VolcanoCam

Mt. St. Helens has burbled and spat over the past six months, and during last fall's media frenzy we suffered a volcano-coverage overdose. One could smell the reporters' thoughts: Bring on the death and destruction...just erupt already! Despite all that, Seattlest still likes to check in on her every once in a while.

According to the USGS, she's currently growing a new lava dome, which, well...we're not volcanologists, or seismologists, or any -ologist, really, but words like "lava" seem to point towards things like "eruptions."

You can keep your untrained eye on Mt. St. Helens with the Forest Service's totally awesome VolcanoCam. If you get obsessive with it--and Seattlest wouldn't know anything about that sort of behavior--you'll start noticing steam bursts and the like, and if you really nerd out, you'll check in at night and convince yourself you see the red glow eminating from the center of the Earth.

If nothing of note is happening on the mountain, entertain yourself with the Forest Service's Hall of Fame. Somebody over there has a sense of humor, as evidenced by their archiving of the fly-on-the-lens pic.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, we've discovered the definition of "dormant volcano": the National Park Service's Mount Rainier site has a webcam...and it points away from the mountain.