THE
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
DECEMBER, 1906
| THE BOGOSLOFS |
By President DAVID STARR JORDAN and GEORGE ARCHIBALD CLARK
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN the southern portion of Bering Sea, about thirty-seven nautical miles northwest from the island of Unalaska, lies a group of small volcanic islets known as Bogoslof, in Russian, Joanna Bogoslova, St. John, the Theologian. There are now three of these, all of which have risen from the sea, hot and steaming, within historic times. An especial interest attaches to them just now from the fact that the third and largest of the group appeared at about the time of the great earthquake of April 18, 1906.
The possibility of a connection between the disturbances at Bogoslof and those which caused the California earthquake is heightened by the fact that the great earthquake rift, which extends through the Coast Range of California for a distance of 200 miles, follows a direction, which, if produced northward to Bering Sea, would pass near the islands of Bogoslof. Again this earthquake rift was largest, and its effects more violent, where it entered the sea in Mendocino County than at any other point throughout its course, the extent of the lateral movement along the crack increasing from about two feet in Monterey County to about 1612 feet at Point Arena, where it finally enters the sea.
In opposition to this view may be placed the improbability that an earthquake rift or fault would extend so far as from the center of California to Bering Sea, a distance of more than 2,000 miles, and through such great depths of water as intervene between Point Arena and Bogoslof. It is also stated that the evidence of the seismograph, so far as understood, favors the idea that the great earthquake was
