The Floor of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

Abstract

“THE amazing display of fumarole action over an area of some fifty square miles, which arose in association with the volcanic outbreak of Mt. Katmai in Alaska in 1912, was described and illustrated by its discoverer, R. F. Griggs, in NATURE, vol. 101, p. 497 (1918). In 1920 (vol. 104, p. 595), J. W. Shipley, of Winnipeg, chemist to the first Katmai expedition, gave an illustrated account of the “great mud-flow” through which the vapours fume, and he attributed the material to an eruption of Mt. Novarupta, preceding that of Katmai. He concluded that the spreading of the volcanic dust and scoriae down the valley towards the Bering Sea was assisted by rains, and that heat from below had hardened the surface and produced the cracks that traverse it.