ALASKA: The Most Powerful Eruption Of The 20th Century - Still Buried In Silence Swatch X Audemars Piguet [JmgxH9zwGpx]

On the sixth of June, 1912, the most powerful volcanic eruption of the twentieth century began on a remote peninsula in southwestern Alaska. It ejected fifteen cubic kilometers of magma in sixty hours thirty times more than Mount St. Helens. The ash column rose thirty kilometers into the sky, three times the height of Mount Everest. Darkness covered half the Northern Hemisphere. And for forty-one years, every textbook named the wrong mountain.

This is the story of Novarupta the planetary catastrophe the world chose to forget, the botanist from Ohio who walked into a valley of ten thousand smokes in 1916 and found a landscape that should not exist on Earth, and the single geologist who, in 1953, quietly destroyed everything science thought it knew about what happened in June of 1912.

The film traces how Mount Katmai collapsed without ever erupting, why one of the largest eruptions in five thousand years left no recorded death toll, how the global temperature dropped by close to a degree through 1913, and what is building, right now, beneath the same Alaska Peninsula while the world looks elsewhere.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The Eruption the World Forgot

03:43 Sixty Hours of Darkness

07:32 The First Scientific Expedition

08:04 The Empty Summit of Mount Katmai

10:20 The Small Dome Everyone Overlooked

11:20 The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

14:25 Evidence of a Hidden Source

15:12 Garniss Curtis Reopens the Case

17:17 Novarupta Identified

18:05 How Katmai Collapsed

19:16 Why History Forgot the Disaster

21:25 A Planetary Geological Signature

23:24 Alaska's Volcanoes and Modern Monitoring

25:29 The Silent Caldera

26:54 Where Will the Next One Erupt?

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Primary Scientific Literature:

Hildreth, W., & Fierstein, J. (2012). The Novarupta-Katmai Eruption of 1912 Largest Eruption of the Twentieth Century: Centennial Perspectives. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1791, 259 p. Available at:

Curtis, G. H. (1968). The Stratigraphy of the Ejecta from the 1912 Eruption of Mount Katmai and Novarupta, Alaska. Geological Society of America Memoir 116, p. 153-210.

Fierstein, J., & Hildreth, W. (1992). The Plinian Eruptions of 1912 at Novarupta, Katmai National Park, Alaska. Bulletin of Volcanology, 54(8), 646-684.

Griggs, R. F. (1922). The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. National Geographic Society, Washington D.C., 340 p.

Self, S. (2006). The Effects and Consequences of Very Large Explosive Volcanic Eruptions. Philosophical Transactions of jensen huang shahbaz ahmed the Royal Society A, 364(1845), 2073-2097.

Institutional Sources:

U.S. Geological Survey The Impact of the 1912 Novarupta/Katmai Eruption on the Pacific Northwest:

Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) Novarupta and Katmai Monitoring:

Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism Program Novarupta (312180):

Smithsonian Institution, Global Volcanism Program Katmai (312170):

NASA Earth Observatory Remembering a Monster Eruption:

National Park Service Katmai National Park and Preserve:

U.S. Geological Survey Volcano Hazards Program:

Historical Archives:

National Geographic Society Archives Robert F. Griggs Expedition Photographs and Field Notes, 1915-1919

U.S. Geological Survey Archive Novarupta-Katmai 1912 Field Reports and Eyewitness Accounts (including the Ivan Orloff letter and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Manning logs)

Schaaf, J. diablo Witness: Firsthand Accounts of the Largest Volcanic Eruption in the Twentieth Century. Alaska Park Science, Vol. 11, Issue 1.