DISAPPEARING FALCON ISLAND

Evening Star, Issue 22632, 26 April 1937, Page 12

DISAPPEARING FALCON ISLAND

From the South Seas comes a report that the celebrated Falcon Island' will soon disappear again (says the New York Times’). This member cf the Tongan Group periodically emerges out of the blue-green waters of the south Pacific, looks around,' so to speal, arid, then goes back to Davy Jones’s 1 ickeiv The romantic islands of the South.; Seas are said to lie pn one iz the world’s main “ fault ” lines. The;r sur- J faces are , studded with craters, someextinct, others active, while quantities* of pumice, smoking and sterming*. often float around their shores, indt*eating that violent eruptions have'; taken place under the ocean bed. Falcon Island; with its flair for disappear;: ing, is apparently a -unique" evidence of subterranean disturbance. .2 The island was named after E.M.S. Falcon, which first sighted a break; ing reef on its location iti 1865. Thiswas nothing unusual in those where such reefs abound. But subset quent vessels reported a fair-sized* island where the Falcon Had n ).ticed breakers. In 1877 H.M.S. Sapphosighted the island with columns < f volcanic srnoke rising from it. Three years later the island vanished beneath the sea. '

Reefs around Falcon made apr roach' extremely difficult, and no oni attempted to investigate its cha -acter • close at hand. In 1885. its reappearance was reported by H.M.S. Fgeria, which described it as a mile and a-quarter long and 153 ft high. By April, 1894, the elusive . island had vanished again, rising to the suriace a few months later and displaying a length of three miles. In two year* it was gone. J In the late summer of 1927 the inhabitants of the island of Tongi tabu, about 56 miles distant from Falcon’* location, heard rumblings and saw smoke columns rising from the sea. Shortly thereafter. Falcon Island appeared again, this time a mile long and 350 ft high. By February of If 28-it was a mile and a-half long and 630 ft high. Up to that time no one had seb foot on the disappearing island. Scientist* from all over the world had co ne to observe ,if from a steamer’s deck Towards the end of 1928 a par:.y of American geologists, wit l ' ‘ 1 '« -e Consort of Tonga, succeeded in read* ing its shores by swimming tL.oUgtt the breakers. , ” The island was found to be circular in shape, with a hot lake of some 50 acres in its centre, shooting up si oweni of small stones. It was compo.- ed of a number of huge mounds of insubstantial volcanic ash deposited on.* coral reef, which formed an undersea crater’s month. Thus Falcon island is really a Jack-in-the-box mountain of pumice and ash, with a reef as a- permanent foundation, built up by subternuran eruptions and periodically eroded away by, wind, rain, and sea.