19121776 Club
Earth tears open on the Alaska Peninsula; sixty hours of ash bury the land
The eruption near Trident Volcano has expelled up to 3.6 cubic miles of ash and collapsed Mount Katmai's summit into a caldera 2,000 feet deep.
The summer of 1912 was already short on the Alaska Peninsula when the ground beneath Trident Volcano began to tear open. Starting June 6, a 60-hour eruption expelled 3.1 to 3.6 cubic miles of ash — thirty times the volume of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption — and collapsed the summit of nearby Mount Katmai into a caldera 2,000 feet deep. The blast left behind a plugged lava dome 295 feet high, a pyroclastic wasteland that a botanist would later name the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, and a new volcano called Novarupta…
