Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 349 pages of information about Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20).

Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 349 pages of information about Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20).
when it is remembered that there is no transference of the water itself at this enormous rate, but simply a transmission of motion (precisely as when in a high wind waves sweep rapidly over a cornfield, while yet each cornstalk remains fixed in the ground), it will be seen that the effects of the great sea-wave could only be perceived near the shore.  Even there, as we shall presently see, there was much to convey the impression that the land itself was rising and falling rather than that the deep was moved.  But among the hundreds of ships which were sailing upon the Pacific when its length and breadth were traversed by the great sea-wave, there was not one in which any unusual motion was perceived.

In somewhat less than three hours after the occurrence of the earthquake the ocean-wave inundated the port of Coquimbo, on the Chilean seaboard, some eight hundred miles from Arica.  An hour or so later it had reached Constitucion, four hundred and fifty miles farther south; and here for some three hours the sea rose and fell with strange violence.  Farther south, along the shore of Chile, even to the island of Chiloe, the shore-wave travelled, though with continually diminishing force, owing, doubtless, to the resistance which the irregularities of the shore opposed to its progress.

The northerly shore-wave seems to have been more considerable; and a moment’s study of a chart of the two Americas will show that this circumstance is highly significant.  When we remember that the principal effects of the land-shock were experienced within that angle which the Peruvian Andes form with the long north-and-south line of the Chilean and Bolivian Andes, we see at once that, had the centre of the subterranean action been near the scene where the most destructive effects were perceived, no sea-wave, or but a small one, could have been sent toward the shores of North America.  The projecting shores of northern Peru and Ecuador could not have failed to divert the sea-wave toward the west; and though a reflected wave might have reached California, it would only have been after a considerable interval of time, and with dimensions much less than those of the sea-wave which travelled southward.  When we see that, on the contrary, a wave of even greater proportions travelled toward the shores of North America, we seem forced to the conclusion that the centre of the subterranean action must have been so far to the west that the sea-wave generated by it had a free course to the shores of California.

Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that the wave which swept the shores of Southern California, rising upward of sixty feet above the ordinary sea-level, was absolutely the most imposing of all the indirect effects of the great earthquake.  When we consider that even in San Pedro Bay, fully five thousand miles from the centre of disturbance, a wave twice the height of an ordinary house rolled in with unspeakable violence only a few hours after the occurrence of the earth-throe, we are most strikingly impressed with the tremendous energy of the earth’s movement.

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Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.