THE HUBBARD GLACIER, ALASKA 



299 



looks black in the pictures and which forms the terminus of Variegated 

 Glacier. Where the streams emerge from this area, eight men were 

 washing the gravels for gold and platinum, their tents being near the 

 base of the moraine-veneered gravel hills. Several earthquakes were 

 felt by them upon September 3, 1899, and on the intervening days till 

 September 10, when there was so severe a shock that seismographs re- 

 corded it throughout the world. Other earthquakes followed until 

 September 29. 



These prospectors tell us that on September 10 the ground shook and 

 cracked and undulated, that waves washed up on the shore, small glacial 

 ponds broke and caused floods, that the Hubbard Glacier crashed and 

 roared, and that its front was broken instantly. The hundreds of ice 

 towers shaken down at once and the great quantities of enormous ice- 

 bergs released from beneath the sea by the shaking of the submerged 

 part of the ice cliff so filled the bay that it seemed to them as if the 

 glacier itself advanced half a mile into the fiord. 



The men subsequently escaped with their lives and the glacier 

 seemed in 1905 to have recovered from its loss. Its better-known 

 neighbor, the Muir Glacier, 150 miles southeast in Glacier Bay, and 

 other ice tongues there, however, have had a period of retreat initiated 

 by this earthquake shaking in 1899 which has destroyed much of their 

 scenic interest and removed nearly a mile of ice a year from their 

 cliffs for the past eight years. 



In Yakutat Bay, however, these earthquakes of 1899, which were 



Fig. 6. Black ice of Hubbard Glacier margin laden with dirt and stones of basal ice. 

 Such ice as this performs work of glacial erosion. 



