The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone EarthquakeChristopherson, Edmund
History
The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake
Christopherson, Edmund
Earthquakes -- Montana; Earthquakes -- Yellowstone National Park
It wasn’t uniform, though. The quake caused tilting, which showed up in
the way the north side of Hebgen Lake had sunk eight feet, while the
south side of the lake, docks, boats, etc., were sticking eight feet out
of the water.
The quake also caused many sink, or more properly, blow holes. These
phenomena are also known as sandspouts. Water, compressed and forced up
and out by quake action washes out layers of sand sub strata. The
overhead surface areas naturally drop into the hole, leaving a puzzling
hunk of slumped ground—separate from the normal scarps—as big as 15 × 50
ft. in area.
The Montana-Yellowstone quake sent seismographs jiggling as far away as
New Zealand. It caused fluctuation of water level in wells as much as
ten feet in nearby Idaho, a tenth of a foot in Hawaii, 3,200 miles away,
and .01 ft. in Puerto Rico.
The huge concrete Hungry Horse Dam, near Columbia Falls, Montana, 250
miles NW of the quake area, showed measurable displacement as a result
of the quake. In remote Seattle, the diminished tremors were still
strong enough to break loose the floating amphitheatre in Lake
Washington.
[Illustration: Rock Cr. Camp]
[Illustration: Collapse of Dolomite Buttress]
[Illustration: Camp as buried by landslide]
But by far the most spectacular effect of Montana’s Earthquake was the
huge landslide at the mouth of the Madison Canyon.
At the site of the slide, a relatively strong and nearly vertical layer
of dolomite rock supported a huge bank, or mountain, of comparatively
unstable schist and kept it from sliding into the valley in the same way
that a retaining wall keeps a hillside terrace from slipping downhill.
The tremendous shock waves of the earthquake fractured this dolomite
buttress, and some 43 million cubic yards, or 80 million tons of rock,
timber, and other mountainside debris cascaded off the slope, hurtled
into the canyon, and surged up the opposite side, carrying huge trees
and house-sized boulders as if they were weightless, hollow toys.
When this huge mass whomped down onto the river bed, it forced out the
water and air trapped underneath at hurricane velocity. The huge slide
spurted mud, air, and water with such force as to send two-ton cars
sailing through the air, and to grind others to suitcase thickness
against the rocks.
All this happened in seconds.
It would take eight seconds for the mass at the top of the mountain to
fall to the valley floor 1,200 ft. below. At the time it reached this
point, the mass would be travelling 174 miles per hour. The time it took
to zoom half-a-mile across the valley, up the opposite canyon wall, then
split and flow three-quarters-of-a-mile up and down the valley (the
slide lies one-and-a-half-miles-long in the valley), was less than
thirty seconds!
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.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account