On a trip this summer, I got to visit the scene of one of Earth’s greatest disasters, the rim of Crater Lake in southern Oregon. As a kid, I was enthralled with this and the entire Cascade Range spanning from Washington through Oregon and into California. My experiences of mountains were the likes of these, like Mount Hood or Mount Rainier, snowcapped cones that pierced through clouds and created a distinct objective on the horizon.

My youthful fascination was encouraged by a kids’ book I had showing maps and descriptions of the range, and this was likely my first open door into geology and science more generally. Diagrams emphasized to the engrossed 8-year-old that these were not merely mountains but volcanoes, giving evidence that the planet stores immense energy that sometimes has to be released.

At my birthday party that year, hosted on what was otherwise a random Sunday when family could join us, I remember my grandfather racing outside to exclaim news to us all: Mount St. Helens had exploded. Adults seemed surprised, rattled, even fearful, but I figured that this was just what growing up was all about: Sometimes an entire mountain will explode and interrupt a party. After all, I’d had a few days in the previous year that I’d been able to sample ash that had rained down upon us from previous eruptions of the volcano. These events were mostly annoyances to grown-ups around me, though life-threatening to those a couple of hundred miles away. For myself, I really wished for more of these events. Volcanic emissions falling from the atmosphere and delivered immediately to my home? Yes, please. (I had little perspective about the death and destruction that these geological forces could impose.)

This brings me back to Crater Lake. This body of water sits within the confines of the caldera of Mount Mazama. While that peak probably stood at 12,000 feet above sea level at one time, its current rim is only at 8,000 feet. You can visit this national park and peer from the edge down into impossibly blue water and an expanse of about 25 square miles in all, the surface of which is another couple of thousand feet below the rim’s vantage point. Additionally, the depth of the lake is another 2,000 feet at its deepest. It’s stunning, both what can be seen and all that you have to imagine.

I think that the kid in me loved the duality of Crater Lake: It’s a mountain and a lake, both, at the same time. Now, staring over into its depth and then looking up and wondering about the additional mountain that would have loomed above and filled in all of that volume, I imagine the extraordinary explosion that changed Mount Mazama’s silhouette less than 8,000 years ago, a geologic blink of an eye. Material was sent in all directions across the continent, and the instability within the guts of it all led to the complete collapse to form the improbable crater. Humans would have witnessed this in all kinds of remarkable ways, from the view of ash plumes to blunt force of shock waves. Indigenous people’s stories have passed this scene down through generations of oral tradition.

In insurance parlance, the event easily qualifies as an “act of God,” but our own actions remind me that humanity is clearly in close competition. For example, it’s taken us a mere century to dig out a mountainside and create the immense hole visible from space. Bingham Canyon Mine is the largest human-dug pit in the world and a national historic landmark. It’s not quite as wide as Crater Lake, but it has about the same vertical drop as the distance between Mount Mazama’s rim and Crater Lake’s deepest point. So, despite my astonishment at what the natural world can do to reshape itself, we do quite a bit of this ourselves. We are so very capable, and we must decide how we use that capacity, for better or for worse. As witnesses to all the awe evoked by the planet, we are also its stewards.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah.

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