THE AMERICAN VOLCANO AND THE ENGLISH TIDAL WAVE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 20, 23 June 1874, Page 3

THE AMERICAN VOLCANO AND THE ENGLISH TIDAL WAVE.

[From the " New York Herald," March 21] The concurrence of the volcanic disturbance in North Carolina and the great tidal inundation of the east coast of England has raised the quest on whether the two phenomena have any connection. Sir Charles Lyell, the great geologist, has asserted that the American coast in Georgia and the Carolinas ip subject to subsidence ; and this fact, taken in connection with the rumblings of Bald Mountain, suggests an agitation extending far into the waters of the Atlantic. The undulation of the ocean from the great Lisbon earthquake produced a marine wave which crossed the whole Atlantic, 3728 miles in a straight line, and broke upon the West Indian shores of Barbadoes and Martinique ; and in 1854 the Japanese earthquake sent its sea wave across the North Pacific and piled up its waters on the Californian coast. It does not appear alarming that Bald Mountain should be in tremor, and yet we can infer nothing from the apparent tardiness of the mountain to relieve itself from internal pressure. The subterranean sounds which preceded the fury uprising of the Mexican volcano of Jorullo, which rose in a single night 1683 feet, had lasted from June till September. The first alarm subsided, and tranquility was restored a few days before the most tremendous eruption of modern history took place with terrific destruction.

It is, however, more probable that the great flood tide on the. English coast was due to meteorological causes. At this season the high winter atmospheric pressure amassed over Northern and Central Europe and Asia is breaking up, and it rolls off to the westward in the form of long continued and high easterly gales on the English sea front. In 1818 (March 4th) just such a tidal inundation occurred in the Thames and at Hull, Yarmouth, and other points on the Eastern coast, and extended to Plymouth, where it washed off many enormous stones of the breakwater. So powerful are the agencies of the sea here that Aldborough, as it formerly existed, lies twenty-four feet under water, almost every remnant having been engulfed and the inhabitants long sincvj forced to retreat inland and form a new site for their town. There is an undoubted physical connection between the quakings and commotions of the earth's crust and the commotions of the atmosphere over wide areas of bolh sea and earth, but the casual connection is obscure and mysterious. In the present instance it is altogether improbable that the tide in the Thames can be due to anything else than the stormy weather and easterly winds peculiar to the spring equinox. As already intimated, we may not have had the last of the volcanic upheaval in North Carolina, and it may take many months for the mountain to finish ita labour.