Is South Sister still sleeping?

If you’re wondering how our lovely old sleeping giant South Sister is feeling these days, here’s the latest news, hot off the press:

“Three Sisters: USGS scientists are completing their fifth annual field campaign in the Three Sisters region of Central Oregon, which has been the site of slow uplift of the ground surface since 1997,” the USGS reports. “Ongoing accumulation of a modest volume of magma at a depth of about 3 to 4 miles has caused the ground to rise a maximum of about 1 to 1.5 inch per year over a broad dome-shaped area. This area is about 10 miles in diameter and is centered three miles west of South Sister volcano. Real-time data from seismic and GPS instruments suggest that there have not been any significant changes over the past year.”

But…

What one must keep in mind is that the beautiful landscape we gaze at from our living room windows or while driving around the sagebrush and juniper is the result of a tremendous amount of violent volcano activity.

With that in mind, and in light of the debacle caused by hurricane Katrina, emergency services personnel throughout Central Oregon are getting their ducks in a row in the event South Sister or any other of our hundred or so volcanoes should suddenly wake up.

The entire region we live in has been — and will no doubt continue to be — comprised of alive and breathing volcanoes with the awesome potential of changing real estate values very quickly. Like it or not, this region is one of the most geologically young and tectonically active in North America.

What that means is that this “province” we call home includes active — and sometimes deadly — volcanoes of the Cascade Range: such as South Sister, Mt. Bachelor, Newberry Crater and a few of the other beautiful snowcapped beauties we gaze upon every day.

USGS calls them, “a string of explosive pearls.”

It wasn’t always this way, however; millions of years ago Oregon was not where it is today on the surface of Old Mother Earth. The slab of soil, rocks and plants we call home was slowly drifting up from somewhere around Panama, inexorably headed for the North Pole. In addition, we would have needed a boat to get around as most of what is now Oregon was covered by warm seas supporting a profuse variety of sea life.

On what little dry land there was, we would have found cycads, ginkgoes, coconuts and conifers growing in a warm, temperate climate. I know that to be a fact as I have found fossils of these and many other plants and animals in the older rocks east of here.

Things changed about 70 million years ago when land emerged from the tropical warm seas in the form of volcanoes and dominated the geologic history of Oregon. The Cascade Range, that great north-south chain of volcanoes we play amongst today, has been growing and eroding in episodes over the past 40 million years.

About 15 million years ago our western skyline had grown high enough to affect our climate. Emerging snowcapped Cascades blocked moisture carried eastward by winds from the Pacific Ocean.

Consequently, the climate east of the Cascades today is relatively dry (10 to 25 inches of precipitation annually), while over in The Swamp, people live in a wetter, soggy environment of 40 to 100 inches.

I don’t know about you, but every morning as I watch our gorgeous sun paint the Cascades all orange and yellow (thanks to the wood stoves in Bend) I am grateful that I live in what Kessler Cannon used to describe over KBND in his sing-song radio voice in the ’50s and ’60s, “BEAU-tah-FULL CEN-tral OR-eh-GON.”