美國地質調查局稱聖海倫火山依然非常活躍

　　5月11日CNN聽力：美國地質查詢拜訪局稱聖海倫火山仍然異常活潑 北卡羅來納州衛生間法激發爭議

　　CNN STUDENT NEWS starts right now! I'm CarlAzuz.

　　The U.S. Geological Survey says Mount St. Helens isstill very much alive.

　　The volcano sits in the Cascade Mountains insouthwestern Washington state.

　　It was dormant from the 1950s until 1980 when amassive eruption there blew a thousand feet off the top of the mountain and killed dozens ofpeople and thousands of animals.

　　Since then, it's had smaller explosions and quakes on and off every few years.

　　Now, scientists say it's recharging.

　　How do they know?

　　Mount St. Helens has had an earthquake swarm, a spike in a number of small tremors over thepast eight weeks.

　　Seismologists have recorded more than 130 quakes recently and that's gotten their attentioncentered on one of the most closely monitored volcanoes on the planet.

　　These have been incredibly small quakes.

　　However, it's the frequency of them that has scientists kind of keeping a close eye on this.

　　So, this is the area over the past seven days.

　　These blue squares that you see, those are the monitoring sites that they have out there.

　　And then all of these dots, these are all of the earthquakes that have occurred in this region inthe last seven days.

　　Now, again, I want to point out, none of these have been huge.

　　In fact, most of them have been at a magnitude of 0.5 or less.

　　You and I can't even detect that, they're so small.

　　Now, the maximum was around the 1.03.

　　Again, very hard for humans to detect something of that small magnitude.

　　Now, they all were very shallow, between about 1.2 to four miles in debt.

　　Now, basically what this means is, when you get these swarms, it's the repressurization of themagma that's in there and it kind of seeps through some of the cracks that are there and that'swhat causes a lot of these little mini earthquakes.

　　But you want to keep in mind, this process can continue for years without interruption andthat's what the experts are trying to make sure that people understand.

　　They're not tossing any anomalous gases come out and they're not expecting an imminenteruption by any means.

　　The U.S. state of North Carolina and the U.S. federal government are suing each other.

　　It has to do with the North Carolina law concerning access to public restrooms.

　　Here's what happened:

　　In March, North Carolina passed what's called the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act.

　　One thing the law does is require people to use the restroom that matches the gender listed ontheir birth certificates.

　　The U.S. Justice Department argues the state law breaks a federal law because it discriminatesagainst people who are transgender, people who identify with the different gender than theone on their birth certificates.

　　So, last week, the government told North Carolina to, quote, "remedy" its law by Monday orthat it would be in violence of people's civil rights and could face a government lawsuit.

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