|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
WONDERS OF NATURE
Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Nature miracle
In the Gulf of Alaska, separated from the peninsula of the same name by the wide Shelikhov Strait, lies the large, wooded and mountainous island of Kodiak. At its northern tip is the only settlement on the island - the village of Kodiak, founded by Russian settlers at the time of the development of Russian America. By the time that will be discussed, that is, by the beginning of the XNUMXth century, there were no longer Russians on the island, but the way of life of the islanders remained the same. The inhabitants of Kodiak - white Americans and Eskimos - hunted seals and sea otters, caught salmon with nets and sold skins, fish and caviar to merchants who occasionally sailed here on steamers from the States.
On June 6, 1912, when the fishermen and hunters, as usual at this time of year, looked out to sea, waiting for the first ship of the season, they suddenly noticed a huge black cloud in the northwest and heard unusually loud thunder. Soon a cloud covered the sky over the island, lightning flashed, but instead of rain, ash fell from the sky! Ash rain fell over the island for twenty-five hours straight. Darkness enveloped Kodiak, and for three whole days it was as dark as night. Lightning hit the radio station antenna, and the island village lost contact with the mainland. Nobody understood what was happening. Only on the fourth day the sun struggled through the clouds and a pale dawn illuminated the surroundings. But it was impossible to recognize them: the green meadows on the coast disappeared, a monotonous gray blanket spread over the entire island, as far as the eye could see. The layer of ash on the island reached half a meter in thickness. Later it turned out that one hundred and fifty kilometers from Kodiak, on the Alaska Peninsula, there was a grandiose explosive eruption of the Katmai volcano. The strength of the eruption had to be judged from indirect data, since the Indians who were near Katmai, at the first sign of the awakening of the fire-breathing mountain, hastily fled, and there were no permanent settlements in the volcano area within a radius of several hundred kilometers. However, the fact that the ash column rose twenty kilometers, and the sound of the explosion was heard for one thousand two hundred kilometers, in the capital of Alaska, the city of Dkuno, spoke of the gigantic scale of the natural disaster. Ground vibrations during the explosions (and the first was followed by two more, almost as strong) were felt two hundred kilometers from Katmai. Ash covered not only Kodiak, but fell even in the city of Vancouver, almost two thousand kilometers from the eruption site. At four kilometers from the volcano, its layer reached twenty meters, and on the banks of the Shelikhov Strait - three meters. A whole year later, small particles of ash were carried in the atmosphere. Summer around the planet turned out to be much colder than usual, due to the fact that the ash haze blocked almost a quarter of the sun's rays falling on Earth. In addition, surprisingly beautiful scarlet dawns were noted everywhere in 1912. Four years passed before the first scientific expedition managed to reach Alaska. Three American scientists, led by the famous volcanologist Griggs, climbed the rocky taiga pass of the Alaska Range, and from its two-kilometer height they saw a wide flat valley going north, along the entire length of which white fountains of smoke were knocked out of the ground with a roar. Griggs named this unusual area the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. On an old map created half a century earlier by Russian topographers, this place was shown as a wooded, narrow and deep valley of the Ukak River. A path passed along it, which means that people have been here, but no one noticed any gas jets here. Now, instead of the valley, there was a smooth, lifeless plain twenty kilometers long and five kilometers wide, dotted with many white fountains. Upon closer examination, it turned out that it was not smoke, but steam, but this circumstance did not clarify the riddle in any way. What happened in the valley? How did ten thousand "smoke" come into existence? The clue was to be found at the volcano, and Griggs headed for Katmai. But what is it? Instead of a high pointed peak, reaching almost two and a half kilometers, in front of him lay a truncated, as if chopped off, wide cone, barely exceeding two kilometers in height. Climbing onto its crest, scientists saw under their feet a huge elliptical depression-caldera, with a circumference of twelve kilometers. Its sheer walls went far down, where at a depth of nine hundred meters there was a deep lake with a diameter of one and a half kilometers. The water in it was cloudy white with a greenish tint, and in the middle there was a small island that had the shape of a crescent. Further study of the volcano showed that its eruption in 1912 was the most powerful in the history of mankind. (Only the explosion of the Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea in the XNUMXth century BC was perhaps even more powerful. But this assumption is from the realm of hypotheses, since documentary evidence of that distant catastrophe has not been preserved, and science is forced to judge it only by indirect data .) Thirty billion tons of rocks were lifted into the air by a volcanic explosion, turned into ashes and scattered in the atmosphere! You can try to imagine the scale of the eruption by mentally transferring the Katmai volcano, for example, to Manezhnaya Square in Moscow. Then the entire territory of the capital up to the ring highway itself would be buried under many meters of ash. In Kaluga, its layer would have reached thirty centimeters, and in Smolensk and Nizhny Novgorod, fifteen centimeters of ash would have fallen. The sound of the explosion would be heard in the Crimea, the Urals and Arkhangelsk, and the finest volcanic dust would fly to Iran, England and Italy. But the force of the eruption did not explain the appearance of the mysterious valley. It was located away from Katmai, and the origin of the numerous jets of steam seemed inexplicable. Only subsequent expeditions by Griggs to this volcanic region helped unravel the mystery of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. It turned out that shortly before the explosion, an eruption began from the side crater of Katmai, and perhaps from cracks on its slopes, but not lava, but fine volcanic sand. A cloud of red-hot grains of sand, each of which was wrapped in hot compressed gas, behaved like a liquid and flowed freely along the slope of the volcano into the valley. Along the edges of the future Valley of a Thousand Smokes, the layer of sand reached thirty meters, and in the middle it exceeded two hundred. The trees on the slopes were felled and charred by the scorching sandy river. When the flow of volcanic dust stopped and the gases escaped, the hot sand grains soldered together, forming a hard stone armor of volcanic tuff. But in some places cracks formed in it, and the waters of the Ukak River and numerous springs on its banks, evaporating under the hot "armor", burst upward in the form of white jets of steam. For four consecutive years, Griggs and his colleagues have explored the amazing valley. They had to work in difficult conditions. Here is what the volcanologist himself writes about this: “It was difficult to sleep in a tent at night: the ground was hot as a stove. While one side was baking, the other was getting cold from the cold wind blowing from neighboring glaciers. People were forced to roll over every minute. But it was unusually convenient to cook food. there were always hot stoves nearby ... The pan was put on a long pole and introduced into a stream of steam, and not only did the pole not have to be supported, but, on the contrary, it was necessary to press it down, and yet the pan hung in the air - the pressure of the coming out was so strong. completely transparent and invisible superheated steam that could light a stick. The funnels of many fumaroles were decorated with beautiful bright patterns of red, green, purple salts and metal oxides deposited on them." Unfortunately, the past decades have left their mark on the appearance of the unique valley. Over the years, the cover of tuffs began to gradually cool, and already the expedition of the French volcanologist Taziev, who visited the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes half a century later, found only five thousand fountains of steam in it, and even in those the height and temperature of the jets became much less. Not even forty years will pass, the venerable volcanologist sadly stated, as the lower layers of tuffs will cool down completely, and then this wonderful natural monument will lose its most spectacular decoration. Now the Internet allows us to travel across oceans and continents without getting up from the table. And the author took advantage of this opportunity, wanting to know what condition the valley is in today, and in his heart hoping that the sad forecast of the French scientist would not come true. Alas, Taziev was right. There is no more smoke in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes! But, despite this, the volcanic curiosities of Alaska have not become less attractive for travelers. And hundreds of tourists annually sail and fly to the northernmost state of the United States to see a fantastic valley, as if transferred to us from another planet, and a giant funnel on Mount Katmai - all what was left of the once formidable volcano after the worst eruption in history. Author: B.Wagner
▪ Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes
Artificial leather for touch emulation
15.04.2024 Petgugu Global cat litter
15.04.2024 The attractiveness of caring men
14.04.2024
▪ ESP32-SOLO-1 WiFi module for low-end IoT devices ▪ Differences between ancient and modern intestinal microflora
▪ site section Power Amplifiers. Article selection ▪ article Microeconomics. Crib ▪ article Upholsterer. Standard instruction on labor protection
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page