MOUNT ST. HELENS, Wash. -- An eruption at Mount St. Helens sent a plume of white steam into the sky for about 25 minutes Friday, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes first warned an eruption was on the way.
Video from KIRO 7 Eyewitness News showed a cloud rising above the crater rim beginning just after noon.
The steam shot from the crater in exactly the way scientists had predicted, KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reported.
About 25 minutes after Friday's eruption, the mountain calmed and the plume began to dissipate.
The earthquakes quit after the eruption, said Jeff Wynn, another USGS scientist.
He called the eruption a "throat-clearing."
The eruption was so short-lived that the ash appeared to pose no threat to anyone. No evacuations were ordered, and there was no sign of any lava pouring from the volcano.
The eruption was nowhere near what happened 24 years ago, when 57 people were killed and towns 250 miles away were coated with ash.
Steam frequently rises from a lava dome in the crater of the volcano, which erupted with devastating force and killed 57 people on May 18, 1980, but it had not erupted in 18 years.
The steam cloud poured from the southern edge of a 1,000-foot-tall lava dome in the volcano's crater, where a large section of glacier had fractured and risen since Thursday afternoon.
For the past week, scientists have detected thousands of earthquakes of increasing strength -- as high as magnitude 3.3 -- suggesting another eruption was on the way.
The earthquakes quit after the eruption, said University of Washington seismologist Tony Qamar.
"That makes us think this is the end of the eruption," Qamar said. "All this buildup was leading to that relatively small eruption."
But USGS seismologist Bob Norris said magma could be moving underground and he would not be surprised to see more explosions in the next days or weeks.
"The monitoring will definitely continue on a very intense scale until we can determine that the thing has really gone back to sleep," said Tom Pierson, a USGS geologist.
Residents of the town of Cougar, about ten miles south of Mount Saint Helens, saw the cloud rise from the volcano.
But Carol Hubbel at the "Cougar Store" told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News no ash fell in the town.
Copyright 2005 by KIROTV.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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