HISTORY OF A TSUNAJMI — ROBERTS 337 



accounts. At that time Jim ITuscroft had lived on Cenotaph Island, 

 engaged in fishmg and prospecting, and he had built himself a cabhi 

 50 feet above the water on the southwest side of the island. He had 

 a companion that year of 193G, with whom he liad salted down 50 

 barrels of salmon, storing them temporarily in a shed near the cabin. 

 Huscrof t was gettmg breakfast on October 27 when a roar was heard, 

 "like the drone of 100 airplanes at low altitude," followed by a wave 

 sweeping down the bay. The two scrambled for safety on higher 

 ground, saving themselves only to see their season's catch of salmon 

 swept away and the cabin flooded. Its time had, however, not yet 

 come, for there it was destined to stand for another 22 years awaiting 

 an end in the greater, higher wave of 1958, 1 day before Professor 

 Mann was to have moved in with his men. 



At least one other great wave is known through clever interpreta- 

 tions of nature's telltale signs. The Geological Survey's Don Miller, 

 a highly respected specialist on Alaskan geology and one of the first 

 investigators of the 1958 wave, had noted some years ago that the 

 trees about the shores of the bay grew in remarkable zones of uniform 

 age, bordered by trim lines separating zones of diiferent ages. These 

 trim lines he traced along the flanks of the hills bordering the bay, 

 finding in them convincing evidence of successive scouring of the 

 slopes by wave inundations at different times and heights. Miller 

 found two definite trim lines, the lower having a maximum height 

 of 400 feet in one arm of the bay and lesser heights toward its en- 

 trance, and the other generally higher one with a greatest altitude 

 2 miles from Lituya's inner end. It was clear that the younger trim 

 line was created in 1936 by the wave seen by Huscroft. The other, 

 according to tree-ring studies, must have been in the winter of 1853- 

 54. Neither of these dates has a record of any important earthquakes 

 near Lituya; therefore these inundations, whatever their cause, are 

 not necessarily seismic sea waves. Miller presented these facts at an 

 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle during 

 1954, finding skepticism, despite his compelling evidence, that sea 

 waves could wash hundreds of feet high on a mountainside. The 

 doubts were shared by oceanographers and hydrographic surveyors. 

 They thought they knew the sea, but they little knew the power of 

 Lituya. 



Miller had discussed possible causes of such waves, finding unlikely 

 the release of an ice-dammed lake, or the fall of glacier ice into the 

 bay. He found the idea of earthquake uplieavals under the water 

 a tempting idea, but noted the absence of any earthquake records 

 for the years concerned. The speculation was made even more imag- 

 inative when some of Professor Mann's men later suggested that the 

 1958 wave, which followed a very violent quake indeed, might have 



