During the eruptions of Mount St. Helens the occurrence of floods and mudflows made apparent the need for predictive water-hazard analysis of other Cascade volcanoes. A basic requirement for such analysis is information about the volumes and distributions of snow and ice on other volcanoes. A radar unit contained in a backpack was used to make point measurements of ice thickness on major glaciers of Mount Rainier, Wash.; Mount Hood, Oreg.; the Three Sisters, Oreg.; and Mount Shasta, Calif. The measurements were corrected for slope and were used to develop subglacial contour maps from which glacier volumes were measured. These values were used to develop estimation methods for finding volumes of unmeasured glaciers. -- Driedger and Kennard, 1986 |