SINCE KRAKATOA.

Timaru Herald, Volume XC, Issue 13296, 27 May 1907, Page 7

SINCE KRAKATOA.

A LIST OF CATASTROPHES. Mr Heilprin, an American, -writer, says that the' last 2Ej years haa been a period marked by an unusual number of volcanic eruptions and disastrous earthquakes, and the. list lie gives of them serves to bear out this statement. He- begins with* 1883, when, as he says, a cataclysm rent asunder 'the island of Krakatoa and caused a. shock throughout almost the entire mass of the earth. For' two-years or more "vre gazed upon the wopdmus red' and yellow after glows which marked the distribution of the highblown ash, and reflected the energy by which 40,000 or more persons were swept out of existence. At this same timej. or close to it, Casamicciola, in the island of-I-schia, fell. The ash from Krakatoa- lia<i hardly settled when we learned of the leawakening- of Tarawera, in New Zealand —a battered volcano, whose activities had been assumed to be ended for a full hundred years prior to June, 1886. The tourist then beheld, seemingly for the last time what had been designated the "eight wonder" of the world, the famous pink and white terraces of '. Rotomabana. Before the great rift that had formed', in this lake-basin had . entirely closed, came the disaster to Charleston, S. C. The major disturbances following the Carolina earthquake were chiefly in the field of Japan, where the number of shocks liot-erl •in the nineteen years between 1885 and 1903, as we are informed by the Japanese Earthquake Investigation Commission, was 27,485. The decapitation, in 1888, of Bandai-San, and the hurling of its vast mass over miles of inhabited lowland, was followed the next year by the great movement of Kumanoto, and two years later by perhaps the most far-reaching of all the recorded earthquakes of Japan, that known as Mino-Owari. Thousands of lives were destroyed in this shock, which the distinguished seismologist, Montessus- de Ballorc, characterizes a-s perhaps the most formidable earthquake of which history makes mention. Within three years came the tremendous earthquake of Tokio, 1894. A new era of catastrophism began with evidences of unrest in Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli, in a number of the volcanoes of central America and of Hawaiian Islands, aud in the mountains of Alaska, northern South Americai, in Colima, Mexico, and Wrangell, She,shalden, Iliamna. There had also been widely separated earthmovements, as those of the Phocian plain of Greece, of Ca-rintbia, and .of southeastern: Alaska. This last brought about the interesting displacements on the shores of Yakutat Bay and the disruption of the Muir glacier. The rapidly succeeding events of the year 1902 are still fresh in the minds of most people: the destruction by earthquake, on January 16, and on April 18, respectively, of considerable portions of the towns of Chilpancingo, in Mexico, and Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala ; the eruption on May 7, of the Sonfriere. of St. Vincent.; on May 8, of Pelee. with the annihilation of SaintPierre; on August-30, of the same volcano, with the raising of Morne-Rouge and other villages in Martinique; on October 24, of the volcano of Santa Marin, in Guatemala, with the further destruction of Quetzaltenango; the earthquakes of Sheinaka, and of Andijan, in farther Asri. The result- of it all was the death of bet-ween fifty and sixty thousand persons. The same year saw the foundering with nearly -all of its inhabitants of the Island of T-ori-Shima, in Japanese waters, as the result of a volcanic explosion. This event was soon followed by the first- of those vast disturbances in Formosa, which culminated in the catastrophes of March and April of 1906, when the greater part of the island was devastated and ■thousands

of lives sacrificed. Preceding these calamities by a few months,'and coincident with a paroxysmal awakening c? iStronrboli, was the earthquake of the Monteleone region of southern 'ltaly. The echoes of this- ha.d hardly died down when Vesuvius opened a new chapter in its history and closed it with the outbreak of April, 1906. which in violence and destructive effect is thought 1 a hare surpassed all other eruptions of that volcano, with the exception of those of the years 79 and 1631. Then the tragedy of Han Francisco was enacted followed in almost exactly four months by the still greater tragedy of Valparaiso, in Chili. Before the close of 1906—ayear which had also witnessed in its early days the minor disturbances of Esmeraldas, in Ecuador, of Buenaventura, in Colombia, and of Castries in the island of St. Lucia—a great part of the city of Arica lay in ruins. And now, with the beginning of the year 1907, the seismovolcanic registiy records the eruptions of Manna Loa and Etna, the continuing vast flows of lava from the Savai volcano in in the >Samoan Islands, and the appalling disaster which has converted the capital of the island of Jamaica into a mass of debris.' In all these events we sea the earth in the making —a process now, as evev, destructive. Within this quarter century the population 'has been diminished by not less than. 125,000 or 150,000 as the result of terrestrial- catastrophism. Possibly the figures should be even larger, for the records are incomplete.