Forest-floor burial in 1507 by the largest Mount Rainier lahar of the past millennium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract New dating of lahar-killed trees underscores volcano hazards in the Puget Sound metropolitan area. Beginning as a landslide from the west flank of Mount Rainier, Washington, USA, the Electron Mudflow, which was the largest lahar of the last millennium, swept more than 60 km down the Puyallup River drainage into areas now densely populated. Wiggle matching of seven radiocarbon ages from buried, bark-bearing Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees brackets the mudflow's age between 1477 and 1522 CE with 99.7% certainty. To narrow this date, we applied dendrochronology crossdating on samples collected from 21 trees killed by the lahar, measuring 86 time series for statistical verification. The four bark-bearing trees died the same year while the final rings in all other trees had decayed, exposing rings formed in earlier years. When averaged together, the crossdated measurements form a 475 yr master chronology that was correlated against absolutely dated tree-ring chronologies in the region. The Electron chronology best matched with chronologies from low-elevation sites, especially a Douglas-fir chronology from Vancouver Island, Canada, to show that the Electron trees died in 1507 CE. Latewood in the final ring was beginning to form, indicating the mudflow likely occurred in the late-summer months. What caused the Electron Mudflow is unknown, but this precise date will help to assess possible relationships with other events, assist in interpreting Indigenous narratives about the mudflow, and increase awareness of potential lahar hazards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".