What a Volcano can Do

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 12, 1863

What a Volcano can Do.

Cotopaxi, in 1738 threw its fiery rockets 3,000 feet above its crater; while, in 1744, the blazing mass, struggling for an outlet, roared so that its awful voice was heard a distance of more than 600 miles. In 1797, the crater of Tunguragua, one of the great peaks of the Andes flung out torrents of mud, which dammed up rivers, opened new lakes, and in valleys of 1,000 feet wide made deposits of 600 feet deep. The stream from Vesuvius which in 1737 passed through Torre del Greco, contained 33,600,000 cubic feet of solid matter; and in 1794, when Torre del Greco was destroyed a second time, the mass of lava amounted to 45,000,000 cubic feet. In 1679 Etna poured forth a flood which covered 84 square miles of surface, and measured nearly 100,000,000 cubic feet. On this occasion, the sand and scoria formed the Monte Rossi, near Nicholosa, a cone two miles in circumference, and 4,000 feet high.

The stream thrown out by Etna, in 1810, was in motion, at the rate of a yard a day, for nine months after the eruption; and it is on record, that the lava of the same mountain, after a terrible eruption, was not thoroughly cool and consolidated ten years after the event. In the eruption of Vesuvius, A. D. 79, the scoria and ashes vomited forth far exceeded the entire bulk of the mountain; while in 1660, Etna disgorged more than twenty times its own mass. Vesuvius has sent its ashes as far Constantinople, Syria, and Egypt; it hurled stones, eight pounds in weight, to Pompeii, a distance of six miles, while similar masses were tossed up 2,000 feet above its summit. Cotopaxi has projected a block of 109 cubic yards in volume, a distance of nine miles; and Sumbawa, in 1815, during the most terrible eruption on record, sent its ashes as far as Java, a distance of 300 miles of surface, and out of a population of 12,000 souls, only twenty escaped.—Recreative Science.