WATERSPOUT 5000 FEET HIGH

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 72, 18 December 1920, Page 11

WATERSPOUT 5000 FEET HIGH

1 Recently a gigantic cylindrical-shaped ■waterspout, 90 feet in circumference, shot out of tho sea to a height of 5000 feet some ten miles off Savoua. ' The phenomenon "was accompanied by a denso cloud of black smoke, which gradually assumed an opal colouring, and subsided after half .an hour, leaving tihe surface of the waters "covered with snowwhite ..foam. . 'Italian' seismologists believe the;outburst"to .be closely connected with the recent sApelinine earthquake, which also caused ii iiory orup'.fion on I'isanello Peak, .in the -Apuan Alps, the whole being attributed .to another undersea collapse of strata in tho eastern section of • tho Gulf' of Genoa. The whole of Italian earthquake history during t,'ha past .thirty-five years, oxpel'ts say, goes to prove that a seismic spectre is slowly advancing in the direction-of 'Northern Europe,- athwart the Swiss' Alps.' . lioinarkable evidence in support of this thesis'is "'now'divulged in- tfio fact that thirteen hours before the serious nature of the. last earthquake was known and realised ■i» : IVU.y itself the Italian Red Cross headquarters received a telegram from- the' international centre at Geneva offering to dispatch instant aid. And this came about because, on the basis of .the aforementioned hypothesis, the central meteorological institute at Zurich, where nineteen successive shocks were registifed in their." vivid passages across the' Alps, had been able to give warning as to the exact' locality'in which the catastrophe occurred; ,