Mt. Fitzherbert

SEATTLE - For more than a year now, Mount St. Helens has been oozing lava into its crater at the rate of roughly a large dump truck load - 10 cubic yards - every three seconds.

With the sticky molten rock comes a steady drumfire of small earthquakes.

The movement of lava up through the southwest Washington volcano is "like a sticky piston trying to rise in a rusty cylinder," U.S. Geological Survey geologist Dave Sherrod said Thursday in a telephone interview from the agency's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash.