oxygen water and their own bark and resin have kept them from rotting for four and a half decades. A University of Washington researcher’s monitoring shows the raft piling up on the north shore each spring and summer, then drifting south by autumn as the wind changes — and as the logs grind against each other, they release carbon and nitrogen that now feed a food web supporting rainbow trout in a lake the eruption once sterilized.
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So who was it that lashed all of the logs together with rope?
Not much to be learned from a video that is so short on facts.
I went Mount Saint Helens in the 80s and spirit Lake like the video says was completely covered in logs. I don’t think there was a square inch of Clearwater. It was all logs complete floating on the top.
AI BS.
What happened to real photos? ai is for ai people.
We had a vacation cabin on Spirit lake with a boat dock and boat garage and we went there every summer it was beautiful there we also went there every opening day of trout fishing and we've got hundreds of pictures of Spirit lake and at one of the boat launches they had a bunch of pumice rock from the last volcano and you throw that rock into the water and it floated
Where is this lake ?
haha, AI creates a raft with cables.
I think of things like this whenever some whinner gets on a soapbox about humans creating the ultimate Armageddon. After we destroy all human life, the Earth will bounce back. I'll bet pretty quickly. Look at the contemporary apocalyptic situations that are righting themselves, after we throw up our hands – Zebra Mussels, Wile Boars, Regenerative cattle raising (Prairie restoration) to name just a few.
There is some truth in this video. But the video portion is AI. The " raft" is of natural construction, not man made like they showed. The real " miracle " is that the fish were not planted by humans. Biologist have no idea how the fish that are there survived.
Trees are being debarred, they sent divers down to document the debris and shows some trees are sinking they sink vertically which helps explain vertical trees in coal beds.
Kinda cool.
45 years ago?!
Yeah, I guess it was …
God has a better idea about everything
Amazing how mother nature takes care of of everything!
What gets me is that the raft isn't just sitting there — it's still crossing the whole lake in under an hour whenever the wind turns, forty-five years after the eruption put it there.
It's also quietly doing work: the grinding between all those logs is releasing the carbon and nitrogen that now feeds fish in a lake that used to be sterile.
If you'd seen Spirit Lake right after 1980, would you have guessed the logs floating on it would still be feeding the lake decades later?