Mauna Loa | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 26, 1868

Mauna Loa.

THE Sandwich Islands, which have now a special interest as the scene of the grandest volcanic demonstration ever known, are thirteen in number, lying in a curve, of which the remotest points are 350 miles apart. Only seven of these are inhabited, the others being small, rocky, and barren. The largest and easternmost of the group, Hawaii, on which Mauna Loa, the greatest of volcanoes, is found, is about 4,000 square miles in extent, and very mountainous and volcanic. The summit of Mauna Loa is 13,758 feet above the level of the sea, but the chief crater of the mountain, which is three and one-half miles long by two and one-half broad, is on its southeast side, 4,104 feet above the sea. Ordinarily this contains a lake of liquid fire, the reflection of which upon the sky at night is glowing red. A second crater, 15,000 feet in length and 8,000 feet in width, on the summit, seems to be the one from which the present eruption began, but others evidently contributed their full share, especially the new opening in the mountain, which is two miles in length. Some idea of the terrible energy of the outbreak may be formed from the fact that the column of smoke sent up was nearly eight miles in height; the slope and part of the summit of a hill, 1,500 feet high, were lifted bodily and thrown through the air a distance of 1,000 feet; a mass of moist, red earth, a mile in width, was ejected along the surface of the mountain one mile in three minutes; during the severest shock the jar of the earth was so violent that immense precipices were shaken from their foundations and hurled down to the general level; a tidal wave from the sea, sixty feet high, was thrown a quarter of a mile inland; a continuous fissure of the mountain was open from the sea miles up the slope toward the crater, and there was shot up a new island four hundred feet above the sea. During the most violent earthquake shock, all living things, and all buildings, were, of course, thrown violently to the ground. The great tidal wave swept away houses, churches, cattle, and human beings, in a flood higher than the tops of the trees. The earth eruption whelmed thirty persons in a moment. Except that the whole district is comparatively uninhabited, the loss of life would have been frightful. As it was, about one hundred persons and a thousand cattle and horses lost their lives by the floods of fire, earth and

water. Fifteen hundred shocks of earthquake were felt in ten days, accompanied, in many instances, by tidal waves only less powerful than that already mentioned. A district thirty miles in circumference is laid waste by the desolating gases poured over everything from the bowels of the burning mountain. Six miles inland a vast stream of lava is running under ground, here and there sending up jets of fire a thousand feet high. Not only does the sea boil far and wide, and roll back and forth in awful tides, but its waters belch forth from the side of the mountain where the great ejection of red earth took place. The terror of such events to those even who escaped with life must have surpassed all the agonies of ordinary death by violence. What is a burning steamer to an island world, bursting with floods of fire, shaken into ruins, and threatened with the overwhelming inroad of the sea moved from its foundations? The spectacle must have been sublime beyond all description, if one could have looked on it calmly poised in mid-air, but what human brain could admit any other than emotions of horror when hell seemed opening from beneath, when the jar and crash of the earthquake shook off the heads of the mountains, and scattered cliffs and precipices as driven sand along the plain, when all living creatures and all human structures were thrown violently on the ground and a terrible tide of the sea rolled in over the ruin, while over all rose the vast column of smoke eight miles into the air! It is believed that the worst is already passed, but after what has already taken place it seems as if anything might happen from the activity of these volcanic forces. No such demonstration has occurred within the knowledge of human history.—Chicago Tribune.