Journey to Novarupta (HD)

Today I saw a sight no human being has ever laid eyes on, a region in the great Alaskan wilderness laid bare by a volcanic eruption. The utter devastation will make further exploration difficult. My team and I are running low on supplies.

This evening I have left base camp alone to do some scouting. I have not seen an animal or any living creature since entering the blast zone. Tomorrow we hope to send an expedition out from the base camp.

I am overwhelmed by the amazing power of one volcano to completely change the entire landscape. We have pitched our tent away from the danger of avalanche from the rocks rolling off the mountains around us.

This is such a harsh environment. I know danger is a constant concern, but we are determined to press on. I hope the words on the pages of this journal inspire future generations to explore this amazing place.

Some adventures are inspired by fame or fortune, and some by the pursuit of knowledge. But I've had the privilege of following in the footsteps of a man whose discoveries show the glory of the creator.

My name is Kenny Cole, and this is my story.

The 1912 Katmai Eruption and the Fear of Those Nearby

On June 1st, 1912, earthquakes were beginning to rock the little Indian village settlement of Katmai village. Soon families from this area would flee for their lives. The village was located on the Alaskan peninsula across from Kodiak Island.

Late in the evening on June 5th, observers at Cold Bay, 40 miles to the southwest, saw that the northern sky had turned black. Something big was about to happen.

First of all, I will let you know of our unlucky voyage. I do not know whether we shall be either alive or well. We are awaiting death at any moment. Of course, do not be alarmed. A mountain has burst near here, so that we are covered in ash, in some places 10 feet and 6 feet deep.

All this began on the 6th of June. Night and day we light lamps. We cannot see daylight. In a word, it is terrible. And we are expecting death at any moment. And we have no water. All the rivers are covered in ash.

Just ashes mixed with water. Here are darkness, hell, and thunder, and noise. I do not know whether it is day or night. Vanka will tell you all about it. So kissing and blessing you both. Goodbye. Forgive me.

Perhaps we shall see each other again. God is merciful. Pray for us.

This letter from a native fisherman named Ivan to his wife demonstrated the fear of those living in the area. Kodiak Island heard the blast and saw the ash cloud from a hundred miles away. Ash fell for three days covering the area.

Another native living nearby, known as American Pete, reported,.

Mount Katmai blew up with lots of fire. And fire came down the trail from Katmai with lots of smoke.

He and a few others immediately fled the town of Naknek. Some fleeing from Katmai village arrived in little boats filled with ash and pumice from the eruption that began on June 6th. They told stories of how they'd escaped hot rocks being hurled down from the sky.

The darkness in Kodiak was so thick during the day of June 8th, it was impossible to see a lantern held at arm's length. The people of Kodiak Island were overcome with fear because they knew the horrible stories of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius on Pompeii.

On the afternoon of the 8th, they boarded the ship Manning and headed out to sea. The boat anchored outside the harbor, and with 500 people on board, there was hardly room to stand or move around. There they stood on the deck of that ship, hungry, thirsty, and scared for two days.

People in Juneau, 750 miles away from the volcano, heard the eruption about an hour after it occurred. Nobody knew what was happening. For two and a half days, tall, dark columns of ash and poisonous gases spewed into the air.

Back on the peninsula, a river of superheated gases, ash, and volcanic material flowed from Nova Rupta, instantly killing all life for over 50 square miles and flattening the valley into a wide plain.

Volcanic deposits averaged 656 feet thick in some places. Because of the remote location and the harsh wilderness left behind, Nova Rupta lay unobserved by human eyes for almost three years. That changed in 1916 when National Geographic sent in a team led by a Christian man by the name of Dr. Griggs.

Dr. Robert Fisk Griggs was born in 1881 in Columbus, Ohio. He was the son of the engineer who built the Griggs Reservoir and Griggs Dam. He attended both Ohio State and Harvard. Later, Dr. Griggs was a professor of botany at the University of Ohio.

The Griggs home was described as a citadel of Christian values based on love, fidelity, and truth. At the time of the eruption, he'd been doing a study of kelp along the Katmai Coast. Wanting to study how plants would recover after a catastrophe like the volcanic eruption, he assembled a team of explorers.

In total, Griggs led three expeditions funded by National Geographic. Their team faced many dangers like quicksand, pumice storms, and a treacherous climb up the caldera of Mount Katmai. Once in the middle of the night, high winds destroyed their base camp and lifted Griggs into the air only to drop him further down the valley as the rest of the team fled for safety below.

During their expeditions, Griggs and his team, sometimes including his wife Laura, documented the events of the eruption and mapped out the area. Their missions were such a success that Gilbert Grosvenor, the president and chairman of National Geographic at the time, said,.

Every member of the organization may thus derive considerable satisfaction that he or she has assisted to bring about such important additions to our knowledge of the young and active planet upon which we live.

Later, scientists would determine that Nova Erupta was 30 times more powerful than the eruption of Mount St. Helens and three times more powerful than Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. As a botanist, Griggs lacked some of the expertise required to explore and understand a massive volcanic eruption.

However, he more than made up for this by surrounding himself with a team of experts. Griggs also took a central role in having the Katmai region made into a national monument in 1918. Dr. and Mrs. Griggs had four children.

On a 1919 expedition, Mrs. Griggs named four waterfalls in Katmai Valley after the children. Dr. Griggs compiled the data, images, and stories of their expeditions into a book published in 1922 by the name of The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

While that book had a profound impact on many at the time, God had an even bigger plan for that book almost 90 years later. Fast forward to present day with another team of adventurous explorers. Completely unaware of the expeditions led almost a century earlier by Robert Griggs, they had no idea that his work was about to radically change their lives.

One of these adventurers was Kenny Cole.

I guess I need to begin by introducing my stepdad, Dr. David Shoreman.

Hi, my name is Dr. Shoreman and I'm a scientist, I'm a natural history researcher as well, and I do research on volcanoes, particularly Nova Repta volcano.

Growing up with dad can be summed up in one word, adventure. We were always going on an adventure, never just a trip.

Dr. Shoreman, his family and friends have done everything from fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, to conducting marine science camps for homeschoolers, to seven day raft trips on Alaska rivers, to hiking through places no one has been in over a hundred years.

Throughout these adventures, I learned that dad's love of God and his amazing creation drove him to learn more about God and his word by studying creation.

Dr. Shoreman's background is in science and engineering, including a PhD in aquatic science. He first started doing Alaska science adventure camps in 2002 on Lake Creek. The main purpose of these camps was to study God's creation while having an awesome adventure and doing lots of fishing.

The camps were very popular and had many people returning each year. So he decided to take it to the next level and go to a more remote part of Alaska, which is how I came to a place called American Creek.

We were in training for an adventure beyond our wildest dreams.

American Creek winds 36 miles through Katmai National Park in Alaska, flowing out of Hammersley Lake and through alpine forests and canyons. Dr. Shoreman took groups of friends there in the summers of 2006 and 2007 to go fishing.

They were dropped off at Hammersley Lake and rafted down American Creek, stopping to fish and camp along the way.

The team we had was about eight people. And so everybody kind of had their own character and personality that added to the camaraderie of the trip. Then everybody also had their strengths and weaknesses and tools that they had brought that somebody else had forgotten.

And so it was cool to get everybody together and realize that the sum of the parts is greater than the total. And we're able to accomplish a lot more than we would have individually.

And so everyone's always excited and willing to help, whether it's a beautiful sunny day and we're all, you know, helping each other catch fish or whether, you know, it's pouring down rain and, you know, someone gets their tent set up first.

And so they're over helping everyone else set up their tent.

In addition to just sitting back and observing the creation was the fishing was absolutely incredible.

It was such a thrilling adventure to be able to raft down this wild river and take on rapids and bears and never knew what you're going to find.

Although it was summertime, it's Alaska, so it's cold and it's wet. You would have to have a mindset that says, I'm going to be a little bit cold today and I'm going to be wet most of the day, but that's OK.

We're not going to be perfectly physically comfortable, but we're going to have a great time. And we did have a great time and it was well worth it.

While at American Creek, there were several memories, ones worth writing down.

We spotted our first bear today. Everyone was freaked out except the bear. It was a grizzly and it was probably in its youth. Still pretty good size, though. We carried bear spray as a last resort to fend off a bear, which we never had to use.

One of the other guys that was with us had bear spray on his hip. Somehow, when he crawled out of the raft, he hit the trigger and sent a cloud of bear spray right into Mike's eyes.

I don't know how long it was. I'm sure it was an hour that I couldn't open my eyes.

To see Dad, you know, just screaming in his hands and jumping in the river trying to splash it off. And, of course, the bear spray, I think, is oil-based, so splashing water on it doesn't do anything.

But you had to do something, and so I'd never seen Dad move so fast in the water and screaming.

And I'm sure I scared every bear off that was within 10 miles of us. We saw literally scores of bears every day. They really added to the trip and it's what made the trip down American Creek really special.

Taking the wrong river braids usually resulted in having to haul rafts across shallow water or over fallen trees. In 2006, we had a raft flip when rushing water jammed the raft against a log jam, flipping the raft.

One of the biggest challenges was actually navigating the river itself. There wasn't just a ton of water flowing through it, so everybody had to get out and pull the raft across the rocks. Or we'd come to a place where the river would shoot off in five different directions.

We called it going to the braids. So you'd have to stop and send scouts to go scout up the different paths and figure out which way had the most water flowing through it so we could flow through it easier, so that would kind of slow you down.

And then there was a couple times where we'd come around a corner and there'd be a huge tree right in the middle of where we want to go. And we'd cut our way around or portage rafts across or whatever was necessary.

While American Creek was fun, God had bigger plans for us.

So that's what life looked like for this team of friends. Crazy adventures, wild fishing trips, and learning about God's creation. But soon, a book written 90 years before was about to change their lives forever.

I found the book that Robert Griggs published in 1922, published by the National Geographic Society. And I started reading that, and that's when I really became interested.

And the more Dr. Shoreman read, the more he realized the importance of Dr. Griggs' expeditions.

And there was a figure in there that particularly drew my attention. And it showed basically the eruption of Nova Rupta. It was like a cross-section through the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. And so it had a layer there of the Nova Rupta volcanic material that was deposited in the valley.

And then beneath that, some glacial action. And then beneath that, a huge layer of sedimentary rock called the Naknek Formation. And then beneath that, magma layer and granite layer. And I just saw that.

I was like, that's creation, flood, ice age, present-day conditions. That's the whole pattern there. And so, you know, not only was Nova Rupta a great evidence of catastrophism, it was a great evidence of just the whole story that's in Scripture from creation to now.

And it was then that the goal became clear. God was calling Dr. Shorman to relive the adventures of Robert Griggs and use the expeditions for his glory.

Well, my motivation in making the trip was just to see it. And just because of the creation, flood, ice age, present-day condition pattern that was there. And then the comparison of this major catastrophic event at Nova Rupta with the major cataclysm of the flood.

I mean, I just really wanted to see that with my own eyes. That adds some credibility to it when you actually get out there and put your hands and feet to it and experience that and then go and tell others about it rather than, you know, me just writing about Nova Rupta and not ever have been there.

Have some photo-geologic evidence of the event.

When Dad shared the story, I knew I wanted to see it for myself. I read some of Dr. Griggs' book and kept thinking how cool it would be to go there and see it 100 years later and find out what had changed.

I'd say that was the main reason that I wanted to go is to try and accomplish the same things he had.

Before I visited Nova Rupta, I read Dr. Griggs' book cover to cover. I read some other research papers about the area. So I knew something of what I was getting into.

Soon Dr. Shorman assembled his team. It would comprise some of the same crew as their trip to American Creek. His stepson Kenny Cole, who by the way had recently had a hairline fracture in his neck, a broken ankle, torn ligament, and dislocated elbow.

Could he make such a physically demanding journey? Mike was the seasoned team member who'd been on many trips with Dr. Shorman. John, his son, had miraculously recovered from recently breaking his back and this trip was the ultimate test of his physical therapy.

Joel was a young and accomplished explorer. And Tommy was just there for the thrill of adventure.

We had the same team as the American Creek trip, so we were all used to each other and knew our strengths and weaknesses. We sat in the lodge and talked about the fact that this was going to be more extreme and more demanding on us.

We knew God had prepared us, but it was a little humbling and a little stressful to know we had to rely so much more on each other. But we were committed because through the things Dad had shared about the volcano and the evidence it left behind, we knew we would see more of God on this trip.

Because of a previous commitment, the team broke up into two groups. Dr. Shorman and Kenny would leave first, followed a day later by the others.

Kenny and I went together and then the Boryaks and Joel and Tommy, they came as a separate group. But we got out there the day before them.

Dr. Shorman and Kenny left Texas and flew into King Salmon, a base camp on the edge of Katmai National Park. From there they had to take a float plane to get to Brooks Lodge.

We spent the night, the first night, in Brooks Lodge and saw all the grizzly bears there at the Brooks River at the waterfall. The day before when we arrived, the wind speed got up to 80 miles an hour at Brooks Lodge and actually a float plane trying to take off, it flipped on Brooks Lake.

Everybody got out and swam to shore, but it was one of the windiest days they'd ever recorded and we were sitting there thinking, oh boy, we're fixing to go into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, I hope this wind dies, but it didn't die.

They set up a tent for the night and turned in early. They had a big day ahead. Both men thought of the loved ones they'd left behind. Dr. Shorman's wife Karen was completely supportive of his research and the trip.

His daughter Ellie always loved hearing about her daddy's adventures. Both were at home in Texas praying. Kenny's thoughts drifted to Ashley, a girl from Hawaii that he had been dating. Is she the one? was the question going through his mind that night before they headed out into the harsh wilderness.

They also wondered if the Lord would give them victory in documenting how Nova Rupta confirmed the biblical account. The next morning, Kenny snuck out early to hike over to Brooks Lodge for a last big breakfast.

After packing up, they took a 23-mile bus ride from Brooks Lodge to the Three Forks Overlook and Robert F. Griggs Visitor Center, which borders the edge of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. They took a little time to look through the visitor center.

This is the end of the line for most people. But to get to Nova Rupta, Dr. Shorman and Kenny set out into the blast zone. Their goal was to reach some small cabins at the base of Baked Mountain, 13 miles away.

I was expecting Nova Rupta to be a whole lot more similar to the American Creek trip than it was. It didn't occur to me that we were actually going to see such devastation.

They wanted to reach the west side of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and spend their first night in the valley at the base of the Buttress Mountain Range, which sits 3 ,356 feet above sea level.

Even though we were out of the main valley, the tent still was getting whipped the whole night long by wind. The next morning, we got up and went to hike to Baked Mountain, which is where the USGS cabin was.

And as we started to hike across the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the wind started to pick up. By the time we got to Baked Mountain cabin, the wind was so strong, it was picking up one to two-inch pieces of pumice.

And it was like a little tornado of pumice would be coming. You could hear it coming. And we would just have to stop, put our heads down, and just kind of cover up like that and wait for the storm to go by, turn our backs, and then when it would stop, we'd get up and hike some more.

The team described the sound of these pumice storms like a freight train. They would hear the sound start way out in front of them and then get closer and closer.

Hang on.

It was probably about every five minutes, you know, just a big group of pumice would get picked up and just carried along.

So a pumice storm is hard to explain if you've never necessarily been in the situation. It's a lot like a hail storm, but with kind of really, really light, but hard, sharp rocks flying horizontally at you.

Kind of like getting peppered with sand, but a little more painful. And maybe a little more scary just because they're so big.

We had to put our wind pants on because we were getting cut. And our legs had cuts all over them when we got to the cabin that day. So, just a lot of challenges like that. Quicksand, falling in quicksand.

It's another big deal because we didn't know how deep it was.

So, yeah.

On the way, Dr. Shoreman and Kenny came to the River Lethe. According to Dr. Shoreman's research, there was a place where the river was narrow enough to jump across, but after several hours of searching, they couldn't find it.

We decided to wait across it. This particular area, though, it's a little sketchy to cross the rivers. And you have to kind of pull across it, checking ahead of you to check and see what the ground is like underwater.

I had read you could either jump across it, or there was places where there was kind of a wide valley. But you had to be careful there because the wind blows the pumice and the ash, and it'll fill up the stream bed.

And if you don't use a stick to probe, you might come across a spot where it just drops 20, 30, 40 foot deep.

Yeah, it was definitely an experience having to test it as you walked across, not knowing if your next step was going to be 100 feet below you. After we got in, though, we were really pressed to get out pretty quickly.

So it was freezing, and our feet went numb immediately. So that was kind of fun.

While Dr. Shoreman and Kenny were crossing the River Lethe on their way to the cabins at Baked Mountain, Mike, John, Joel, and Tommy were starting their journey from the Three Forks Overlook in Robert F. Griggs Visitor Center out into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

And that's where all the tourists got off or were standing on the overlook, you know, walkway, just looking out. That looks like the craziest thing ever. And then we're in the back, you know, putting on our backpacks.

And then we start hiking off into that, and they're just like, what are y 'all doing out there? At first, it was still, you know, as we're kind of descending into the valley, there was still some plants and some trees and brush.

And once you get to this overlook, it looks like you're looking out onto a desert. The horizon just kind of hazes off. You never really see the end of it.

When we were on American Creek, everything was lush and green, life everywhere, bears, fish, eagles, hawks, wolves. And then when you were in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the side of Nova Rupta, there was nothing.

You wouldn't even see birds flying. Very little, if any, plant life. It was the antithesis of American Creek. Couldn't be any more different.

Anywhere you go in the world, there's going to be just little bugs and ants or birds or something there. Right here, there's nothing. There's no ants. There's no little crawling anything on the ground.

There's no nothing flying over. It's completely desolate.

There really hadn't been much change since Dr. Griggs had been here.

The changes between Griggs' expedition and our expedition, other than the fact that the fumaroles had calmed down and we didn't see very many fumaroles, there was a little bit along the edge of the valley, there was plant life starting to come back.

While there was life along the edges of the valley, Joel was surprised by how empty the valley looked.

I just thought I was walking on the moon or, I don't know, someplace else. It just had a very, very different feel. Totally different than anything I had seen before.

And this desolate terrain made hiking tough. Back at the River Lethe, Dr. Shorman and Kenny were observing the river flowing through a massive volcanic deposit. While crossing the rivers were a formidable challenge, they also provided some great lessons, such as the stream power law.

This equation is used by many scientists to determine the age of a stream or river. It takes into account the rate of erosion, the hardness of the material the stream is flowing through, the size of its drainage area, and the slope of the water flowing.

Supposedly using this equation, scientists can figure out how long a river has been cutting through its riverbed. But the problem is this equation assumes that the processes we see working at a particular river are consistent.

This canyon was cut through material deposited by Nova Rupta in less than five years. But present erosion rates are hundreds of times slower. This demonstrates that uniformitarian dating for many streams could be way off.

As Dr. Shorman and Kenny continued toward the baked mountain cabins, they faced their own battles with pumice.

There's nothing like walking through the middle of the desert basically with a 50-pound backpack and pumice flying in your face for an hour and a half.

Kenny and Dr. Shorman arrived at the base of Baked Mountain. While Kenny and Dr. Shorman were safe inside the baked mountain cabins, Mike remembers hiking to the first night's camp in the foothills of the buttress mountain range.

We had agreed to meet Dr. Shorman at a USGS cabin that was marked on the map. Well, of course, none of us had ever been there. It just was a dot on a map. And this pumice storm kicked up and just started sandblasting us.

It was too much. We just couldn't take it. You know, we took shelter up in the foothills just out of the valley the first night and made camp there.

And this was my first time I'd really camped out that far from anything. And, of course, the valley really gave us a lot of protection that we were in. And we were up behind kind of a sand dune kind of thing.

And so we had some protection from the wind. But the wind was just so harsh that first night that I remember waking up, it seemed like, every 30 minutes, just thinking, man, I could be blown away here.

And it's like, that's what it felt like to me. I was going to be blown away. I just remember I'd wake up and like, oh, God, you know, just please keep me alive through the night.

The next morning, as they began the journey to meet Dr. Shorman and Kenny, they suffered a major setback.

Maybe it's about a little after lunchtime. And we kind of see the ridge where we think the cabin is. And then I looked real close and up on the hillside, I see two what looked like ants hiking across the side of this hill.

And I'm thinking, oh, that must be them. We start hiking. We get, you know, maybe, I don't know, a half mile off or something where they're able to see us. I know they're able to see us very well. We can see them stop and look in our direction.

So we're thinking, oh, that's good he sees us. He'll probably wait for us now and wait till we can catch up. And then he just keeps walking. I'm sure he wants us to go follow him to wherever he's hiking to.

And so we go and follow him. He's moving fast and he keeps going. And we're trying to track him and we finally find his trail. We're following his footprints across this valley. And he's not slowing down and just really starting to get a little bit ticked off at him.

And we see him break up for camp or for lunch or something. And we were hustling to catch up. We're hustling to catch up to him. I'm getting pretty mad. I'm hot and tired. And we catch up to him and it's not Dr. Shorman.

It's a couple other hikers that just happened to be out there at the same time.

While the second team struggled to find the cabins at Baked Mountain where they were all supposed to meet later that evening, Dr. Shorman and Kenny were becoming increasingly concerned with the weather.

At the moment, things looked good, but that might change over the next several hours. It looked like they might lose their window of opportunity. Dr. Shorman made the decision that he and Kenny would head out to the Nova Rupta crater without the rest of the team.

They needed to accomplish their goal of photographing the vent and the surrounding deposits and collecting a sample from the lava dome.

It was incredible to finally arrive at our goal, Nova Rupta. As we walked around this lava dome, we couldn't help but wonder about God's amazing power.

You think of volcanoes, usually. You think of this nice triangle-shaped volcano. But Nova Rupta was just so powerful and it just blew everything out for miles down the valley and beyond.

I think I thought it was going to look a little more like something out of a movie. Like it was going to be forest all around it and that there was going to be this big mountain coming out of the trees that we were going to climb up.

And it really made it better when we did get there. And I got to see like, oh wow, this is really what a volcano looks like 100 years after it's gone off.

At the Nova Rupta lava dome, it's a typical feature there of like a ring that goes around it. And you'll see some different colors in that material. It's not all just one solid color. Just different levels of oxidation of the iron a lot of times is what's causing those changes and the concentrations of iron in the material.

So what exactly happened here on June 6th through 8th of 1912? In Psalm 104 verse 32, it says, God is so powerful that a simple touch of his finger and an eruption like this can completely eradicate a landscape and create a completely new one.

Mount Katmai is located six miles east of Nova Rupta. Somewhere near Nova Rupta was a shallow magma chamber filled with molten rhyolite and dacite. A second magma chamber of dacite and andesite was centered beneath Mount Katmai.

The two magma chambers were connected by a series of underground channels. At one o 'clock in the afternoon of June 6th, 1912, or possibly earlier, rhyolite began spewing and oozing from Nova Rupta's vent.

As the shallow chamber near Nova Rupta drained, Mount Katmai's chamber started to flow into the void and out Nova Rupta. As the pressure was relieved from underneath Mount Katmai, the top of that mountain collapsed down inside itself.

There was a cubic mile of material that fell 1 ,000 feet into the void.

Robert Griggs, he thought that Mount Katmai had exploded. And that's what caused the eruption and that's how all the material filled up the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and the ash that went for thousands of miles.

He thought that all came out of Mount Katmai. But actually what they found out later was that Nova Rupta, about six kilometers to the west of Mount Katmai, that's all the magma came out it and that's what exploded basically.

It's called a Plinian eruption and it's basically an explosion. The ground just ripped open and a mountain right next to it, Falling Mountain, the whole third of that just fell into the hole made by Nova Rupta.

Most of the material actually came out in the first 16 hours, about 70 of it. So the majority of the material came out just right at the beginning of it.

Nova Rupta exploded in a fury of power. The eruption took place in 60 hours, which have been divided into five different episodes. Episode one lasted for 16 hours and accounted for 70 of the material that would be ejected.

As soon as Mount Katmai started to break apart, it started to erupt products too. You just think about if a big glacier on top of Mount Katmai that falls into super hot magma, it's going to flash to steam instantly and just blast out of there.

And that's what happened. And so mud flows came out of the top. Pumice breccia, it's called, the hydrothermal breccia, just rocks and mud mixed together, conglomeration just blasting out of the top of that.

It wasn't anywhere near as big as Nova Rupta, but Mount Katmai did erupt as well. So there were basically two eruptions, but the majority of it came out of Nova Rupta.

During that time, it deposited nine distinct deposits, filling the valley of 10 ,000 smokes. It caused flows moving at speeds of 450 miles per hour. It began with rhyolite material, then dacite, followed by andesite.

Sometimes the different magma types would mix like batter in a marble cake. At the vent, the molten mixture would shoot high and cool midair, falling to the ground as banded pumice. It was about six hours into this episode when Mount Katmai began to collapse, releasing mud flows, ash, and hydrothermal rock matrix.

During the first 11 hours of the eruption, there was 567 tons of material ejected from Nova Rupta's vent every second.

Nova Rupta at its height was releasing the equivalent of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers a second. That was the rate of material coming out. These things are over 100 meters long, and doing that continuously for 10, 11 hours, that would just be incredible to see.

It's just hard for us to get our minds around something like that.

At the end of episode one, there was a short pause for a few hours. Episode two was a Plinian eruption, shooting gas and dacite material high up into the air. Although there were earthquakes throughout the entire eruption, which is probably what caused Noisy Mountain to collapse, the largest took place during episode two, hitting 7 .0 on the Richter scale.

It blew out almost three cubic miles of material. For comparison, here's what three cubic miles of magma looks like compared to the skyline of Manhattan. This event also caused pyroclastic density currents, waves of fast-moving gas carrying rock that shot downward at incredible speeds and depositing layer after layer of material.