Mount St. Helens: 32 years of change in 44 seconds

A lot has changed at Mount St. Helens since it erupted on May 18, 1980, and you can see just how much in decades' worth of images captured by Landsat satellites.

The Landsat program, whose mission is to observe changes on Earth, is a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists from the two agencies recently included the eruption and recovery at Mount St. Helens as one of the top 10 most significant changes recorded by the satellites.

The video above begins in 1979, before the eruption, and shows the changes in the landscape year by year through 2011. Vegetation appears red, rather than green, in the first images because of the limitations of the early satellites.

Read more from NASA about the images, the eruption and the recovery here; check out the Earth Observatory's gallery to see the images in greater detail.

Revisit memories and historic photos of the eruption here.

Credits: Video from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; homepage image from NASA's Earth Observatory