The curious case of Mount Shasta's 1905 "Spasm"
Have you ever played a game of Telephone? If so, you know the message that you start with might not always be what you hear in the end. News coverage of volcanic unrest works in much the same way, especially if the volcano is remote or unmonitored.
Before the era of electronic monitoring and cell phone communication, even inhabited volcanoes could produce some pretty wild news stories. Case in point is the 1905 "Spasm" of Mount Shasta, California's tallest volcano. On April 14, 1905, the residents of the town of Sisson (now the city of Mt. Shasta) experienced a curious mudflow that seemed to emanate from ground cracks near a local livery stable. The flow continued to ooze for the better part of a day, and was described in newspaper stories as "dark colored oily mud" or "thickened paint". Some reports also noted "distant rumblings" coming from the mountain, and called the event a "spasm", "grumbling", and a "queer mood".
To a volcanologist, this sounds very much like a mud or debris flow, which are known to either follow hot weather (glacial melt) or rainstorms (runoff). The fact that it seemed to be coming from underground is curious, but could be attributed to a buried drainage or related to landslide processes. However, long-term residents of the town pointed out that there had been "no recent cold spell followed by a sudden thaw or heavy rains which might cause a slide", and so were worried that this phenomenon heralded new volcanic activity.
Local newspapers largely contained the same AP report, but farther afield, stories became more sensational. The Chico Daily Record dryly remarked that "the San Francisco Examiner went so far into fiction as to have the mud flying so rapidly and in such volumes that the whole town of Sisson was threatened with being covered up", which was clearly not the case. The San Francisco Call was later obliged to publish an explanatory op-ed on April 17 which reminded readers that "The mud spring at Sisson is not an uncommon phenomenon attending volcanic cones with glaciers at their summits...The snow melt and rainfall upon their summits do not flow over the surface, but sink into subterranean channels."
Shasta never produced any volcanic unrest in 1905, and it is now widely recognized by locals that either snow-and-ice-melt or rainstorms on the volcano can lead to non-eruptive mud and debris flows. These lahars (a term for any mudflow composed of volcanic debris) are currently a subject of ongoing hazard assessment at Mount Shasta, and even sensationalized newspaper records could help CalVO scientists unravel patterns in how and when they can happen.
To read some of the newspaper accounts of the 1905 event, visit the California Digital Newspaper Collection https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ and search for "Shasta mud flow". To learn more about Mount Shasta's lahar hazards, visit https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-shasta/science/hazards-summary-mou…
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