Saturday, June 2, 2012

RE: [Geology2] Volcano eruption in 1912 was largest of the 20th Century



I DO find it hard to believe it could have been heard in Dawson City.  (Juneau, absolutely; Fairbanks, probably.)  Dawson was a raucous mining town, is in a deep river canyon (the Yukon) which has fairly swift moving water (noisy) and is/was 660 miles away and any noise would be passing over at least two significant (even by Alaskan standards) mountain ranges.  *

 

Now the radio noise I would easily believe.  At that time the signals were in Morse code (probably spark) with (by today’s standards) barely functioning very broad receivers.  It would not take much to make the radio unusable, a lightning storm raised havoc; this would have been massive amounts of noise.  Since the ‘aerials’ were also huge (a LOT of wire), it’s no stretch that they got hit by the volcanic lightning.

 

It is still called the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and tours are offered.  It’s still fairly barren (very slow changes in the near Arctic).  And what survived is still some of the best bear habitat in the world.  It’s still worth seeing (well heck the entire state is worth seeing).

 

Rick wa6nhc

 

* Dawson has maintained its rough edged image over the years; we were there 5 years ago.  Eclectic is probably the best polite word.  :o)  Expensive too; a *tiny* hamburger (smaller than a Mickey D’s kiddy burger) in a bare bun with a single quarter sized slice of pickle and a slice of tomato you could read through and a packet of catsup was CA$8.50.  We didn’t stay long.

 

We arrived in Dawson around 2 am (still daylight) after driving in from Chicken, AK via the “Top of the World Highway” (which is another story).  Most of the town was shut down for the night, except a couple bars.  As there were no remaining camping spots (we tent camped and sometimes just slept in the car) and we had been warned to not use the trucker rest spots, we opted for a motel (a REAL bed AND a shower? How extravagant).  A sign on the office door said “The keys are on this board if the room is vacant.  We’ll open the office at 8 am and see you after that.  Check out time is noon.”  A nice woman from England ran the place and she said she nearly always got the room rent; a bargain at CA$80.

 

Leave town to the south and in about 5 miles is a left turn which would take you to Inuvik, NWT (several hundred miles further north, where the “Ice Road Truckers” start heading north).  We went straight and for 120 miles, there were no other side roads, no intersections, no houses or towns, just the paved road and raw nature.  Then turn right and in 20 miles you came to Carcross (still on the Yukon river).  We camped there for 4 days.

 

It was um, an adventure.  Visiting these places needs to be on everyone’s ‘bucket list’.

 

I know, off topic again.  Lin gonna be git’n mad at me agin.  ;oP

 


On June 6, 1912, if you happened to be sitting on a log outside your cabin near Fairbanks, Juneau or Dawson City, you would have heard an explosion.

There was no way to know the boom came from hundreds of miles away, or that it was the starting gun for the largest volcanic eruption of the 1900s. Nor would you imagine that in the next three days a mountain would collapse upon itself, or that ash and hot gases would explode from the ground six miles from that mountain, creating a landscape of hot ash and 500-foot geysers of steam. The Novarupta-Katmai eruption of 1912 was hard to imagine then just as it is now, 100 years since it happened.

• Volcanic lightning and thunder added to the terror on Kodiak Island during the first day of the eruption; static from the charged particles blown from the volcano made the wireless radio useless at the naval station in Kodiak. A fire, possibly caused by volcanic lightning, later destroyed the station.

http://www.valdezstar.net/story/2012/05/30/main-news/volcano-eruption-in-1912-was-largest-of-the-20th-century/121.html




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