Tidal waves? Mud volcanoes? The desert can surprise
From Aug. 10, 2013:
This was in the “Today in Arizona History” feature: “In 1891, an earthquake followed by a tidal wave damaged Cocopah Indian villages and other land.” Are you able to share any additional information on this event?
The tidal-wave part throws you, doesn’t it?
That’s understandable, because we hardly associate Arizona’s burning deserts and cool mountains with tidal waves, also called tsunamis.
However, some parts of our state, especially a large swath of southwest Arizona around Yuma and thereabouts, are not particularly stable, geologically speaking. That instability continues down into Baja California and the Gulf of California.
Earthquakes, huge mud volcanoes, even changes in the direction of the Colorado River have been fairly common over many years.
Col. David Allen, who became editor of the Arizona Sentinel in Yuma in 1890, described mud volcanoes of up to 15 feet in diameter and several feet tall:
“Some of these remain quiet for hours, others for minutes, while others boil quietly for days, and then, as if the steam and gases of the universe were bottled up, break forth hurling hundreds, yes, thousands of tons of boiling mud hundreds of feet into the air, with a force that shakes the ground for a long distance away.
“You can crawl up the sides of some of the cones and look down for 15, 20 and often 30 feet and watch the restless contents as they rise to the top and finally explode, scattering the hot mud and water about for 50 feet or more. Some will be dead for days, perhaps for weeks, when all at once they break out with a roar of a thousand thunders, shaking the hills.”
So, the 1892 event was hardly uncommon to the area in those days. The tidalwave part sounds a bit odd, but it’s conceivable that an earthquake in the Gulf of California could set off a tsunami capable of reaching the Colorado River.