My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
Water soundings showed 900 feet of subsidence in Sagami Bay opposite
Oshima, and there were changed depths elsewhere, some of them
shallowing by underwater land slips. We went to the Boshu Peninsula
east of Tokyo, where the beach had been rising for many years, and
where the earthquake rising left wharves high and dry. The principal
effect of the earthquake, occurring at noon just when all charcoal
braziers were lighted for luncheon in the flimsy Japanese houses of
wood and paper, was to set fires in an area of hundreds of square miles
and a score of towns. Water reservoirs were destroyed, there was no
adequate fire department to care for a conflagration, and a high wind
was blowing in the bright sunshine. A characteristic of Japanese cities
was the absence of open parkways for refugees, hence the crushing,
burning, drowning, suffocation, and annihilation of hundreds of
thousands of people and the destruction of factories, railroad trains,
water supplies, power plants, and every essential utility in a great
metropolitan area with a population of many millions. The horizontal
movement of the ground in the shock was about eight inches, and
aftershocks kept on for many months.
We explored Yokohama, clambering up to the Bluff where everything was
wrecked and where land slips had tumbled down the precipice. We visited
what remained of a beautiful English type villa with a slate roof,
which had been occupied by two missionary ladies and their numerous
parrots. These people were encamped, along with their parrots, in a
shack built by their yardman, for the residence had tumbled down like a
house of cards. One woman had been imprisoned between her bed and the
wall, and was quite uninjured when the gardener dug her out through
cracks of the roof.
Scientifically, what happened to the ground in this earthquake was
not explained by any single fault. Whatever happened to the bottom
of Sagami Bay was not communicated across the beach to the coast as
any great rift. Small faults were identified in a number of places,
the shoreline in one place lifted a few feet and lowered in another;
but no such movement as the big subsidence of the bottom of the bay
crossed the contact of sea and land. It appeared as though the margin
of the bay itself outlined an area of sudden slumping, somehow related
to Mihara Volcano on Oshima; but the shoreline of that island was not
seriously affected. The great mountains of the foothills of Fujiyama,
and the Hakone district, were shaken to a hash of broken railway
tunnels and land slips, but the topography was not altered.
A resurvey of trig stations west of Tokyo revealed movements that
indicated the country had been spirally twisted. However, it has always
seemed a mystery to me that all the motion on land was so small, when
change on the bottom of the bay was so great.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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