- [Teacher] What does it mean to be curious?

For my students, curiosity creates opportunities for a bigger and brighter future.

(upbeat music) - Mount Baker Volcano in Northwestern Washington, beautiful cone.

But here, under glacial ice, there has been intense erosion to reveal older volcano stories, a volcano graveyard in the Mount Baker volcanic field, including a newly discovered caldera where a volcanic explosion on the scale of Crater Lake and even Yellowstone happened here more than 1 million years ago.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) (helicopter blades buzzing) (gentle music) (snow crunching) Hiking up on the Table Mountain Trail, I mean, come on now.

That's about as iconic as it gets, right?

A cascade volcano, Mount Baker, with glacial ice flowing down its flanks.

And beneath that ice, lavas and ash layers that make us realize that Mount Baker is only 40,000 years old.

That's a baby compared to Mount Rainier, which is 500,000 years old.

So the deep geologic history here, the volcanic history in this area is mostly beneath that cone, not the cone itself, starting with Table Mountain itself.

(gentle music) (car engine buzzing) Mount Baker Highway on the way up to Artist Point, Heather Meadows, very popular drive.

And there's a stack of four lava flows along the way, along the drive, and they're gorgeous with these columns.

Did these lavas erupt out of Mount Baker Volcano?

No, because these andesite lavas are 300,000 years old, it's way too old for the cone itself.

So the columns are spectacular, the crystals inside of the Table Mountain andesite lavas are also spectacular, beautiful.

Fluid, but stiff lavas cooling, cracking long before Mount Baker volcano decided to make its appearance starting 40,000 years ago.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Deep beneath Mount Baker Volcano, there's more history, our oldest story.

An incredible pile of ash, pyroclastic flow, large broken blocks from an incredible explosion, a volcanic explosion 1.15 million years ago, creating an incredible crater, a big one called the Kulshan Caldera.

So much of that material ejected up into the sky and fell back into the caldera, and that's what we see down there, rhyolite, andesite, broken block, pyroclastic flows.

The idea is we have three distinctly different chapters of this volcanic history in the Mount Baker area.

That earliest chapter was on par with the scale of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, a crater that's five miles wide.

But on top of that, 300,000 year old andesite lava flow cooling into the columns.

And then finally, the cherry on the top, a relatively young Mount Baker cone-shaped volcano that got its start 40,000 years ago.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] This series was made possible in part with the generous support of Pacific Science Center.