Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/303

Rh looks black in the pictures and which forms the terminus of Variegated Glacier. Where the streams emerge from this area, eight men were washing the gravels for gold and platinum, their tents being near the base of the moraine-veneered gravel hills. Several earthquakes were felt by them upon September 3, 1899, and on the intervening days till September 10, when there was so severe a shock that seismographs recorded it throughout the world. Other earthquakes followed until September 29.

These prospectors tell us that on September 10 the ground shook and cracked and undulated, that waves washed up on the shore, small glacial ponds broke and caused floods, that the Hubbard Glacier crashed and roared, and that its front was broken instantly. The hundreds of ice towers shaken down at once and the great quantities of enormous icebergs released from beneath the sea by the shaking of the submerged part of the ice cliff so filled the bay that it seemed to them as if the glacier itself advanced half a mile into the fiord.

The men subsequently escaped with their lives and the glacier seemed in 1905 to have recovered from its loss. Its better-known neighbor, the Muir Glacier, 150 miles southeast in Glacier Bay, and other ice tongues there, however, have had a period of retreat initiated by this earthquake shaking in 1899 which has destroyed much of their scenic interest and removed nearly a mile of ice a year from their cliffs for the past eight years.

In Yakutat Bay, however, these earthquakes of 1899, which were