Surprising Find inside Infamous Volcano

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Mount St. Helens may be best known for its ability to spew red-hot lava during eruptions, but a recent study has revealed the volcano's core is relatively cold.

Published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, the findings were collected by a team of geologists led by Steve Hansen, a geoscientist at the University of New Mexico. Researchers set off nearly two dozen explosions at the volcano to collect the data for their study, according to ScienceNews.

They discovered that the mountain's location may be contributing to its cold core. Most of the active volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest line up along the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, which melts and sinks into the mantle under the North American plate. But even though Mount St. Helens is about 30 miles west of the other volcanoes, the team still figured they'd see plenty of heat beneath the volcano when they looked several miles below.

Instead, they found nothing but a wedge of cooler serpentinite rock. No chambers of magma, despite history proving that there must be plenty of it nearby.

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"We don’t have a good explanation for why that’s the case," Hansen told Gizmodo.

Because Hansen also said this type of discovery has never been seen below an active volcano, there will need to be additional studies to learn why this is the case. One theory suggests the magma is being pushed westward from the Cascade Arc – that area where the other volcanoes line up – and earthquakes may also play a factor in that movement.

But that's all speculation, and the researchers will have to keep listening to the volcano for more clues.

"Mount St. Helens is pretty unusual," Hansen told Gizmodo. "It’s telling us something about how the arc system is behaving, and we don’t yet know what that something is."

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