Mt. St. Elias is better known and has been much written about. Its
height is eighteen thousand and twenty-four feet. Mt. Logan is nineteen
thousand five hundred and forty feet. Of the two now-celebrated passes
in the mountains of the Yukon, the Chilkoot and White Pass, the former
is at a height of three thousand one hundred feet and the latter at a
height of twenty-eight hundred feet. It was over these passes that the
gold-seekers of 1898 stampeded into Klondike.
But the mountains of Alaska, glorious, majestic and awe-inspiring as
they are, are the losers when compared with the greatest of Alaskan
wonders, the volcanoes. Of these, Mt. Katmai, opposite the Island of
Kodiak, the terrific eruption of which in June, 1912, is well
remembered, is most celebrated. At that time a mass of ash and pummice,
the volume of which is estimated at _five cubic miles_, was thrown into
the air. It buried an area about the size of the State of Connecticut
to a depth varying from ten inches to ten feet and smaller amounts of
the ash fell as far as nine hundred miles away. Unquestionably, the
notoriously cold, wet summer which followed the eruption was due to the
fine dust which was thrown into the higher regions of the atmosphere
to such an extent as to have a profound effect upon the weather. At the
time of the eruption I was at sea, on my way from St. Michael to the
States. It was not long until the ash began falling over us, filling
the air and seemingly trying to cover the face of the waters. It got
into our lungs and made them ache. It was not until some time later
that I heard that it was Mt. Katmai which had exploded and that the
eruption was one which would go down in history. There was not, of
course, the enormous loss of life which followed the eruptions of
Vesuvius, Stromboli and Mt. Pélee. But in other respects the explosion
of Mt. Katmai was unique. Kodiak, the town which was buried, was a
hundred miles away. Ash fell as far away as Juneau, Ketchikan and the
Yukon valley, distant respectively six hundred, seven hundred and fifty
and nine hundred miles.
In the report of the leader of the National Geographic Society's Mt.
Katmai Expedition of 1915-'16, Robert F. Griggs, of the Ohio State
University, is the following paragraph which gives concisely a good
idea of the magnitude of the explosion:
"Such an eruption of Vesuvius would bury Naples under fifteen feet of
ash. Rome would be covered a foot deep. The sound would be heard at
Paris. Dust from the crater would fall in Brussels and Berlin and the
fumes would be noticeable far beyond Christiana, Norway."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account