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Mt. St. Helens Recovery Slowed by Caterpillar When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it destroyed every living thing around it. Gas, ash and rock, heated to over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, sterilized a 60-kilometer square area, leaving a gray lunar-looking landscape devoid of plants and animals.Within a year, the first plant life had started to return, just as ecologists predicted it would. But a new study shows that things are happening differently from what ecologists have long thought of as the norm. It seems that a small insect is slowing down a piece of the Mount St. Helens recovery process.
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