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Title: My Experiments with Volcanoes
Author: Jaggar, Thomas A.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "My Experiments with Volcanoes" ***
VOLCANOES ***
_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
[Illustration: THOMAS A. JAGGAR
_January 24, 1871--January 17, 1953_]
_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
THOMAS A. JAGGAR
“_Through faith we understand
That the worlds were formed
By the word of God,
So that things which are seen
Were not made of things which do appear._”
MCMLVI
HAWAIIAN VOLCANO RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
HONOLULU
Copyright, 1956, by the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE COMMERCIAL PRINTING DIVISION OF THE
ADVERTISER PUBLISHING CO., LTD., HONOLULU
_Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr._
_January 24, 1871_
_January 17, 1953_
_It is the wish of the members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research
Association to share with others the experiences they have enjoyed in
their association with a truly great man._
_On October 5, 1911, through the efforts of Thomas Augustus Jaggar,
Jr., the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association was organized to assist
in the support of the newly created Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
at Kilauea, Hawaii. Accepting Dr. Jaggar’s sincere belief that a
systematic and continuous study of volcanoes would result in the
protection of life and property, the motto the Hawaiian Volcano
Research Association adopted was “Ne plus haustae aut obrutae
urbes.”_
_Dr. Jaggar arrived in Hawaii to take up his work at the Observatory
on January 17, 1912--exactly forty-one years before the day of his
death on January 17, 1953._
_Dr. Jaggar spent the last years of his life writing the history
of his sixty years of intensive, rugged, and hazardous scientific
achievements. During many of these years, and up to the completion
of his life’s history, it has been well stated that one of his most
valuable co-workers was his wife, Isabel, who shared with him the
disappointments, the joys of discovery, and much of the physical work.
It is the privilege of the officers, directors and members of the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association to present in book form this
story of Dr. Jaggar’s life._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. YOUNG SCIENTIST 3
II. IMITATING RIPPLEMARKS 32
III. EXPEDITION DECADE 55
IV. LIVING WITH VOLCANOES 85
V. EXPANSION DECADE 114
VI. PROPHECY AND HOPE 151
VII. ENVOI 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Thomas A. Jaggar _Frontis_
1. Experimental Geology Laboratory, Harvard
University, 1900 40
2. Fountain at edge of lava lake, May 17, 1917 41
3. Explosion cloud rising from Halemaumau, May 13, 1924 56
4. Crag in lava lake, January 23, 1918 57
5. Scientists of Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907 72
6. Captain George Seeley of the _Lydia_, 1907 73
7. Volcano House from Observatory, 1913 88
8. Island in Halemaumau lava lake, 1911 88
9. Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, 1912 89
10. Jaggar in seismograph vault beneath Observatory, 1916 89
11. Lava lake, showing bench, March 30, 1917 92
12. Halemaumau, showing lava lake and crags,
December 8, 1916 92
13. Jaggar holding pipe for sounding lava lake, 1917 93
14. River of Alika flow, Mauna Loa, October 6, 1917 100
15. Lava streaming into a sinkhole in Halemaumau lava
lake, July 7, 1917 100
16. Sakurajima Volcano, Japan, 1914 101
17. Fountain in lava lake, March 19, 1921 101
18. Isabel and Tom Jaggar in woods on Kilauea Volcano,
1923 120
19. Lava lake, fountains, and crags, March 20, 1921 121
20. Footprints in ash west of Mauna Iki 121
21. The _Honukai_ on Alaska beach, 1928 136
22. The _Ohiki_, first amphibian truck, 1928 136
23. Lava flow entering village of Hoopuloa, 1926 137
24. Lava flow of 1926 Mauna Loa eruption approaching
Hoopuloa 137
25. Jaggar in office of Observatory in “Tin House,” 1937 152
26. Bomb bursting on lava flow, December 27, 1935 153
27. Fountain in Halemaumau lava lake, May 23, 1917 168
28. Rare dome fountain, Kilauea Crater, March 20, 1921 169
29. Lava stream near rim of Halemaumau, February 9, 1921 169
CHARTS
Fluctuations of Halemaumau 113
Diagram of hypothetical globe section 179
PREFACE
This, my latest book, is another experiment. After sixty years of
volcanoes I have learned reversal of preconceived notions. Gradually I
have learned a totally different approach.
Shaler of Harvard was my inspirer, worker in the wonders of swamp and
ice and sea beaches. He set me to work and turned me loose; among books
and storm waves and men; especially among men, young men, ever reaping
something new. When I chose volcanoes for my field Shaler said, “You
have certainly selected the hardest.” It was a missionary field, for in
it people were being killed. But the products of internal earth fluids,
lava sea bottom, and vast Canadian ancient meltings, seemed to promise
real natural history. Volcanoes squirt up the very ancient stuff of the
solar system. Therein, I knew, must be something for future discovery.
The investigation of it was a clear field, if action was the goal.
My field education in geology was by Hague, the friend of Archibald
Geikie. By Emmons, skilled in ore deposits, and like Hague, trained by
Clarence King. By Bailey Willis, son of a poet, a superlative draftsman
and field man, and a brilliant experimenter. I went into the American
West with these men.
But this story of a volcano experimenter’s life would have reached
nowhere without Frank Alvord Perret, whom I first met on the slope
of Vesuvius in 1906. I knew at once that he was the world’s greatest
volcanologist. His skill was taking pictures. Mine was making
experiments. We agreed that these two skills in action would accomplish
what theories never could approach.
Perret was an inventor. He was an artist. He was a poet. He was a lover
of little children, and a worshiper of the music of the stars. Always
in delicate health, he circled the world. I was with him on Sakurajima,
on Kilauea, and on Montserrat. We did not agree. He had a vast love of
the romantic and bizarre. I was always a sceptic. But I thank Heaven
that his posthumous and nobly illustrated book reached magnificent
publication. His other books set a standard for all time for what the
field science of volcanoes shall be.
Perret and his camera were my models. He gave me all of his pictures
to use as I chose, and he and Tempest Anderson taught me volcano
photography. The latter, a Yorkshireman, was a British geographer and
we met on many volcanoes.
The purpose of this book is to tell what one man saw. I was actuated
by the will to learn. I wanted to copy ripplemarks on the bottom of
the sea, to understand what force pushed up Harney Peak as coarse
granite in the Black Hills, and to imitate Yellowstone geysers spouting
rhythmically. I wanted to know how cracks made the Cascade Mountains
pile up in a line.
Finally, I studied the San Francisco earthquake rift, sliding open
parallel to the shore for hundreds of miles. How thick was the crust
of the globe? Then I was called to Hawaii, islands on a ridge 1,700
miles long with volcanoes at one end, coral atolls at the other. And I
started a volcano experiment station at a very lucky time. Volcanoes
proved surprisingly amenable to experiment.
Forty years of this lead far away from Lyell’s geology--the geology
of uniform processes past and present--and from brachiopods and
trilobites. It lead to the ancestor of volcanoes. It lead to ancestral
gas. It lead back 10 billion years. A lava splash might be a live
souvenir of that age. More than anything else, this belief pointed our
instruments down, to the inside of the globe.
Six decades of a man’s life. Decades of geology, exploration,
foundation, outspreading, prediction, and fruition. The fact of
fruition makes the telling worth while. Geological education was
unbelief. Fruition was belief, verified by growth of unified science.
Culmination was not geology but science. Uniformity, evolution, and
symmetry are in nature. Value and number are human. I have been called
geologist and seismologist, volcanologist and geophysicist. I am none
of these. I am interested in the evolution of what Hoyle calls “This
quite incredible universe.” I am just as interested in Bergson’s
“Creative evolution” as in Hoyle and Lyttleton’s “New cosmology.”
And more interested in life than in either. The elements of fruition
are a thick earth crust, a comparable pattern for earth and moon,
and a mechanism for earth core. This is the story of sixty years of
volcaneering.
_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
CHAPTER I
Young Scientist
“_The gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the
onyx stone._”
It was the training of my youth under a father who loved God’s
out-of-doors that led me to Audubon’s birds; to tramping miles over
carries in Maine, Labrador, and Nova Scotia; and to fishing with
another eight year old, named Willie Grant.
When I was fourteen my father the Reverend Thomas Augustus Jaggar, took
our family to Europe, where botany and bird life were as much a part
of my education as geography, French, and Italian. And it was during
our visit in Italy that I made my first trip up Vesuvius. All of these
early interests convinced me that I wanted to be a naturalist.
It was Nathaniel Shaler at Harvard who told me to go and study the
beaches at Lynn and Nahant. So I walked and photographed, and measured
ripplemarks. I found a headland and a longshore accumulation with
scallops dwindling regularly along the high-tide level. I found swash
marks a foot across forming as the tide went out. On the dunes were
other sand waves beautifully regular.
Try it. Lie on your stomach and watch them. They are at right angles to
the wind. Smooth them out and see what the wind does. It piles little
flocculent heaps of course grains, each with an eddy downwind. The fine
stuff migrates up the slopes forward with the wind, backward on the
leeward side. The powder streams meet and lengthen the hills right and
left.
I watched the swash marks. The swash of the surf full of sand rushed up
the beach, cleared suddenly, and retreated, leaving a ridge along the
beach. This elevation became the tide limit, and a new series started
lower down. The swashes couldn’t climb over the ridge because the tide
was going out. And so for hours ridge after ridge was built.
I watched high-tide scallops, six feet apart, forming heaps at the
top of the beach. The swash waves ran into the bays between the heaps
during the flood hours, making a rush up and a suck down. The rush up
was muddy, the suck down was clear. Pebbles and sand were building up
on the sides of the small promontories. Each heap was horseshoe-shaped,
with the toe seaward. Forty or fifty crescents got smaller and more
sandy toward the middle of the beach. Here was rhythmic force making
repetition. The ripples and swash marks were repeated seaward. Clearly
the headland of rock was making pebbles and sand, sending pulsations
along the beach, instead of across it.
The ripplemarks were packed sand of the low-tide flat, formed totally
under water parallel to the waves. The back-and-forth motion of waves
made a pattern of sweep and eddy on the bottom. Were beaches, then,
things of habit like birds? Here were four kinds of sand waves, all
on one beach, all of them complicated by wind and water and tide; big
and little; shapely and regular. The beach was alive. It was building
from the end, it was rippling under wave action. It fed the wind as
it dried, and the wind made an exquisite dune pattern of the grains.
Perhaps beaches might be natural history, just as much as the birds
that inspired my interest in nature when I was eight years old.
The mystery of the beaches drove me to a new discovery; to the
university library, where I found French and English references to
ripplemarks. I found experiments, soundings, fossil sandstone ripples.
I learned that such great authors as the botanist De Candolle and Sir
George Darwin had interested themselves profoundly in what happened to
the sand grains. From the library I went to mud puddles in a tank and
to experimentation. Thus I found my way from beach to books and from
books to the making of baby beaches.
Later, at Harvard, zoology and botany were all cells and embryos
and the microscope. The habits of animals scarcely entered into our
studies. The natural history of Audubon and my boyhood had vanished.
The new words were phylogeny and cytology, development of the
individual, and cell development.
So in mineralogy the microscope and the tiny crystal governed; the
molecules of the crystal, and the chemical atoms of the molecule.
Science was headed toward the infinitely little, though later, by
way of the spectroscope, it was to leap to the infinitely big of the
heavens. I never learned to think the universe finite.
Professor Shaler wrote in 1893, “In the next century there will be a
state of science in which the unknown will be conceived as peopled with
powers whose existence is justly and necessarily inferred from the
knowledge which has been obtained from their manifestations. In other
words, it seems to me that the naturalist is most likely to approach
the position of the philosophical theologian by paths which at first
seemed to lie far apart from his domain.” Just this has happened in the
world of galaxies and electrons, producing Einstein and Planck, Jeans
and Eddington, Hubble and Hoyle. And I suspect that sea bottoms and
volcanoes are “peopled with powers” yet to be inferred.
Through Josiah Cooke and his wonders of projection apparatus; through
Cook’s nephew Oliver Huntington and his mineral crystals; through John
Eliot Wolff, whose assistant in optical microscopy I became; through
Robert Jackson with his museum collection technique and the hexagon
plates on fossil sea urchins; through all these I was introduced to the
laboratory collections and instruments. I found a fascinating world.
The theater, too, furthered my education. Like many Harvard students,
I “suped” for several great actors and actresses, among them Julia
Marlowe and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one play I even had a speaking
part: “My lord, Posthumus is without.” I also practiced legerdemain
as amateur assistant to Kellar and Hermann, who called me out of the
audience and pulled rabbits out of my coat and eggs out of my mouth.
Thus I learned of the psychology of audiences, how to experiment in
public, and how easily deluded is the average mind. Just so nature
may delude, if the scientist doesn’t keep his wits about him. But
I also learned the value of vivid demonstration before students. A
great exponent of this method of teaching is Professor Hubert Alyea of
Princeton. His chemical experimentation is marvellous. His chemistry
textbook is modern physical chemistry at its best. He demonstrates that
the art of the magician has come down to the twentieth century and that
even mathematical science may pass over to the layman. I suspect that
geophysics does not need to be buried under differential equations as
it is today. Certainly experimental volcanology made exciting at the
lecture table could work wonders in getting the globe explored.
At Harvard we were taught that geology was a detective history.
Vaguely, the same fossils were the same age. Vaguely, man had come from
a fish which climbed up on the land. It was much later that radio
activity of rocks was accepted as setting ages in millions of years.
King and Kelvin taught us that the age of the earth was 24 million
years and the sun was dying. A half century later, 2,000 million years
was the figure and the sun was heating up. Now cosmogonists talk easily
of 10,000 million years as an item in star history. I have learned that
one can have any theory he chooses, and that some new discovery will
probably reverse it. A discovery is the uncovering of an appealing,
bright idea.
The idea of geology as history based on Darwin’s evolution never took
root in my consciousness. Geology to me is the science of the globe.
Science studies how things work, how things change, how they accomplish
what they do, how they grow, and how they compare. It does not study
the “why,” or the necessity for an origin of anything. Originating is
eternally in progress. Astronomy today is giving up origins. History
based on a few relics seems futile. Relics, or specimens, must be
compared with action.
Guessing that we must have come from a fish, with no evolution sequence
in successive strata and no mammals whatever in very ancient strata
and no preservation of soft creatures possible, seems a contradiction
of Darwin’s own testimony. He insisted on “the imperfection of the
geological record.” But he had no conception that the Cambrian was
500 million years B.C., nor that the fiery Keewatin of Lake Superior
was 1,800 million years B.C. Darwin knew that the bivalve brachiopod
_Lingula_, now alive in quiet seas, is exactly the same today as
it was then.
_Lingula_ is found fossilized in the intermediate geologic
eras. We have no proof that intelligent beings in ships from unknown
lands did not dredge him up in Cambrian time. Five hundred million
years is so absurdly long that there may have been at least twenty
different flowerings of intelligence on the earth, having no relation
to us. Continents are places of catastrophe. Sea bottoms are places
of constancy. Man lives on continents, and his fossilized bones are
short-lived.
If each Adam preceded a new humankind of 100,000 years, the time since
the Cambrian allows for 5,000 deluges, or eruptive conflagrations.
Each one would exterminate that particular Adam’s descendants. If
glacial periods are deluges, we know their scratched boulders back to
400 million years before _Lingula_. These older ice sheets were
in Canada. But we know fiery floods of lava 1,300 million years before
_Lingula_, on the north shore of Lake Superior.
We have not one particle of evidence that before the race was killed
off primordial volcanologists, who were very queer looking chaps, might
have studied those eruptions with expensive instruments. Certainly they
had a lot of copper at their disposal. Perhaps the great lakes were a
continental sea, and some ancestor of _Lingula_ was scooped up for
food by those doomed beings.
But geology at Harvard was not all history. When R. A. Daly and I
were graduate students, we worked on Ascutney Mountain, studying
ancient fire-made granites. The hills were lumps of the ancient
pastes crystallized. The crystals were feldspars, mica, quartz, and
iron oxides. Oldest prisms were lime phosphate, the mineral apatite
containing imprisoned brown glass. How did the several kinds of red
hot paste invade the altered sedimentary slates? Was brown glass the
ancestor? Lava is brown glass. Some of the phosphate crystals contain
gas bubbles and liquids. Daly, who published the work, found that
ancient lava pushed up while deep in the claystones, and shattered a
hole by heat and cracking. The pieces sank and the paste or gas foam
was injected in successive lumps. Each new lump had more silica.
Apparently the fragments melted--some of the old sediments of Lower
Silurian age were silica--and the invading magma was contaminated with
more and more molten sand. So basalt turned into granite. Thus Ascutney
Mountain in Vermont became a classic place for hot fluids squirting up
and recrystallizing the under rock of New England. It made eventually,
by erosion, the Connecticut River landscape.
Daly became a specialist on granites, I became a specialist on lavas.
We became professors at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Something new came into world geology when Wheeler, Hayden, King,
Powell, Gilbert, and Dutton surveyed the Utah block fault mountains and
the Rockies. They revealed the globe with a crust of gigantic cracked
deep prisms, and an eroding surface. Davis of Harvard, the physical
geographer, was at his zenith, and from Powell’s and Gilbert’s example
came his classified river valleys. He devised systems of splendid
topographic maps and models, and demonstrations of glacier steam beds
and deltas. He made surface wear and dumping debris a living thing, and
the land forms a record of it.
Thus I was overjoyed when, in 1893, I received the summons to go with
Arnold Hague to the land of geysers, colorful canyon, old volcanoes,
and the source rivers of the Mississippi. My job was to take pictures
with a huge camera, but I posed as microscope man, too. I climbed the
highest peaks of the Absaroka Range, and I traveled with Hague and a
mule packtrain back and forth across the range, collecting specimens.
Hague had been with Clarence King during the 40th Parallel Survey for
the Union Pacific railroads.
Hague’s field method was to climb a peak, study the view, and ponder
the visible strata, dikes, valleys, escarpments, and pinnacles for
miles around, thus formulating each problem. Then we moved camp to a
new place to solve the problem.
We sought the ancient craters. The volcanic tuffs and agglomerates
covered thousands of square miles, dating from 30 million years ago
and continuing outpourings until 2 million years ago, and there were
lava flows, ropy or bouldery. Here were petrified trees; there could
be found fossil leaves. The tree species told the formation ages of
Tertiary time. Many peaks appeared but no volcano cones. The craters
had been over what now were eroded dikes, or fissure fillings of lava,
which stood out in crisscrossing walls. Where they clustered, ores
were found: the Sunlight, Crandall Creek, and Stinking Water mining
claims. These were the roots of lost volcanoes, lost by decay, tumble,
rainfall, glaciers, and rivers. Underneath the mountainous lavas,
appeared white marine limestone cliffs, and still lower appeared
ancient granite gneiss.
The geology of ancient seabeds, fossils, eruptions, and glaciers was
painted on a whole panorama of mountains and river basins. From a
mountain top silently gazing through field glasses--which he was always
losing and recovering--Hague would look around for hours. “That ledge
is the Madison limestone, those are the Red Beds, those pink, rounded
hills are Archean granites.”
After a day of packtrain travel I was free to fish or hunt. It was a
privilege to hunt with Anderson, the old negro cook, whose gray beard
and bushy white wool belied his keen eyes. He had been a slave, later
a soldier in General Custer’s Big Horn expedition, and a pioneer and
hunter. His father had been massacred by Indians, and Anderson swore he
would kill any Indian on sight.
One of our hunting trips near Crandall Creek was especially memorable.
“Mr. Jaggar, I smell sheep up on that shelf!”, said Anderson. And he
climbed up a pine tree growing at the bottom against the limestone
cliff. He laid his Winchester rifle on top of the steep slide rock
slope at the foot of the tree, muzzle upward, butt end downhill. “You
mind my gun, I’ll climb out on a limb against the cliff and get on
the shelf, and yo’ all hand the gun up to me.” He reached the shelf,
made of Cambrian limestone of trilobite fame, and sitting over on it
immediately knocked down slabs of rock. They fell on the gun which
started to slide down the slope. I grabbed for the muzzle pointed
toward my throat, the stock wiggling right and left. The gun went
off and I felt a nick in my ankle. Anderson had left a cartridge in
the barrel with the hammer resting on it, but my nick was made by a
pebble ploughed up by the bullet. So the trilobites took a shot at me.
“Well, this is natural history,” I murmured. Old Anderson was less
philosophical. He cussed me for letting the rifle kick itself far down
among the trees.
Elk, grouse, blacktail deer, antelope, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs,
skunks, badgers, owls, whistling martens, wild sheep, and the grizzlies
we never saw alive were all part of the great West. So were the bucking
cayuses and kicking mules with which we lived, numerous ranchers,
prospectors, soldiers, sportsmen, and guides. Once we were joined by a
sheriff looking for an escaped desperado from Red Lodge Prison.
Just before I left the Yellowstone, I visited the hot springs and
geysers. With more than 4,000 vents, the geyser basins are steaming
areas in the forest. At Mammoth, the carbonate terraces show exquisite
ripples and sculptured cups in steps. One hotter group of waters,
through the igneous lavas and granites, becomes full of silica and
deposits sinter. The other, through limestones, deposits travertine.
The alkaline siliceous waters deposit such strong silica edifices
as to hold the explosive steam boilers of the geysers. Both silica
and lime deposits are led to gorgeous sculpturing and to brilliant
colors at their borders caused by the blue-green algae, which live at
temperatures up to 150° Fahrenheit.
The boiling waters have been superheated volcanically since Tertiary
volcano times, when first dark magnesian, and afterwards siliceous,
lavas were ejected. Here is the same order Daly and I found in Vermont;
the dark rocks first, rifting through slate, the granites last, with
quartz cutting the dark rocks. The cavities among the Yellowstone
geysers show quartz.
The surprise to me was that the geyser basins were eternally breaking
down, cracking, dissolving, making new geysers in the forest. Instead
of being chiefly deposition, the hot spring action is chiefly erosion.
It is a vast cycle of hot magma gases and rainwaters from Tertiary
times to now; from 20 million years ago to now. A long time.
Remember that the last retreat of the glacier-period ice was only
20,000 years ago. That ice found the geyser basins in full swing. A
thousand times farther back were the Yellowstone volcanoes in full
activity, and they kept going while the continent lifted and pushed
the Gulf of Mexico from the Great Plains to where it is now. And yet
that 20 million years was only a twenty-fifth of the time back to the
trilobites, and a Yellowstone seabottom bed of that age is under all
the lavas. Our schoolbook history is pretty small.
In all directions the ground of Norris Geyser Basin is cracking and
changing. The geysers are utterly unreliable, here today and mere hot
springs or empty cracks tomorrow. Old Faithful intervals range from
thirty-eight to eighty-one minutes, quite irregular. The New Crater
was a squirting, scalding jet which killed the trees and vegetation
all about. Its seemingly regular, twenty-five foot jets shot up at
forty-five degrees inclination about every three minutes. Later, in
1922, I was to find this geyser totally different. Careful studies
have shown that water of this elevation boils at 199° Fahrenheit; one
geyser gave off 253° Fahrenheit, or fifty-four degrees of superheat,
seventy-two feet down its shaft. This is the only place of superheated
waters known on earth. The roaring steam of the Black Growler has
eighty-one degrees of superheat. The quantity of carbon, sulfur, and
chlorine in the waters is so excessive, though it is very small in the
rock, that a source of heat from volcanic gas is certain.
The net result is thousands of boiling springs of rainwater, soaking a
sponge of rhyolite rock over hundreds of square miles, erupting over a
remnant volcanic furnace beneath, and eroding and dissolving out basins
at the headwaters of the Mississippi.
Here is an object lesson in volcanic erosion. Here is a perpetual
eruption of volcanic gases which has dwindled after millions of years
of melting siliceous and carbonaceous rocks. It recrystallizes them
as andesites, rhyolites, and obsidians, and mixes deep steam with
rainwater to do the work of erosion and water solution and of deposits,
over a vent at the heart of the Rocky Mountains. As usual, this vent
has cluttered itself from age to age with the melt of the deep earth
crust, namely basalt, which Yellowstone’s lavas show repeatedly from
bottom to top of its accumulations. And as usual, the vents themselves
are hard to recognize, buried as they are under heapings.
In 1897 I returned to the Yellowstone, where I visited Death Gulch,
a dismal solfataric gully with a trickle of cold, acid water near
Cache Creek. Accompanied by Dr. F. P. King, I climbed up this gorge,
where there was a bad smell and burning oppression of the lungs from
hydrogen sulfide. It was a V-shaped trench 50 feet deep in volcanic
puddingstones, whitened with alum and epsom salts. Bubbles rose through
the water in many places.
The remains of eight big bears were found in the gorge, clustered in
one place. The latest victim was a young grizzly with a clot of blood
staining his nostrils from his last hemorrhage. Poison gas had killed
him. Earlier visitors had found squirrels, hares, and butterflies and
other insects killed by gas. Probably both sulfuretted hydrogen and
carbonic acid gas do murder in still weather. However, we had the wind
blowing up the gulch. We lit matches in hollows and carbon dioxide did
not extinguish them. The same thing had happened when Mr. Weed in 1888
tested for carbon dioxide at Death Gulch.
Now, knowing the case of Mr. Clive, the Englishman, and his guide,
Wylie, who were overwhelmed by hydrogen sulfide while photographing
Boiling Lake on December 10, 1901, it looks to me as though the
rotten-egg smell may play a large part in the killings at Death
Gulch, as well as in some poison tragedies of Java. Boiling Lake is
at the south end of Dominica Island north of Martinique. There are
four solfataras and the scalding lake, the latter near the interior
village of Laudat, at the head of a volcanic valley, and four miles
on horseback from Roseau, a shore town southwest. When Mr. Clive,
Wylie, and Matson--another native guide--looked down at the hot pool,
Matson noticed it boiling without vapor, and called attention to the
danger. However, they went on to the lake. Matson later reported, “I
inhaled something offensive and felt as if I was dying. I ran, and lost
consciousness. I came to in a ravine and found Wylie lying where I had
left him.” Clive, refusing to leave Wylie, sent Matson for help, but
when rescue parties arrived, both men were dead.
At Boiling Lake there was no eruption, no vapor, only the very bad
smell. All the symptoms indicated a sudden change in the pool from
steam to excessive hydrogen sulfide. And five months later, at Pelée
across the channel from Dominica, excessive hydrogen sulfide set off
the great explosions.
In view of these phenomena it seems likely that Death Gulch in the
Yellowstone also kills with sulfur gas, the odor of which is so strong
there. Day and Allen associate hydrogen sulfide with the limited
Yellowstone sulfate areas, of small water discharged, and such is
Death Gulch. One part hydrogen sulfide in 200 parts of air is fatal to
mammals, and it may come up in gushes. Carbonic acid asphyxiates, but
it is not a poison and when it is free is so heavy as to mix with air
very little. Death Gulch is not a place of lime deposition like Mammoth
Hot Springs, where carbonated water decomposes underlying limestone.
Europe was to be the next step in my education. As assistant in
petrography and graduate student at Harvard, I was encouraged by
Wolff to plan for Heidelberg. There I was to find H. Rosenbusch, who
had put system into the infinite series of minerals in rocks. But my
journey to Heidelberg began with a geography congress in London and
a geology congress in Zurich. These meetings were with such bigwigs
as Lord Curzon, Henry M. Stanley, and famous arctic explorers, and I
was surprised to find that all these VIP’s looked like ordinary men.
Unfortunately for me, this realization came a little late.
Looking for a luncheon beer garden in Zurich, I picked up a small
side-whiskered Englishman, and suggested we join a group of foreign
geologists in a buffet. “Oh no,” he replied, “no beer. I only want a
cup of tea and a biscuit.” So I left him and crudely and youthfully
joined the younger men in the beer parlor for sauerkraut and wienies
and Munich beer. Later at the opening meeting, the Geological Congress
was addressed in French by the famous Sir Archibald Geikie, Director
General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, and the
author of “The textbook of geology,” the greatest of geology manuals.
He was my pickup, whom I had deserted at lunch time. I had lost the
opportunity of a lifetime, for a tête-a-tête with the world’s most
famous geologist.
Before going to Munich, Harry Gummeré of Haverford and I trekked
through Denmark in a third class carriage amid peasants smoking
fearful-smelling tobacco in long china-bowl pipes. Then we crossed to
Christiansand in Norway. We traversed the fjords north to Trondhjem
by rowboat, in “stoolcars” with little girl drivers. Then we traveled
on foot, and everywhere in rain. Waterfalls were so numerous we never
wanted to hear of another one. We climbed up to Stalheim from Bergen,
saw the Jordalsknut, a magnificent half dome in a vast granite canyon
like Yosemite. We rowed around the Kaiser’s yacht in the Nordfjord,
and tried to pick him out on deck. We got soaked with days of rain in
a backcountry village, and went to the inn, got into bed, and sent our
clothing to dry in the kitchen.
The local Norwegian bank looked at our Brown Brothers letter of credit
and said, “Nothing doing,” which inspired us to compose a poem:
We’re so happy we don’t know what to do.
We haven’t any clothes to wear,
We’re wet all through and through.
We haven’t any money and we ought to feel quite blue
But we don’t, we feel so happy, we don’t know what to do.
Fortunately, the innkeeper was amused by our poem and sympathetic
toward our plight. He took our IOU’s and told us we could have all the
money we wanted and to send it back when we reached Trondhjem.
From Trondhjem we crossed Scandinavia by rail to Stockholm, like Venice
a city of canals. Delightful maiden ladies kept the breakfast place
and served us with many queer breads, goats’-milk cheese, and sublime
cleanliness. The canal boat took us across Sweden to Göteborg. It was
a little steamer, from the porthole of which we saw a cow comfortably
grazing a few feet away. And we saw and were impressed by the superb
landscaping of lawns, by tree horticulture, and by lock masonry. In
both Norway and Sweden the people talked English, the national costumes
were delightful, the girls were pretty, and everybody was clean and
democratic.
The winter semester of 1894–1895 was spent in Munich, where Groth’s
mineral and crystal collections were the main attraction, and where I
heard the lectures of Sir Doktor Privy-Councillor Knight Karl A. von
Zittel, author of six huge volumes on fossil shells, fossil horses,
fossil dragons, and fossil trees, and a history of geology. We once saw
him rigged out in gold braid and an admiral’s fore-and-aft cocked hat
for some imperial function.
He was a forceful lecturer. The assistant arranged diagrams on the
rack, the students gathered, and then his majesty entered. Everyone
rose and Zittel held forth with a rattan pointer: “Es gibt, meine
Herren, ein ganze anzahl von ausgezeichnete beobachten über” and so
forth. Then he whacked the drawings, and made graceful allusion to
American investigators as he explained a giant stegosaurus.
In the “Heidelberger Geologischer Panoptikum,” as an attic room on the
Neckar was called, I afterwards posted a ditty based on “Ole Uncle Ned”:
There was an Orthopod
Stegosaurus Marshii
Laid him down on his Jurassic bed.
He had a row of shovels down the middle of his back
But he didn’t have a very big head.
_Chorus_:
Hammer, hammer, hammer on the stone
Chisel, chisel, chisel on the bone
There’s no more rest for poor old Steg
For Zittel couldn’t leave him alone.
Heidelberg days were memorable for the lectures of Rosenbusch,
Goldschmidt, and Osann; for laboratory system; and for long collection
trips. With specimen bag and hammer, we went to Saxony, Bohemia and
the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest, and the Oberwald. I had a
large, pointed hammer named Umslopagaas, after Rider Haggard’s hero who
wielded such a weapon. When Palache and Brock and I were in a quarry
and an unwieldy boulder had to be broken, the yell arose, “Umslopagaas
come quick!” The collection of rock specimens at “classical”
localities, meant the textbook rocks of Rosenbusch, or of Zirkel of
Leipzig. Every student dreamed of having a private collection.
After the Ascutney experience, I was impressed by Schneeberg granite
in Saxony. At the border of the granite are slates, baked in zones
back from the granite edge: hard horn rock, spotted rock, mica rock,
then claystone. The colored geological map of Saxony was superb. This
includes the mining district of the birthplace of geology in Europe,
where in Freiberg, A. G. Werner had founded an arbitrary science in
the eighteenth century, imagining granites to be crystallized from a
world-wide ocean.
In one place I found a hand specimen with tiny granite tongues which
had split their way, as liquid as alcohol, between the blackened folia
of slate. The granite itself was all crystals, but here was proof of
a fluid when the granite penetrated. What was it, how hot was it, a
gas, a foam, a paste, or a liquid? The time this occurred was millions
of years before Kaiser Wilhelm. I had found something similar in
the Yellowstone, the little dikes of sylvan intrusives in Absaroka
Mountains. The smallest tongues showed the most perfect granite in the
microscope, of Tertiary intrusive stocks. It was as though in these
siliceous invasions of basaltic agglomerate, nature made its best
experimental granitization on a very small scale.
We soaked up the surprises of European scholarship. We pored over books
in the bookshops, loaded ourselves with microscopes, goniometers, and
four-volume textbooks. We found all the science of Europe in attractive
unbound form and had it bound in half morocco. Mineral dealers were
everywhere, offering beautifully labeled specimens. All things in
Europe seemed inexpensive.
Rosenbusch, who had big brown eyes and a gray beard, came to look over
my work on feldspar, in his laboratory. When I asked enthusiastically
what make and model of German microscope I ought to buy, he turned me
around and looked deep into my eyes: “Herr Jaggar,” he said, “Es is
nicht das Mikroskop, es ist der Mensch.”
Another time he produced a dense black rock and said to Matteucci of
Vesuvius, to Palache, and to me, “You are geologists. What for a rock
is that?” We, of course, got it wrong, thinking it must be a lava. It
turned out to be a black limestone, easily identified, had we scratched
it instead of putting our lenses on it. He chuckled at the gullibility
of geologists.
Osann gave a course on petrographic chemistry which met at 7
A.M.! We usually got there, but once or twice the teacher
himself was late. We would gather around Osann, who was fat and genial,
and say “Herr Professor, how about some sausages and beer and a little
breakfast?” He always replied “Why not? There is plenty of time,” and
we sought the nearest cafe.
Some professors got up at two o’clock in the morning and wrote, taking
advantage of the quiet hours. Rosenbusch had a high desk and wrote
standing up. Their objectives were to produce enormous tomes listing
all crystals and all rocks and all publications, in all languages. This
is German science. Its password is “thoroughness.”
The net effect of German scholarship on me was a feeling of irksomeness
and resentment, but what I learned of thoroughness and of mechanisms
I value extremely. I honor the memory of those teachers, and I
honor their pupils, who by specialism have penetrated deeper and
deeper into the smaller and smaller things of matter. The ultimate
is the background material between the galaxies of the universe and
the unknown background particles of life. But for me, the middle
field--the development of mountains, rivers and sea bottoms, continents
and volcanoes, earthquakes and depressions of land, the sky, clouds,
and waters--all the outside world, needed experimental engineers.
Intermediate bigger things like the crust of the earth and moon, within
the time that is measured in human years, seemed to be neglected by
science, and yet to be accessible to the giant power of engineering.
Rosenbusch set me at one feldspar specimen for an entire summer. I
wanted things moving, changing, and evolving. I wanted a narrative of
that tabular feldspar crystallizing, or better, a dish wherein to watch
it crystallize. To me it seemed that Faraday or Pasteur would have
described the quality of a moving feldspar medium in pressure, heat,
gas, liquid, or changing particles. The qualitative investigator would
have a furnace and make many trials and produce synthetic feldspar, and
he would write a narrative approximating what the under earth must do.
He would make melt or froth conditions successful in imitating such
rocks as basalt or granite, using hot gases.
The problem of basalt and granite began to be recognized in the
eighteenth century. Werner guessed, and taught his pupils, that
these rocks were sea bottom deposits. A few determined Europeans
in the nineteenth century--Fouqué and Michel-Lévy, Doelter, and
Morozewicz--melted mineral mixtures and made igneous rocks by cooling
them. The motive was approximation; the result was good and useful.
No one reached melting by hot gases and absorption of hot gases. No
one made granite. Volcanic rocks were imitated approximately as to
crystals, but not as to gases. And the whole of volcanism was later
proved to be gases, as is the whole of physics and astronomy and
biology. Man is largely a puff of hydrogen.
These visions were what I brought back from Europe, along with much
pondering of such experimenters as Daubrée, Lacroix, Stanislas
Meunier, Reyer, and my teacher Goldschmidt, all brilliant imitators
of the earth. Goldschmidt gave a course in blowpipe analysis which
was completely original. His methods went far beyond those of his
predecessors.
Meanwhile, W. M. Davis had written me to come home to Harvard and give
the course in field geological surveying. This was in 1895–1896.
My teaching was devised to cut up the map of Boston. I pasted the
pieces in notebooks and sent out students in pairs, equipped with
map books. They were to keep pencils sharp, use a uniform system, and
hammer off specimens from ledges. They were to examine the rock under
a magnifying glass, then name it; but I cautioned them, “If you don’t
know the rock, call it ‘FRDK, funny rock don’t know.’” Students marked
the page opposite each map with symbols for the rocks on that map. Then
they came together in seminar, and we made a colored map of the geology
of Boston. Laurence La Forge, now professor at Tufts College, was my
student and later my assistant. He published the results of our work
many years after the study was made.
When teaching was extended into experimental geology and geology of
the United States, laboratories were set up in the basement of Agassiz
Museum and I was given carte blanche to furnish them. I equipped them
with a water tank, a gas furnace for melting and recrystallizing
minerals, pressure machines, an air compressor, and motors. Students
were assigned experiments with wax, plaster, cement, sands, coal dust,
and marble dust. They imitated strata, rivers, deltas, intrusions, and
mountain folds, and familiarized themselves with the way solids break.
Each man took a special arbeit for his final thesis, and worked by
himself with clock or metronome, thermometer or pressure gauge,
spring balance or centimeter scale, and he reviewed the experiments
of the past. Prominent among my students were Ralph Stone, afterwards
state geologist for Pennsylvania; Vernon Marsters of Indiana; Julius
Eggleston of Riverside, California; and Ernest Howe of Yale.
In the course on United States geology were such students as Amadeus
Grabau who became leading paleontologist of China; Stefansson the
arctic explorer; Ellsworth Huntington, afterwards the distinguished
Yale author and geographer; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With so
many Roosevelts at Harvard, I quite forgot my famous student until
his first visit to Hawaii, in 1934. Mr. Roosevelt had remembered his
geology professor, though, and an aide phoned the Volcano headquarters
to request that I be at Hilo when the President’s ship arrived.
The United States geology course was the product of my two seasons in
the Yellowstone and my interest in the great Hayden, King, and Powell
surveys. The youthful geologists needed to know the continent and its
details.
The big Washington monographs and folios have made a gallery of
underground pictures of one of the greatest continents, and these are
supplemented by the work of the Canadian geologists. America shows
Appalachian folds and thrusts, fault blocks of the Utah plateaus, and
eruptives of the Rockies. It contains the amazing metamorphism of very
recently upheaved sea beds along the Pacific shore. It records the
remnant sea bottoms and dust-storm deposits of the vast plains, bearing
beside the obvious buffalo skulls, the old bones of whales, reptiles,
and rhinos.
Superposed on all this is so-called physiography, the science of
falling materials and water, the rotting of the lands, and the
accumulation of debris. A net of rivers over ground and under ground is
what stands out, and the living river pattern has changed incessantly
through the ages. But through and over it is a moving process of the
ages, kinetic, alive with glaciers, hot springs, underground heat or
surface cold, soaking rains and rushing storms, earthquake and uplift,
fault motions and sinkings. Everything is in motion to one who senses
slow motion, occasionally breaking down resistance and charging ahead.
And geology is a sense of slow motion and its jumps for 5 million
years, with this human year, here and now, of great importance.
Geology, like humanity, is not just history.
Under all are gas and heat; Saratoga Springs, Yellowstone, the Comstock
Lode, and Mount Shasta. The series gets hotter from New York to
California. And out at sea the refuse of the continent is dumping all
day long. And science is anxiously waiting to learn how hot sea bottom
is.
In addition to laboratory work, I wanted to conduct cross-country hikes
for such subjects as botany, geology, and zoology in the forests and
swamps and hills of Massachusetts. And it was in connection with these
plans that I learned a lesson in simplicity. I went to President Eliot,
remembering the high sounding “Pierian Sodality” name for the college
orchestra, to get a classical calendar name for my cross-country
tramps. He said, “What, in brief, is your idea?” I replied, “In
ordinary language they will be natural history walks.” He took a pen
and said, “Why not this for a name?” On the paper was written “Natural
History Walks.”
An important part of our curriculum was the Tuesday evening geological
conference, during which any graduate worker could give a paper. To
these conferences came, at different times, Brooks, Spurr, Schrader,
Goodrich, Mendenhall, P. S. Smith, Mansfield, Matthes, Lane, Crosby,
Barton, Douglas Johnson, Daly, and all the Harvard staff. The men
got confidence in public speaking and exhibiting, and the professors
commented in kindly fashion. Topics ranged from summer work in the far
west and current studies in meteorology under Ward to petrographic or
experimental work with projection apparatus under Wolff and me. Jackson
and Hyatt brought in fossils, and the Geological Survey was always in
evidence as a goal for young men, or a subject for review. Shaler’s
comments were accompanied by a string of good stories. The conferences
taught students how to teach by making them speak in public. It was one
of Shaler’s most productive inventions, and has been copied far and
wide.
Walcott in the Survey looked to Harvard to produce field mappers of
rocks. Graduate students had the choice between process and history,
geography linked to school teaching, microscopical petrography and
crystallography linked to the minerals and rock collections, or
evolution linked to museums and fossils. Beecher of Yale had found
hairs on the legs of fossil trilobites. Someone else had found fossil
bacteria. A group of petrographers got together and founded an
artificial classification of fire-made rocks based on chemistry--no
use at all to the field man with a rock specimen. Agassiz had built a
magnificent museum. The research motive was based on collections; the
public exhibit motive was based on evolution and big, rare things.
The publication motive imitated Europe; “be as technical as possible,
detest reporters and newspapers, and never be popular.”
In 1897 Harvard University gave me a Ph.D. degree, after a double
thesis and an oral examination. I passed the examination very
awkwardly, as my capacity for remembering text book information is nil.
My theses were (1) on an invention, a mineral hardness instrument; and
(2) on the included fragments found in Boston dikes.
The microsclerometer, as the instrument was called (that is, a
microscope scratcher), was designed to diamond drill a mineral to a
fixed depth. The hardness was measured by the time consumed, on the
theory that the energy required for the standard hole varied with the
time, and the time with the hardness. The number of rotations with a
constant speed motor is a measure of the time.
The paper was published in America and Germany, and elaborately
reviewed by a microscopical society in England. The instrument was
borrowed by H. C. Boynton, a graduate student in metallurgy, and he
got good results on the microscopic crystals that constitute steel.
The inventing and constructing with the aid of Sven Nelson, a Swedish
mechanician of ability, were to me an education in themselves. For one
thing, I learned how enthusiastically science feeds on ultra-little
things.
My petrography of included quartz fragments in basalt dikes was partly
published, but made no hit at all. It was outdoor work, it concerned
the granite problem, it revealed the “fluid” of granite minerals as
“waters or vapors” having no effect on augite, the green fusible
mineral of basalt. But the same fluid was revealed as corroding quartz
inclusions, harder and supposedly more infusible.
If temperature had anything to do with it, the granite fluid could melt
holes in quartz inclusions, but the mantle of augite dark crystals
which the basalt had plastered on the outside of the quartz fragments
remained unmelted. This was my first adventure with the ancient problem
of fusion, or melting. I became convinced that granite fluids, like
the makers of gold quartz veins, are low temperature vapors or gasses.
This agrees with what is now well known, that silica has a low melting
point. But melting and temperature are not the whole story.
To me, the spreading of one’s fame by scientific papers was
commercialization. “You must make your name known” and “what have
you published?” rang through the scientific halls of learning. No
suggestion of art, literature, drama, beauty, or philosophy ever came
to me from my scientific colleagues. Some literary friends, like
William Garrott Brown and my classmate William Vaughn Moody, thought
readability important. Brown warned me against the dullness of small
papers in scientific writing. Agassiz warned me against exactly the
opposite, namely, against popularizing or being interesting. This
antithesis between science journals and art probably never comes
into the field of vision of many young scientific writers. They see
only “Write for your scientific peers and for no one else, that is
your world.” All my life I have been plagued by “be as technical as
possible” versus “tell the public what it all means.”
I suspect that our system is producing diagrams and statistics in
geology (and perhaps in science generally) and no longer produces works
of art. I know few geologists who are fine draftsmen. They accept
photography instead. I know none who is a literary stylist. They write
for ultra conciseness and tabulations. The nineteenth century taught
classical English and drawing.
Geology is a science of the dreamland of the earth’s interior and
of millennia of the ages and of the overwhelming expanse of rich,
productive, unknown ores under ocean bottoms. It is a field for men of
letters, and for new Magellans, Humboldts, and Darwins bursting with
imagination and the will to explore.
This seeming digression is really germane to the purport of this book.
It is one man’s review of a half century of evolving discovery. Also
a half century of evolving error and departure from the ways of the
leaders. The leaders, from William Smith’s thoroughness with strata
in England, to Clarence King’s summary of a thousand miles across the
Cordillera, explored upward and outward. It persuaded governments.
Persuasion before the court of public opinion no longer uses and
employs explorer men of letters. The United Nations is not employing
Clarence Kings on the world geology of the remaining three quarters of
the earth.
The confusion, the secrecy, and the loss of art are occasioned by
vulgarization. In 1875 real men of distinction explored the earth.
Now that is left to incorporated establishments, teaching trusts, and
calculating machines. Clarence King was a linguist and was the son of a
trader in China. His Yale training under Dana and Brush gave him real
culture. His founding of the United States Geological Survey was the
evolution of a genius who disliked politics and whose friends rejoiced
with him in great prose, good pictures, and fine sculpture. Then he was
wrecked by a false ambition and the decadence of the very thing which
made him great, the simplicity of high thinking, noble writing, and
cultivated friends. Lacking today are cultivated boys with an ambition
to explore the globe, both under the sea and in the wilderness.
Geology in 1897 was a jigsaw puzzle, with a choice between the museum
and the field, between the easy thing of collections, fine microscopes,
and the scientific societies, and the hard thing of exploring the
globe. Collections and instruments were an overpowering attraction,
particularly when photography and experiment were involved. But
roughing it in the wilderness has made some of the finest characters I
ever knew.
Geological surveys of the west continued to occupy me during the
summers. I worked in the Black Hills of South Dakota under Samuel
Franklin Emmons, and my associates included John Mason Boutwell, John
Duer Irving, Philip Sidney Smith, Bailey Willis, and N. H. Darton.
Boutwell was to become a copper geologist and copper magnate in the
mines of Utah; Irving, Professor of Economic Geology at Lehigh and
Yale; and Smith, head of the Alaskan branch of the U. S. Geological
Survey.
Being with Emmons, Willis, and Darton in the Black Hills field was to
learn variously how geologists work in the field and how their minds
work. Emmons was of the Boston Brahmins, a Harvard man, mining geology
his specialty, with the Clarence King tradition of the Great West, the
40th Parallel Survey.
Bailey Willis as Chief Geologist spent a week with us in camp, and I
saw his genius for drawing in line, and he explained the four-step
pacing method. Willis mapped distances by pacing across mountains,
counting in his head, while talking at the same time. He compiled in
color a geologic map of the United States. His marvellous experiments
on mountain folding, his explorations in all the continents and his
poetic faith in hydrogen and crystallization as internal forces made
his name immortal.
N. H. Darton mapped the Great Plains; and his genius was for hard work,
long field hours, color photography at its very beginning, and an
extraordinary eye for detail in the field.
Darton showed me how to find the Chadron Formation on the divides,
white clays easily overlooked. Darton’s many years, traversing the
entire West, and publishing superb monographs of artesian waters and
of immense fossil sea bottoms, summarizing the geology of whole states
from Texas to Canada, ranks him among the great geologists. I learned
from him detail of infinite discovery possible in every rock ledge. He
found tiny fossil shells everyone else had missed. Powell and King had
painted impressionistic geology. Darton followed and painted thousands
of miniatures, but also combined these into large books.
Charles Doolittle Walcott was Director of the U. S. Geological Survey
at that time, and no greater geologist ever lived. His Cambrian
fossils, those of the first great fossil-making “Mediterranean Sea” of
North America, lay buried in the United States from shore to shore.
Unswervingly he followed every inland sea of 531 million years ago and
thereafter, through advances three times across the continent. Lands
were of moderate relief and climates were mild. Marine animals and
sea weeds, large and small, were abundant for 80 million years. And
remember that a million years is a thousand times the interval since
William the Conqueror.
The continent Walcott mapped of that ancient time was the North
America of today, with sags that let in shallow sea strips and
pools where the Cambrian shales and limestones now lie. He wrote a
description of that vast history, and all his later summers were spent
in the Canadian Rockies, where fossil-bearing strata make the most
startling mountain peaks on earth.
My Black Hills surveys of 1898 and 1899 were near Deadwood and
Spearfish and Mato Tepee, the Devil’s Tower National Monument. In
those badlands with weird desert gorges, appear the bones of ancient
rhinoceroses and many grotesque animals, huge and tiny, of 40 to 60
million years ago. We found little bones in white earth on the divides
still preserved against erosion.
Our big job was to map the laccoliths near Deadwood. A laccolith, or
rock cistern, is a lava body which in very ancient times squirted into
the cracks of the strata. The lava had penetrated between the strata of
the northern cover of the Black Hills, swelled to lenses between the
strata; and, particularly, it selected and penetrated the soft shale
beds which grow thicker and more numerous upward among the formations.
Thus after erosion of the present landscape, both large and small lava
lenses were revealed as resistant hills, the largest toward the bottom
of the pile of strata and the smallest and steepest toward the top in
thick, black ancient mud deposits.
Mostly, the laccoliths were injections of volcanic fluid up a crack,
which met a hard bed and bent to squeeze the paste or lava into a soft
layer. The result was an underground lava flow which ruptured the beds.
Apparently the first rush brought up fragments of the rocks below. This
fragmentary stuff of mud and gravel was overridden by the lava, until
the latter penetrated horizontally a mile or two between strata, arched
the layers above, and solidified at the Devil’s Tower with vertical
columns like the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.
This group of subterranean volcanic eruptions between strata probably
came under sea bottom at the same time that the Yellowstone upland
began its open-air outpourings farther west. But in the Black Hills
there is no sign the laccolith lavas ever broke up to the top country.
The Black Hills, like the Rocky Mountains, were a long time rising in
waves of action, whereas the lava intrusion was a relatively short
episode of one of the latest of these spasms. However, that episode
entails a long story of numerous injections. It takes us down into
crust and along through the millennia.
Always think in millions of years. It is wise also to think in millions
of miles and to remember that the sun and the Milky Way are parts of
the same system as the earth. And remember that a ledge or a boulder
doesn’t worry about living 20 million or 100 million years. A skull
is a boulder. That old brontotherium rhinoceros with a forked horn,
standing eight feet high and fifteen feet long, lived in the upper
Oligocene, when clay and volcanic ash were being deposited in the Bad
Lands of South Dakota. Probably vast flood plains of rivers were his
habitat, swamp reeds and leaves were his food, and floods washed his
bones and buried his skull where we find them today. The country of
open glades was probably like the safari land of central Africa.
Brontotherium’s skull in Chicago Natural History Museum dates from
about 30 million years ago. The bones are scattered, and few complete
skeletons have been found. Man’s ancestor may have started 10 million
years ago, but the nearest approach to an ape who lived in the trees of
old Bronto’s forests was an opossum. Furthermore, nothing like flint
tools have been found in the rhino strata. The apes started in Europe
and Asia in the next geologic period, and some fossilized monkeys have
been found in South America. But men and monkeys are too soft. They
don’t make good fossils.
The bones we found were of turtles, in clays upheaved on the top of the
Black Hills uplift. These clays were afterwards eroded into the present
valleys, and probably were contemporaneous with the riverbed silts,
where the rhinoceros skulls were found. So our turtles and rhinos were
no doubt neighbors in 29,998,000 B.C.
Our sojourn in the Black Hills was not without adventure. One evening
when Boutwell and I were riding home to Deadwood, I dismounted and
jumped into the shrubs of a gully to knock a rock specimen off a ledge.
From beneath my feet came a buz-z-z like a swarm of bees. I had jumped
right on a rattlesnake and could feel his coils against my ankle, and
no leggings that day. Boutwell called out, “Oh let me see him! I’ve
never seen a rattlesnake.” I made a suitable reply and, somehow, leapt
clear before the snake had a chance to strike.
Another adventure concerned my gold watch, a gift from my dad on my
twenty-first birthday. I lost it from a chain which broke against
the saddle pommel at some dismounting point. I advertised for it by
placards at railway stations and, amazingly, it was returned. A
Salvation Army man found the watch, badly trampled by my horse, at a
back country place, brought it to me in Deadwood, and received the
reward. I took it to the maker in Waltham, where it was restored; and I
am wearing it fifty-four years later, converted from a hunting case to
a stemwinder.
John Irving of Yale, whose father had been a mining geologist in the
Great Lakes district, was one of the most lovable companions I ever
camped and tramped with. We were together in the Black Hills, where
we hired a wagon outfit to cross the Hills to the Devil’s Tower. The
personnel was a masterpiece of improvisation. The cook was a fat boy
who told marvellous tales of adventures. Among other things, he had
been a human ostrich in the circus, and he assured us that chewing up
glass and swallowing it did no harm if you knew how. So elaborate was
his cooking that again and again we ran out of grub. Furthermore, meals
were generally late, but we knew better than to hurry the supper and
his finishing touches. When finally a meal was ready, he advanced to
our tent, bowed, and called out, “Gentlemen, you will now proceed to
sagastuate.”
Johnston the teamster was an ambitious South Dakota high school
graduate and farm boy who wanted to learn all he could from geological
surveyors. A few years ago, in the nineteen forties, I received a
letter from him in southwest Africa saying that he had been successful
in placer mining for gold and diamonds and that he was writing a book
about it.
Arizona was my fourth field of fire-made irruptions; after New England,
the Black Hills, and the Yellowstone (old, middle-aged, and young). To
the Bradshaw Mountains between Prescott and Phoenix and lying south
of the Grand Canyon, I was sent with Palache to make the Bradshaw
Mountains folio.
At Prescott we had the rare privilege of talks with Clarence King. An
aged bachelor dying of tuberculosis, he was living in a cottage with
an old negro servant. King was a fascinating talker and writer. He had
been the first director of the Geological Survey and was the author
of “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.” His great summary volume
of the 40th Parallel, the survey along the Union Pacific, is one of
the classics in literature and in geology. His model, unhappily for
him, was Alexander Agassiz, who made a great fortune out of Calumet
and Hecla copper. When King went into mining to make a fortune he
contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after we saw him.
The problem of what makes granite was never better illustrated than
in the Bradshaws. One formation, in upright bands for miles across
country, showed dark schist, diorite, granite, diabase, granite, light
schist, quartzite, granite, gabbro, and schist again, like a succession
of dikes, slabs, and veins side by side. A mountain spur, like a
bookshelf with colored books on edge, is called Crooks Complex, and was
named after Crooks Canyon. The trend was with the pinched strata but
the stuff was mostly igneous.
It was as though a mechanism of melting-up was mixed with intrusion
of fluid, but what fluid? A glass? or a gas? There was no smearing,
but clean-cut dikes and schist slabs on edge. In the big granite hills
there were contact breakups with fragments of schist imprisoned in
granite, but not smeared or streaked. The impression was of millions
of years and thousands of episodes, all dike-making and guided by the
upright lamination or vertical structure of the ancient altered tightly
folded clay and sand strata, squeezed together by horizontal pressure.
Since learning of the million-year periods taught by radioactivity, and
of the many million years within a single era of geology, I have begun
to wonder whether these very old formations may represent hundreds of
millennia, with granitization happening over and over again, in each
geological revolution of upheaval and mountain building above.
Granitization, then, is a process of heat pressure, gases, melting,
and crystal making, of which the ancient words magma or emulsion or
paste give no conception. And volcanism, up through the deep crust, is
the mystery devil. May it not be nucleonics and melting of deep crust,
rather than chemistry? And is not the mystery devil always hydrogen gas?
At the beginning of the twentieth century I visited two places which
are close together and related to the Bradshaw Mountains. One was
Searchlight in the southern tip of Nevada, the other was the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River.
I shall never forget my arrival in Searchlight. A strike of miners was
going on, and Stanford geology students had been sent in as strike
breakers. Big Bill, the sheriff, brought the boys across the desert
from the railway. His buckboard was in front and the Stanforders
followed in a wagon. The strikers lined the road out from Searchlight,
intent on loosing the horses. But when they saw Bill’s star and his
notched six-shooter, they dropped their hands to their sides and stood
like a row of tin soldiers, while Big Bill led the way through at a
gallop, cursing them roundly.
When I got off the train at Ivanpah, a small place with only a few
houses, I spoke to a young station agent where the ancient Wells Fargo
sign hung. He told me that the Quartette Mine team would meet me soon,
and shortly a cloud of dust on the desert proclaimed the vehicle which
came dashing up, a phaeton rig with two big horses. The five men inside
were armed, with rifles and pump shotguns protruding. One man pulled
out a heavy leathern pouch, and another stood over it with his rifle.
“Come on, Jack, lets go over to Wolf Saloon.” “No,” said Jack, “not
till I get my receipt.” The mild station man yanked out a receipt
book, filled the blank acknowledging $20,000 in bullion from the mine,
threw the pouch into an open safe, and Jack with his receipt departed,
leaving the gold brick to the mystic protection of that sign, “Wells
Fargo and Co.” Two ablebodied bandits could easily have held up the
whole rail terminus.
When I started for the mine, accompanied by detectives and guards, we
all carried pistols in holsters strapped under our arms. En route, we
spent Christmas amid the smell of sagebrush and the glorious sunset
lights of a purple desert. Once more I murmured, “So this is natural
history.”
I was employed to examine the Quartette Gold Mine, and the geologic
mystery of the origin of a million dollars in dirt between a level
200 feet down and another at a depth of 500 feet. The million dollars
was along a crushed, slipped, so-called vein, where a fault followed
the upright bedding of just such gneisses, granite dikes, and schists
as had made Crooks Complex in the Bradshaws. Where gold was richest,
minerals were richest--beautiful orange-colored wulfenite, green
chrysocolla, blue azurite, onyx, quartz, and calcite. Everywhere were
quantities of gouge, or crushed clays, from grinding walls. Native gold
particles were distributed through all this.
The schists were filled with lava fissure fillings, and the mine
was where this pattern of bands was interrupted by a very ancient
greenstone or basalt body. Hot fluids of the volcanic period, deep
underground, had accompanied fault slipping or fracture where the ore
was, the vertical fault parallel to the upright layers and across the
greenstone contact.
Ore and gold particles were directly related to fracture, to the fault
slipping on an upright crack of one mountain block against another,
to the hot vapors depositing the mineral collection, and to renewed
crushing and sliding on the mountain blocks. This was during or
following some part of the volcanic period when all the cracks were
injected with andesite lavas, or what the miners call porphyry. The
origin of the minerals was in lead and copper sulfides which lie deeper
down.
A hundred miles to the northeast is the Grand Canyon, and all around
are granite mountains, just as in Arizona. These Searchlight schists
are the same Algonkian ancient strata, recrystallized and granitized,
that make the inner gorge of the canyon, and are traversed up cracks
by volcano-making lavas, such as dot the north bank of the canyon
with crater cones. Above in the canyon are the horizontal strata from
Cambrian up to the Coal Measures and beyond. The vast maze of castles
and turrets is a net of branch valleys of the Colorado, trenching
through these old seabed deposits.
Including Searchlight ore, the whole history going backward is top
country desert, deep trench, strata piled in rivers and sea bottoms for
500 million years, and lastly faulting and cracking that squirted steam
and made gold minerals over and over again during the last 100 million
years. There were at least a dozen revolutions that lifted and lowered
mountain ranges and continents for 2,000 million years, and the remains
of iron-eating bacteria and of seaweeds and other living things that
go back for 1,500 million years. Through it all are granite injections
as a process, as a mystery, going over the whole range of years in
different ages, and meaning what?
One of the puzzles of Grand Canyon, Bradshaw Mountains, and
Searchlight--if not also of New England, the Black Hills, and the
Yellowstone--is faulting. A fault is what a geologist means by a crack
down deep where the country rock has dropped down on one side so as to
make a discordance across country. Earthquake faults make a visible
bank or step or sidewise slip, changing the surface after an earthquake.
The northwestern states are partly mapped as fault block mountains. The
island of Hawaii has a series of fault step blocks southeast, slipping
toward the ocean. The steep east face of the Sierra Nevada is a fault
fracture.
Professor Shaler once stopped me on the street and said of my field
work, “Jaggar, you don’t teach faulting enough.” Faults were shown
along straight lines on the color maps of formation in the old Boston
books, and were located by guesswork if glacier deposits covered up
the ledges. It seemed to me that faults ought to be proved or else
omitted from the maps. Probably I too was wrong, for faults or cracks
completely concealed by soil and strata are tremendous unknown lines on
the globe.
The Searchlight ore body is certainly a fault fracture, and so are
those of Tonopah and hundreds of mines. It was digging that proved it.
The cracking and slipping and steaming and mud-making on the fissure
are what brought up the minerals.
A question arises as to how much the Grand Canyon itself and its
tributaries are guided by fault fractures under valleys. My impression
was in 1901, and it still is, that “Jaggar ought to teach faulting”
more than he then did.
The primitive ocean blocks of earth crust sank, while continents
remained high, leaving the earth crust a mosaic of blocks large and
small, high and low. Between the blocks spout the volcanoes. I have
never agreed with C. E. Dutton that volcanic heat energy could come
from shallow pockets under those fault blocks. Even he acknowledged the
weakness of the argument. If the earth crust broke up and the blocks
variously sank in the core matter, leaving continents as a complex
of high blocks, then the blocks are deep and are still moving. The
movements are in years, year-thousands and year-millions. Volcanism up
the cracks releases core energy. So does much of fault movement, namely
earthquakes. And these facts geologists do not appreciate.
So we get faulted river courses and fault cracks up which came fluids
that transformed sediments of rivers, lakes, deserts, and seas into
granite, felsite, and greenstone. These are the ancient names. There
are hundreds of other, geology names. But geology produced no Faraday.
I disliked geology in 1902. And I disliked mining because of its
secrecy and its devotion to profits. Geology failed to tell businessmen
the mystery of granite, of felsite, and of greenstone. Astronomers told
the same men of mysteries, and they were fascinated. Physiology led
them to cells, plants, animals, and chemicals in the blood, solving
mystery after mystery. Men, money, inventions, engineers, buildings,
and staffs grew by leaps and bounds in those sciences. The best geology
could do was guesswork--a mastodon, a big reptile skeleton, a guesswork
color map--while seventy percent of the earth was seabottom rock,
unmapped, and twenty percent more consisted of fractures covered with
soil.
Seeing the Carnegie and Rockefeller laboratories and observatories, I
grieved for field geology. The public did not even know that granite,
the mystery, is the commonest rock and that quartz, the gold maker, is
the commonest mineral. Nor did they know that both are almost absent
from the whole Pacific. Nor that geology is almost ignorant of their
origin and injection, if it is injection. Here was the globe, the
end product of astronomy, the most fascinating research in the whole
range of science. The source of all raw materials of commerce, yet its
fire-made rocks and its seabottom rocks remained a mystery.
Before leaving the Grand Canyon, let me record my impressions of the
erosion. It is a gorge a mile deep usually described as “cut” by the
Colorado River. As I shall show in discussion of experiments with the
Grand Canyon model, it is possible, in stratified layers yielding grit
to flowing rainwater, to cut a deep canyon by surface runoff. It is
possible for underground water and tributaries from side rainfalls
to increase the volume of such a stream greatly in a hundred miles.
But Dutton’s showing of upheaved and downdropped big blocks of broken
mountains, and such obvious breaks as the Tonto and Bright Angel faults
shown to tourists as traced out by Bright Angel Canyon, prove that the
earth crust is broken. And Searchlight showed a fault to be a water
supply.
The enormous canyon appeared to me to be a million-year break system
of earth-crust rotting. The water is a giant modern grinding mill of
rainfall, underground accumulation, and transport. But with five great
erosion surfaces shown in the discordances, from 2,000 million years
ago to the present day; and with upheaval of the high plateaus in block
faults, and bent strata age after age; and farther north with recent
volcanoes that spouted up the cracks, it seems more vivid to think
the valleys at least partly water-filled cracks and chasms. Volcanoes
cannot be shallow. The canyons and the great bend are different from
the Green River source, because of upward push in waves. The up-push
of the Uinta Mountains is well known to have been slow. It kept pace
with the ruptures followed by the river. Going back to Daubrée, rivers
follow cracks much more than do the textbooks.
In 1899 two things happened which affected the rest of my life. First,
Director Walcott asked me to furnish estimates for a Hawaii geologic
survey, a request which eventually led me to Hawaii. Second, the
Yakutat Bay earthquake snapped on an astonished world, though most of
the world didn’t know it.
The Yakutat Bay earthquakes in Alaska, in September 1899, were
accompanied by the pushing up of the bedrock shoreline by forty-seven
feet. Lowered beneath the sea were whole forests, on glacial deposits
pulled down by submarine landslips. It was an uninhabited region at
the foot of Mount St. Elias, along a fjord penetrating far into the
mountains. It came in line with the Aleutian trench, under the Pacific,
4,000 fathoms deep. The earthquakes lasted two weeks.
This colossal movement of blocks of the earth’s crust hundreds of miles
across gave one the impression that we knew little of what was going
on. Remembering that seventy-two percent of the earth’s surface is
covered by oceans and that less than ten percent is really inhabited, I
awoke to how much there was to learn. If whole forests and their roots
could float away into the Pacific currents, with all their plants and
animals and seeds and bacteria, what might not have occurred in past
ages, when such jostling of crust blocks was common.
But before I was to experiment with live volcanoes came a decade of
laboratory experiment.
CHAPTER II
Imitating Ripplemarks
“_The Constitution is an experiment,
as all life is an experiment._”
At the end of the century my experiments with the sclerometer, and with
the class in experimental geology, steered me for years into laboratory
experiment. Europe was headed toward geophysics and geochemistry,
meaning chiefly mathematical and statistical analysis. My vision was
nonmathematical, though I used pressures, temperatures, clocks, and
yardsticks to measure erosion, sediment, warping of strata, and melting.
This took me away from petrography, for the polarizing microscope was
dealing with infinite series of minerals and molecules. I could see
nothing but infinite penetration into the smaller and smaller. Clarence
King and Frank Perret had been on the way to infinite journeying
outward to the bigger and bigger.
The guiding formula was “erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and
eruption.” Measure these on the globe, imitate them with mud pies
in the laboratory. Compare the global examples with the mud pies.
Try to get the mud pies to illuminate the gigantic stream systems,
flood plains, sea bottoms, folded mountains, intrusions, and lavas
of the earth. Then try to measure in the field those processes with
observatories. So, to me, came the transition from collections to
experiments.
The machinery of nature, whether with sand heaps or sand grains or
coral pebbles, is the same. It is impelled by currents flowing over
loose materials which make eddies in the lee of lumps. The eddies
are either billows or cyclones. At the middle they are billows; at
the ends they are cyclones. The billow eddies obstruct the heaping.
The cyclone eddies lengthen the heaps right and left of the current
direction. George Darwin studied the eddies by means of a drop of thick
ink in a glass tank on top of a ripple ridgelet. The ink migrated to
form underwater billows and cyclones, or vortexes. He used a dropper
to place the ink globule, and then watched the vortexes form as he
oscillated the tank.
Low parts travel fastest, namely the points. High parts build on the
upstream side, and travel slowest, and the stuff tumbles over the crest
line and is corniced by the eddy. Snow does it, pebbles under sea do
it, and marine life adapts itself to it, wherever the food supply is
best.
In the study of ripplemarks, Harry Gummeré, a graduate in astronomy,
was my collaborator. Ripplemarks are made by back-and-forth eddies on
the bottom, while big waves oscillate the water. We moved the bottom
instead of making waves in the water. A glass plate sprinkled with sand
under water in a tank was oscillated back and forth horizontally. It
was clamped under a carriage which oscillated on wire tracks stretched
across the tank. A string pulled the carriage against an elastic on
the other side. A wooden wheel and crank, set upright edgeways, had
holes and pegs to pull on the string, and the crank turns were timed
with a metronome. The holes in the flat wheel were a centimeter apart,
so that a revolution of the wheel pulled the string for every two
centimeters of travel of the carriage. Thus the sand-covered plate was
jerked back and forth under water two centimeters, four centimeters,
six centimeters, and so forth; once a second, or two seconds, or three
seconds, and so forth, by beats of the metronome.
The result was beautiful ripplemarks on a glass which could be lifted
out of the water, dried, and placed over blueprint paper to preserve
the record. The sizes of ridge to ridge ripples were from a fraction of
an inch to two or more inches. The little ones diminished to zero when
the jerking was small, the big ones washed out when the jerking was too
big.
The blueprints showed that both length and speed of strokes (amplitude
and acceleration of motion) made the ripples increase in size, and
somewhere between the largest and smallest sand ripples was the optimum
perfection of ripple form. The blueprints look like mackerel skies.
And mackerel-sky clouds are billows of condensation between an upper
cold stream of air and a lower moist one. In between are the same
back-and-forth billows of vortex as in our sand.
At a geological conference at Harvard I showed blueprints made directly
from glass plates covered with artificial ripplemarks. At the same time
I exhibited rock slabs of fossil ripplemarks and photographs of others
shaped like horseshoes. These were variants of the rippledrift process
seen on sandy beds of running streams. I also showed photographs of
swash marks running along the upper steep slopes of beaches. And of the
wind-formed rippledrift of dry sand dunes. From the deserts of Peru
come photographs of _medaños_, or crescent dunes, hills of sand
tapering to curved points at both ends. The points are downwind, the
high horseshoe toe of the hill is upwind, and like a coral atoll the
edifice is current-formed.
Ripplemarks can form in hundreds of fathoms of ocean water if the storm
waves on the surface of the sea are big enough. A particle of water on
the crest of a wave is lifted up and down in a long vertical ellipse.
A particle deep down under the wave is lifted fore and aft in a long
horizontal ellipse. Under a three-hundred-foot length of wave in the
English Channel in deep water the bottom particles of water are shoving
sand back and forth, and making packed ripplemarks.
A big sand grain becomes a lump for small sand grains to bump against.
They make a heap which piles up and lengthens out. The heaps merge and
we get a tightly packed and ridged sandy bottom. Each ridge has an eddy
first on one side, then on the other, as the water particles reverse in
direction. Oscillation builds first flocculence, then alignment, then
even spacing. The opposite sides of a ridge have equal slopes.
Rippledrift is made by a current in one direction. It is usually not so
regular or in such straight ridges as ripplemarks. If a stream of water
is jetted over sand round and round in a ringshaped tank, ridges will
migrate along the bottom, but they are smeary. The regular ripples in
dry sand on dunes have flatter slopes upwind, steep scarps downwind.
They are regular, probably because wind blowing is intermittent and
back currents occur. So they become more like ripplemarks.
On the bottoms of water streams, the horseshoe rippledrift requires
a nice adjustment of lumps and side points migrating downstream. All
rippling requires a sand of mixed sizes of grains. If they were all
alike they would not ripple, for the larger grains have to obstruct the
smaller ones in order to produce the ripple pattern. Rippledrifting
as a whole is a building mechanism. Mixed with wave currents which
move beaches along, including beach pebbles, it can be compounded
into building oceanic islands. The crescent dunes of the desert are
dependent on the prevailing winds being loaded with a sand supply at a
windward erosion source.
Oceanic currents depend on the winds, like the trades in the tropics,
and an obstructing bank or shoal adds surf action to the streaming. If
corallines and _Tridacna_ clams and crabs add organic cements, a
horseshoe hill is built on the sea bottom. Big eddies will do the same
kind of work as little eddies. This phenomenon extends all the way
from the galaxies of stars with their beautiful spirals, to the spiral
eddies in molten lava rushing down a pit crater, or to the streaming of
protoplasm in a plant.
De Candolle, the great botanist, studied rippledrift in order to try to
solve the most abstruse problem in all biology, the unsolved mystery of
cell division. At some critical point a budding cell decides to form
a partition and divide in two. Why or how? De Candolle thought that
the protoplasm granules circulating around the cell walls might start
regular lumps on those walls, and so build rippledrifts and make eddies.
Thus a current and an eddy and mathematics might start many of the
doubles, triples, hexagons, and stars of the world of shells and living
tissues. And the cells could pile up in symmetry in the submicroscopic
world.
The erosion of the earth’s surface reveals symmetries. River maps look
like trees with branches and with rivulets as twigs. Other symmetry is
in the horizontal plane of the ocean, where headland furnishes pebbles
and the sand sweeps into pure curves of beach and bar and cusp. So a
delta builds into a lake of leaf shape and annual layers are added as
the flood seasons come.
Some of the fingerlike drainage of erosion cuts into plowed lands
during a rainy spell. This suggests what might be done with a spray, a
mud bank, and a tank, to see how the finger valleys form. This erosion
of the runoff of water was imitated in the Harvard laboratory.
A beautiful river pattern on a slope, like the trickle of raindrops on
a windshield, was made by tipping up a rectangular glass plate covered
with very liquid clay. A portion clung to the glass, and exquisite
fernlike streams formed on the upper half of the plate, with a bank of
distributaries of V-shape on the lower slope.
This glass plate was used for a surface of stamp mill slimes, of
thicker beds, and was eroded with an atomizer and water by means of a
barbershop air compressor. The slimes are very fine pounded sands with
angular fragments. To get a stream pattern, this is necessary, so as
to have fine grit to cut down the rivulets between the coarse grit
remnants. This resembles the requirements for ripples.
The spray was kept going for hours. Meanwhile the river pattern at the
steep sides of the sloping plate ate into the bank of sediment, robbing
the streams of the main slope, because the side streams were oblique
cascades. They dug deep, took off the water, and left the main slope
streams without their headwater drainage. The pattern of the main slope
became the headwater branches of the side streams, the streams which in
plan drained over the edge of the uplifted plate right and left. This
was somewhat like stream robbery.
For example, the Lewis River at the south end of Yellowstone Park
once drained Yellowstone Lake, including the Lamar River, which is
now the headwaters of Yellowstone River. The Yellowstone plateau
formerly drained south into the Snake River and the Pacific Ocean.
The Yellowstone River headwaters suddenly tapped the system, thanks
to geyser erosion and acid corrosion, and the Yellowstone Canyon cut
down rapidly, reversing to the north the outlet of Yellowstone Lake.
Thereafter the lake flowed into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
At some critical time about the glacial period the continental divide
made a leap of thirty miles from the present head of the Canyon to the
neighborhood of Lewis Lake, or from one end of Yellowstone Lake to the
other. This is stream robbery.
Spray and runoff and rainfall and wash did not alone cut down the
Yellowstone Canyon. The essentials were the rotting of rock and the
pull of gravitation on the fragments. The Yellowstone rotted away on
the north side, but it was hard granite and mountain-built quartzites
on the south, toward the Tetons. Hot spring rotting, geyser erosion,
acid waters, and sulfur decomposed the north country. The underground
water head followed the easiest channels, and the canyon was the
result. The canyon line encircles Mount Washburn, the old volcano, and
conceivably is over an old crack concentric to the dome.
Water is a transporter, and cracking opens ways to the rotting agents.
Only in rivulets and floods does water actually corrade, or grind, the
bottoms of streams. In our spray and fern patterns there is analogy to
rainfall springs on flat strata, but nine-tenths of the elements of
erosion are left out: jointing, weathering, ice, faulting, gravitation,
rotting down, quaking, solution, sliding, and last, spring water.
Erosion by sliding continues by wind action in desert mountains, and
on volcanic cones under bombardment, and by rocks snapping under chill
and sunshine on the moon. Creep of loose stuff is the greatest eroder
on earth. Rainfall cloudbursts certainly help, especially where soil is
not held together by a mat of roots.
The process of erosion is supposedly slow, as all geological processes
are slow, if we neglect the possibility of such submarine landslips
or supramarine upheavals as occurred at Yakutat in 1899. But even
New England has floods, hurricanes, landslides, forest fires, and
cloudbursts which are exclamation points on an otherwise sleepy
history. And in the past it has had ice sheets, and subsidences beneath
the sea.
In other words, the making of valleys and stream patterns for the
map is accented occasionally, and the occasions may come in climatal
waves unknown to us. The stream patterns in the Bad Lands, Tennessee,
Pennsylvania, the Grand Canyon, and New England make very different
maps. The rotting of the rock, limestone caverns, rainfall, faults, and
sloping underground strata bearing spring water all influence these
maps. What is erosion and what index is written on the land to say the
Grand Canyon and tributaries are being carved downward faster than the
Mystic River in Boston?
Ralph Stone tackled the Mystic River, and marked ledges and set stakes
opposite the flood plain meanders. The idea was that ledges split by
winter freezes, and that the meanders of a stream build on one side
and cut on the other. Maps were made repeatedly, and the ledge cracks
were measured in millimeters. Some movement was found, but a college
year was not enough time. If we could combine as a motion picture,
photographs from the air taken once a year for many years, doubtless
the film would show that the stream meander pattern is migrating toward
the sea like a wiggling snake.
Stone next made a model three inches thick in a tank of water, by
sedimenting sixty-one very thin layers of marble dust, coal dust,
clay, red lead, and sand. He tipped it up as an island and sprayed it
in periods which lasted one to ninety-two hours, up to a total of 719
hours. A forking stream and its delta were formed in the lagoon of
the tank. The stream cut a canyon with waterfalls, treelike branches,
esplanades, and a flood plain. There were three principal hard white
multiple strata layers in the model, separated by sand. The white
layers made waterfalls and were eaten back to form the canyons.
When the cross section of the delta was sliced with a knife, it showed
three white layers foreset at thirty degrees under the tank pool
and separated by more sandy strata. The bottommost of these was the
sediment of the top thick marble dust layer of the model as first
eroded by the spray, and the top frontal layer of the leaf-shaped delta
was the product of the erosion of the canyon bottom on the lowest of
the white layers. This must happen in nature where one formation in
reverse order is derived by river erosion undermining a stratified
older pile of sediments.
We called this the Grand Canyon model, and it showed many features
similar to those of South Dakota Bad Lands and the Colorado River
drainage. It was strictly rainfall erosion and stratification soakage
and seepage. The model surface sloped ten degrees, the high divide
at the top had a backslope of forty-five degrees, and everything was
sprayed for two months with special hose nozzles, making during part of
each day a mistlike rainfall.
The steep backslope did not trench itself at all despite its steepness.
This slope, on the contrary, absorbed moisture and carried the rainfall
underground down the dip of the strata to add spring water to the main
streams. The backslope was a “steep escarpment,” supposed in physical
geography to migrate by trenching backward, but the rills never gained
volume enough to cut into it. All the water volume acquired its grit
for cutting from the large surfaces, which were gradually tilted in the
direction of the rivers.
When the complete series of experiments on erosion and sediment
was published, it showed that the treelike branching of rivers is
dependent on underground water surfaces; that meanders on a flood plain
are partly a bubbling-up process of flood-plain soakage; that when
side tributaries form by undermining, the upstream branches cut off
underground water from the downstream branches; and that when a country
is tilted in one direction, there is a tendency to parallel streams,
separated by intervals controlled by underground water areas reached by
the undermining tracery of headwater springs.
This arborescence in a spray model is a regular and delicate
adjustment, where a bunch of tributaries is not mere catchment of
rainfall, but is the product of sheet flood in belts of underground
water related to the tilt of the country. Arborescence of river
drainage on a surface of flat strata, like the coastal plain of the
southeastern United States, is a rhythmical pattern of exquisite
design capable of reproduction and study in the laboratory. It is a
mathematical forking and headward development dependent on volume
of water, undermining impermeable strata along permeable ones. And
after the “tree” map is formed, the bulb of branches and twigs and
underground leaves of spring water holds all the downslope country in
its “shadow,” so that no new rivers can form there. This is what makes
our great maps of river systems. It is not haphazard. It is a vast
ocean of underground water, with mountains of water and valleys of
water.
A great lake marks an underground soakage water level. A riverbed marks
an underground seepage topography. The sea of water inside a continent
is just as much a map of hills and dales of water as the land is a
map of the hills and valleys of geography. The water is dynamic, it
is flowing. The land surface is dynamic and rain fed; it is creeping
soils. Together, groundwater and rivers are melting down the landscape
as a living thing. Man dams the water and uses the power of the erosion
melting down the land.
When we went to Haystack Basin north of the Yellowstone Park, we found
that all of the mountains surrounding it were audibly crumbling.
Ultimately, the continent is all one thing: a falling body of rotten
rock, ice, water, sand, boulders, and soils, self carved into valleys
and mountains, always tumbling. And down below are the fault blocks,
prisms of earth shell over the white hot core. And that also is
eternally in motion, irrupting, earthquaking, lifting, falling,
scraping, heating, cooling in waves through the ages. Man is very tiny,
but if he listens he can hear the earth’s heartbeats.
At hot springs the water mantle meets the hot earth shell. So the
geyser basins of Yellowstone, California, New Zealand, and Iceland are
a hot part of the great erosion system of groundwater. This brings us
to the next group of experiments, the making of artificial geysers.
Geysers as eroders show that the under earth is hot and is invaded by
rainwater. In exceptional volcanic places the water is boiling hot. The
Firehole River of the Yellowstone is carving down basins of solution
faster than the regular geysers are building up siliceous sinter. Here
is boiling-spring erosion by solution. It may be called the extreme
thermal aspect of ordinary spring-water erosion. How does spring water
erode? By bubbling up under the beds of rivers. The bubbling out of
springs starts rivers, and flood rainfall starts soil gullies; land
sculpture is the result.
We introduce geyser experiments here because boiling springs make drama
out of ordinary springs, just as active volcanoes make drama out of
buried volcanoes. Ordinary springs and buried lavas intruding invisibly
are much more important and extensive than geysers and volcanoes. Most
people never think of a spring as one of millions bubbling up the beds
of brooks and rivers and sea bottoms.
Most people never think of volcanoes erupting--properly speaking,
irrupting or inrupting--under Kansas or Brazil. Nobody denies those
places are hot underground, but it all seems remote. Yet every spring
is thermal if there is heat escaping through the rocks around it.
Geyser basins lower the country around them and leave hills in relief.
The proportions of basins and hills depend upon the runoff of rotting
and dissolving rock. The shape of a hill standing high, what Davis
called a monadnock in New England, depends on its whole history, not
on its hardness. Ascutney Mountain stands high as a lump because
surrounding slates have rotted down. Mount Monadnock may stand high
because the springs under the river pattern of cracks neglected it in
the rotting and crunching of a continent.
Dynamic weight eternally falling makes low places. Hardness against
weathering makes a mountain high only as a relic or residual. It is
a node in the gigantic process of gravitation rotting and the spring
squirting of groundwater. The water heats, rises, dissolves, siphons,
springs up, and transports dirt. Underneath is a definitely heated
earth crust.
Accordance of summit levels of mountains and hills as one looks across
country does not have to represent an upraised plane surface. There
is more undermining where the spring squirting is most voluminous.
When spring squirting is equal, the opposed slopes of a valley adjust
themselves. The tree line, the snow line, the rain line, and the wind
line are definite levels of erosion. Under it all the rotting rock is
falling toward the earth’s center, slowly, creakingly. The everlasting
hills are not everlasting, they are everfalling; rocks, boulders,
slopes, waters, gravels, sands, and muds. And adjustment to the
atmosphere and groundwater surface is irresistible.
[Illustration: _1. Experimental Geology Laboratory, Harvard
University, 1900_]
[Illustration: _2. Fountain at edge of lava lake, May 17,
1917_]
The notion of erosion pulling down hills to a flat plane near sea level
is fascinating to geometry-minded people, but not to the mechanically
minded. A flat plane near sea level in the Mississippi delta is
where the river has swung right and left against valley walls, over
its own flood plain. A flat plain, secured by ice sheets or planed off
by encroaching wave action as land sinks is mechanically probable. In
these circumstances we look for river or ice or wave-beach deposits.
But an “almost plane” occasioned by the multiple action called erosion
down to base level is to me the delightful dream of map students. If
a landscape has been planed off, a machine router or planer did it.
The great rivers of China have had a long time to bang back and forth
against their confining boxes of rock and on top of their own mud.
To return to geyser-spring experiments, I built a simple quart flask
surmounted by a four-foot glass tube. At the top the tube rose through
a cork in the bottom of a two-foot pan. In the side of the cork of the
flask was a second tube with a hose leading up to a reservoir bottle of
water. The reservoir bottle could be raised or lowered. If the water in
it was level with the pan, there was hydrostatic equilibrium: the pan
a pool, the bottle a source, the flask and tube full. When we applied
heat to the bottom of the flask, the water boiled, the pan overflowed,
and some cold water from the bottle chilled the flask. The pan had
become a boiling spring.
Next we lowered the reservoir bottle. The reduced head of water
permitted no overflow at the pan, and steam bubbles accumulated in the
four-foot upright tube. The boiling point was controlled by four feet
of water pressure. If the bubble lift reduced this to three feet, there
was a lower boiling point, the pressure was reduced by overflow above,
and the whole flaskful boiled. The geyser tube became a regular geyser
at intervals of a minute and a half, with eruptions enduring twenty
seconds.
This was a miniature of Old Faithful in the Yellowstone. Old Faithful
is bigger, its intervals average sixty-five minutes, and they range
from thirty-one to eighty-one minutes. It jets up 150 feet for a period
of four minutes. It throws out 3,000 barrels of water at each eruption.
Our little machine threw up about a pint to a height of four feet.
We hear much about soaping geysers as an artificial stimulus. The
apparatus in our laboratory showed the effect of soap right away. When
some soap was put in the pan, the intervals of a minute and a half
shortened to one minute. Soapsuds accumulated in the tube and depressed
the water to the neck of the flask. The multiple bubbles, film against
film, made the water system viscous. The myriads of tiny steam bubbles
formed so fast that they shortened the lifting time for the column.
If the height of the reservoir bottle was so adjusted that the geyser
didn’t quite know whether it was a geyser or a boiling spring, the soap
made the decision, and the thing went off with a bang.
This simple group of experiments makes springs very real. The
Yellowstone explosive springs differ from other springs in having
superheated steam from live lavas to heat them. The rock is cracked and
the water is doing a job of solution and deposition. It deposits stout
tough silica around some openings and builds them up against the head
of groundwater, and they become geysers. It deposits lime dissolved off
underlying limestone at Mammoth, and this makes sculptured terraces
but not explosive springs because the temperatures are not so hot. In
both lime and silica regions, blue-green algae, which love hot water,
decoratively sculpture the pools.
Like a magician I exhibited the artificial geysers before New York
and Boston science academies, and gave the summaries of the results
of our geyser experiments, as follows: (1) Boiling springs are like
other springs, controlled by the head or pressure of underground water
in the hills. (2) Upstreaming of heated water and building up of
silica (convection is the scientific jargon) may push the vent of a
boiling spring even higher than its source (reversed head). (3) In this
delicate condition, even rainfall or sinter building up or outburst
at a lower level or clogging of a pipe may change spring to geyser or
geyser to spring. There are many more boiling springs than there are
geysers, and many more hot springs than there are boiling springs, and
the word cold means nothing at all. There may be boiling springs under
New York City if you go deep enough. That is why the riot of geyser
apparatus is worth thinking about. (4) Irregular geysers overflow
continually, regular geysers discharge their waters only during
eruptions. Both are methods of feeding rivers, just like any other
springs. But there is a lot of volcanic heat underground.
This brings up the question of how much a volcanic eruption is like
a geyser. Geologists apply a glib word, phreatic, to Japan’s Bandai
Volcano, which blew steam and rocks out of the side of a mountain and
dammed a river. Hawaiian volcanoes squirt liquid basalt up a crack
with flames and red fume and sulfur gas, and almost no steam at all.
The answer seems to be that the Palisades of the Hudson may once have
been Hawaiian lava eruptions and, further, that lava is still erupting
there if you go down deep enough. New York doesn’t know about it, but
it sensed it in 1886, when it felt the Charleston earthquake.
All that Catskill water supply of the great city is in cracks above the
level of the deep lava, and extends out under Long Island Sound. If the
Hudson fault fissure wiggled a little more than usual, and if the deep
lava lowered and pulled down some of the Atlantic water, an eruption
like Bandai is not impossible in the Watchung Ridge of New Jersey.
This is not likely; but the globe has been through revolutions and
cataclysms, and the Watchung explosions might start a new geyser basin.
Something like that happened in northwest Wyoming in the Pliocene
age, during 11 million years, next preceding the ice ages that began
2 million years ago. And the Yellowstone was the result. We shall see
more volcano geysers.
Next, the making of deltas became a hobby in our laboratory, in
connection with the old leaf deltas scattered on the New England
landscape, partly covered with trees within the grounds of the country
villas about Boston.
Delta deposits extend upstream, within the mould of the cavern within
ice of the glacial period. Thus the map shows a snake-like ridge of
gravel, ending in a maple-leaf flat, with lobate frontal slopes. These
slopes were much steeper where the dump of the stream on the delta fell
over the beach line at the lagoon or lake level in which the delta was
built. This was like the delta shown in Stone’s erosion model.
Stone prospected the idea of torrential deltas in a tank, while E. W.
Dorsey and I started a tank imitation of the glacial sand delta. In the
glacier, the ice tunnel had been supplied with water by melting through
the ice crevasses, just like tunnels seen in Switzerland, floored with
sand ground up by the ice. There was thus a torrent pouring along
inside an arched tunnel, the mouth of which emerged on a delta in a
pool, with water surface either at the tunnel level or above it against
the rounded front of the ice mass.
In imitation of a rounded bank of ice with a pool of water in front
and with a subglacial meandering cave fed with sands and a torrent,
an apparatus was built and supplied by a hose. A sheet of lead was
bent in the form of the glacier surface, with an arched opening, and
set in our tank. This fitted over a tunnel of sheet iron, soldered
so as to meander in plan, and fitted at its upper end with pipe and
hose connection. A sheet-iron funnel rose from the upper end of this
artificial cavern, wherewith to supply different colored sands to the
model subglacial river, represented by the hose jet and iron tunnel.
The iron tunnel ended flush with the leaden arch.
The object of the experiments was, first, to set the leaden glacier
in a pool of water in the laboratory tank. Next, to jet water through
the tunnel, supply sediment in successive colors through the funnel,
and let that accumulate on the bottom of the tunnel and in a delta
in front of the artificial leaden glacier. The deltas and their
sliced cross sections in different experiments represented the noted
difference of kinds of sand supply or difference in water level of the
pool. In one case the water level was below the ceiling of the tunnel
where it emerged from the arch entrance. In another, it was above the
cavern mouth, so that water of the cavern stream, debouching from the
submerged cavern mouth in the lagoon, spurted up with its mud and made
a half crater against the glacier front.
These experiments illuminate the gravel-quarry sections of
Massachusetts. In those cuts in eskers (serpent ridges) and sand plains
(glacial delta fans) were seen topset beds, or flood wash, or foreset
beds at forty-five degrees which are the sublagoon frontal wash, and
occasionally backset beds where cavern wash gushed upward.
So our cross sections, cut with a knife in the delta, and the winding
cake extending upstream in the cavern showed topset, foreset, and
backset strata after draining the tank and lifting out the apparatus.
From the embryo delta the flood-plain beds overlap the earlier frontal,
or foreset, beds. The frontal beds are always under the lagoon. The
flood-plain beds (topset) were made by a meandering river course under
the air. Always this plain is built at beach level as a wash fan shaped
like a leaf, with the cavern stream bottom as the stem of the leaf.
New England has been covered with mountainous ice, miles high.
Subglacial streams and subglacial clear ice caverns are abundantly
found at the lower ends of all glaciers in the world. They merely
represent the melting snow and ice in pulses of sunshine, snow at the
source, ice in the course, crevasses and gravitation making water seep
through. This water shapes a channel for itself and erodes a sewer
system of scouring along the bottom of the subglacial valley. This
grinds and melts the bottom ice into arched caverns; and the sediment
builds up on the stream bottoms, eventually carving the roofs of the
caverns into high arches or arcades. The subglacial caverns are self
constructed drainage pipes.
The glacial stream is really a river flood cutting its valley. The ice
river grinds and scrapes, and the water under the ice pipes and drains
the melting. The ice carries chisels of broken rock. The enormous
weight, in gliding plane layers of ice, flows in accordance with the
crystal laws of snowflakes and ice crystals. The moraines, or debris
fields, at the sides and on top and underneath the eroding ice jumble
yield mud and sand and boulders. The torrent underneath removes the
rubbish.
The delta in front follows laws of sedimentation. If there is no lake
in front, the delta is a flat wash fan, or valley flood plain. All
these things become clear to the student who makes a baby glacier out
of tinware, sand, a tank, a hose, and a faucet.
I have spoken of cataclysms, or what early geologists called
catastrophe, happening occasionally in the world of erosion and
subterranean geysers. Such were the Yakutat crash and the Bandaisan
explosion. But each glacier-period field, like an ice mountain over
Europe and America, constituted a cataclysm lasting 500,000 years,
and this happened four times even in the centuries of early man. The
Mediterranean and the Great Lakes are offspring of such cataclysms.
But Lyell carried the doctrine of uniformity to extremes; he thought
that what man sees is what always happens. I do not believe Lyell ever
realized that earth or sun might conceivably explode in a month of our
time. Again, this is not likely.
The opposite of uniformitarianism is occasional catastrophic trigger.
The process of erosion pulls the trigger for sudden deformation. Slow
deformation pulls a trigger for eruption. Eruption triggers internal
intrusions. The Frank Landslip; the Charleston, San Francisco, and
Napier earthquakes; the Pelée eruption; and the Yakutat upheaval all
created terrific surprises for geologists.
The gigantic intrusions through millions of years from the core of the
earth, made of white hot star matter, percolating to surface volcano
belts up 1,800 miles of permanent, primitive cracks, are mostly
balanced by the crustal weight. This is the adjusting globe. But the
intrusive mechanism, under tides in the rock and in the oceans, always
in motion, pulls the trigger for the big geologic revolutions.
The very deep broken earth blocks shift, volcanism between them heats
the surface, floods the surface with gas foam, and lifts areas of
surface by heat swellings; and on the surface, what was a glacial
period gives place to a volcanic period. The last of these was the
Miocene Tertiary, with large-scale volcanic eruptions all over the
world.
Comparing Boston with the Black Hills showed underground eruptions in
the latter, for which a warping uplift pulled the trigger. These were
the rock cisterns or lenses of porphyry injected among the strata. The
time of this was Miocene or Eocene Tertiary, probably later than most
of the volcanoes of the Yellowstone, farther west.
Boston, on the other hand, was making black basaltic dikes, probably
identical with the volcanoes of the Berkshire Hills and New Haven, of
the age of the big reptiles, 150 million years before the Black Hills
injections. The trigger which pulled off the Boston eruptions was the
Appalachian warping. That which fired off the Black Hills was the
Laramie revolution that pushed up the Rocky Mountains.
The injection of lava lenses in the Black Hills was a form of
deformation of strata which we experimented with in the laboratory. The
layers of sandstone, limestone, and old ocean muds covering over the
arch of these hills were injected by dikes or fissure fillings from
below. How would injections behave?
With Ernest Howe as my associate, I arranged a square tank for
sedimenting sand, plaster powder, coal dust, or marble dust in layers
under water. Under it was an iron cylinder in which wax could be
melted. A screw piston pushed the molten wax up to inclined or upright
slots in the middle of the tank box. The water was drained off, and
the hot wax was injected up into the strata. The tank sides were taken
down, and hardened lenses of wax were sliced vertically with a hot
knife to show what had happened to the strata by the process of wax
intrusion.
In some of the experiments 300 pounds of shot were piled over a cloth
layer on top of the strata to imitate the weight of natural sediments.
This was before injection of the hot wax, and the result was a neat
dome of deformed layers at the surface, a domical hill over a lens of
wax inside. This hill was eroded with a spray of water to show what
kind of radial valleys would form. Such radial streams were found in
South Dakota, with infacing escarpments, around some of the dome hills
made by laccoliths.
From the beginning it appeared that a lens of injection would form,
that the strata would arch over a dome of wax. The arched strata
stretched on the crest and the breaks gaped upward, while the side
bends cracked gaping downward. It was there that the wax could break
its way upward and make a volcano. Some nice little experimental
volcanoes of wax-built cones and craters formed on top of the model.
As with all folded strata arched downward under weight, the cracks
on the bend of a downward arch, or syncline, admit lava from below,
whereas the cracks on the upward arch, or anticline, are held tight,
closed by the weight of strata above. Thus an intrusive dome will not
erupt through its crest, but through its sides.
The results of all these tests showed that rigid beds carried the
arching force and that soft beds were most invaded and pushed aside by
the wax. The steepness of curvature of arch varied with the load. An
inclined pipe formed an irregular lens thickest away from the incline.
In a hard bed ruptured on a downbend, concentric fractures around a
dome let the lava up to higher strata.
On the crest of a hard bed the fractures are like the spokes of a
wheel, but they do not make dikes; they yawn open upward. Liquid wax
tended to spread as a thin sheet in soft layers of strata, stiffer wax
tended to arch up in a steeper dome. Rapid injection made a higher and
smaller dome than slow injection.
Compared with the arching up the whole long mountain oval of the entire
Black Hills dome, with granite on the crest, this intrusion of wax
only imitates the small domes of lava intrusion or injection, where
the injection carries the energy or stress. Indeed, in nature, even
the lava lenses are influenced by the buckling that is going on in the
strata under stresses of crust warping. For the warping crust of the
earth is always pulling the trigger and straining the strata. The lava
rising from below seeks out the weak places and assists the buckling,
as well as following the most incoherent mud or shale beds.
When it comes to the big oval of the whole Black Hills uplift--swollen
up like the Rocky Mountains during millions of years and within which
the lava injections were only an item--we are dealing with a push from
below or an expansion that swelled up the pre-Cambrian ancient rocks as
well as the later granites. Such swellings were doubtless made again
and again in Massachusetts. There, also, we find lavas and granites and
Red Beds and glacial boulders, older than the Appalachian Mountains,
as well as younger. The younger Triassic lavas are definitely erupted
between fault blocks.
All that our experiments showed was what melted stuff will do in
strata under weight, when the force of melted stuff overcomes that
pressure to find a place for itself, although the weight may be more
or less lifted by big arching that is taking place on a big scale. The
arching is bigger than the hydraulic or gas pressure squirting.
There is another possibility besides buckling. This is faulting, or
movement of deep crust blocks the boundaries of which do not appear.
The deep crust is a movable mosaic above the core, and this movement
renews itself, now here, now there. Dutton shows that we may think of
the Rocky Mountains this way all the way out to the Pacific coast. We
may have the core fluids sucking down the blocks, the volcanic fluids
pushing up the local strata. And the volcanic fluids in cracks are the
degenerate gassy top remnants of the core fluids which man has never
seen and which are 1,800 miles down.
The boundaries of the crust blocks do not appear because the whole
first shell of the globe is buried under lavas and intrusions and
crystals and mud, meaning by mud, countless dumpings of lakes and
rivers and seas through 3,000 million years. Such is the kind of
thinking started by making wax injections.
It will be seen from the experiments that whether we are imitating
underground heat with a Bunsen burner to start a geyser, or overground
cold with delta apparatus to simulate a glacier, we are dealing with
erosion of the earth’s surface. Erosion started with the first attack
on lava by the atmosphere or by sea water. Never was the pristine
lava anything like the magma inside the globe; it snapped and chilled
and oxidized. Whether we call it basalt or obsidian, it degenerated.
Moreover, it degenerated in the outer crust when it loosed its gases,
heated itself and the rock wall, found groundwater and free air, and
started oxidation new to it. Thermal action is just as much concerned
with erosion as is rainfall or snow. Therefore, whether injecting
wax and swelling strata or imitating geysers and ripplemarks, we
were experimenting with volcanoes, for the crust of the earth is
fundamentally volcanic. For the purposes of this book these facts
demand reiteration.
In what are called geosynclines, or earth sags, the great beds of
strata are accumulated. They are the dirt washed from highlands into
midland seas. They are strata of sandstone, mudstone, or limestone;
thin films in comparison with the fire-made earth crust. It was
the wrinkling of basin fills by expansion or end push that built
Himalaya and Appalachia. The mountains are etched out of foldings and
overthrusts and faults by rotting and water transport. Pressing the
strata endways to wrinkle them is called mountain building, much better
named strata wrinkling. The thickest of them reached twelve miles
vertically, but what is that to the earth’s crust of 1,800 miles? The
crust lifts and lowers fault blocks. The little strata basins expand
with heat on their bottoms and get pulled and pushed by underground
lava intrusions. Also they get squeezed by global contraction between
crust blocks, and shoved up and down by the agelong wobbles. The
biggest wobble was the downdrop of the great oceans over fault blocks
when the crust first cracked and settled over the core. Those oceans
have shifted and adjusted in waves of global action ever since. The
crust has kept the earth a sphere while lavas erupted and weighted down
the blocks. This block wobble extends into the innermost continents.
Eruptions up the cracks migrated from the continental seas to the
shores of the present oceans. They changed composition as they did so,
because they changed from under-air eruptions to under-sea eruptions,
fifteen pounds pressure to 600 atmospheres pressure. From erosion
eruptions with enormous heat, to deep sea eruptions with enormous
chilling and pressure. And the latter are the volcanoes of the present
day, mostly concealed except for the islands and sea borders.
Meantime, the crust blocks continue to wobble up and down, and quakes
continue to creak under the rock tides of sun and moon pulls. The
creaks and wobbles are our big earthquakes, tidal waves, and eruptions.
Such big accumulations of eruptions as the Cordillera or the Hawaiian
Ridge is a terrific weight in a few million years. Both heaps have been
at it since Miocene time, or for about 18 million years, banging down
through the crust blocks on top of the core. Whether such balancing
of heavy weights on top of the crust blocks is due to change of lava
weights or sediment basins, six to twelve miles of rock vertically, the
down squeeze and underflow is called by the Greek word isostasy. It
means standing level and is a poor word because the earth’s crust never
stands still. The blocks are eternally adjusting and creaking over a
fluid core, the globe is whirling, the sun and moon are pulling, the
volcanoes are erupting, and the solar system is shooting through space.
Terra firma is never static. And our little atmospheric lives on top of
it never stand still. We are hot, and we ourselves do a great deal of
eroding.
This oration is introduction to the next series of Harvard experiments,
which dealt with squeezing and wrinkling strata in imitation of the
folds and faults of the Appalachian Mountains. Bailey Willis, at the
Geological Survey, made a press of wax models of strata. A heavy oak
piston was advanced by a screw crank. The models were waxes mixed with
plaster for hard strata and waxes mixed with Venice turpentine for soft
strata. They were cast to imitate actual successions of hard, thick
limestones; less hard sandstones; soft mudstones; or slates. The piston
advanced at a measured rate against one end of the model, the other
end being a fixed box, the strata lying horizontally. The elongate
Appalachian basin had a continent (the piston) to the east; a wide flat
fill of limestones or sea bottom to the west (the box); and the deepest
trough of pebbles, sands, and muds on the east, toward the rivers of
the eroding continent of that ancient time. The heavy limestone tapered
from the west into these thinner beds and made a stiff rib in their
midst. The final result of their wrinkling was linear folds with axes
north and south parallel to the trough, and close set at the east.
The folds overturned toward the west, the overturns developing into
overthrust fractures westward when the beds ruptured. Also, the folds
became bigger, flatter, and wider apart westward under the deeper sea,
the famous one being the Cincinnati arch.
The evidence in the middle eastern states is that the trough bottom
sank as the heavy shore sediments were dumped by rivers into the sea.
The west-central states received a wide flat of limestone. Uplift of
the continent shallowed the ocean and pushed it, narrower, over to the
great plains. So there were left a deep trough of weak beds, a massive
limestone, and an overlap of continental wash across the uplifted later
continent of the present time. The problems to be studied in Willis’
models were how folding would affect such a pile, what transmitted the
wrinkling force, what started a single fold, and how soft and hard
strata behaved under horizontal pressure.
He found that hard, thick layers of limestone transmitted the push
farthest. That soft beds piled up on each other near the piston. That
these beds showed beautiful overthrust faults inclined away from the
piston. And that the start of individual folds was favored by very
small initial bends in a transmitting layer. These downbends away from
the continent would be made as the trough bottom sank through the ages.
The nature of this sinking in upright slices of the bottom rock is
probably downfaulting. Each vertical slice would make a step-bend as it
sank.
The bottom of Willis’ box did not admit of down motion by underflow,
nor did the piston pressure create an opposed horizontal force that
might have come from the ocean area. In restraining up motion over the
folds that formed, Willis piled bags of shot on top of the model to
represent downweighting. The folding in the Appalachians was down at
the bottom of the heap where things were hot and compressed, and heat
could extend individual strata.
In our pressure chest we extended the Willis conception. We made two
pistons at opposite ends of an oaken box, with thick plate glass
panes at one side, so as to watch the folding. The two pistons would
distribute the end pressure better and admit the possibility that all
the pressure did not come from the continent. The bottom under the
model was an inner box that could move down, hung on heavy spring
balances. These could be screwed up to a pressure upward to compensate
the load of shot. Thus the first fold could arch downward as well as
upward. This imitated a possible lowered trough bottom. The piston rate
of advance was controlled by metronome, one man at each screw.
For examples, models E, F, and G had four white and four black layers,
all alike in substance, at fast, medium, and slow rates. The quickest
was shortened one inch in five minutes. The slowest was one inch in
an hour and three-quarters. The quick-squeeze model flexed smoothly,
all folds seemed to flow, and the model held together compactly. The
slow-squeeze model shortened the same amount, cracked in many places,
was brittle, and did not hold together compactly. This appeared to
prove that slow motion will fracture where quicker motion will hold
strata intact, under otherwise identical conditions of substance, of
folding and shortening, and of vertical confinement.
We verified Willis’ conclusions that stiff and thick beds transmit the
pressure farthest and that overthrust tends to form in soft beds, which
thicken near a piston. In one model we got overthrusts in opposite
directions on opposite sides of the model along a single-fold axis,
with a twist in between. While an experiment was in progress, the chest
creaked occasionally, the equivalent of an earthquake. One model was
cast to represent overlap of strata near shore, like a coastal plain.
When squeezed, it made a group of overthrusts away from the piston
acting as shore rock.
In burial of strata there is a possibility whereby they wrinkle,
and wrinkle most in one direction, which piston pressure does not
imitate. That is the heating by burial and expansion or lengthening
of controlling layers. In a long basin like the Appalachians, the
wrinkling under expansion across the greatest length is easiest,
because the axis of stiffness is parallel to the long trough.
Transitions off the coastal line from one sediment to the next--sand
to mud, mud to lime--will be weaknesses to start bends when expansion
pressure takes place under burial along the layers separately heated.
These bends develop into wrinkles and the wrinkles, into propagated
folds, with the axis parallel to the initial change of weaknesses.
Expansion lengthwise on folds, once begun, may make long flat arches
pitching in one direction. This heating by burial distributes the
folding better and farther than pushing abutments, and makes initial
bends. All bottom strata heat and expand in all directions. The
direction of easiest yielding to a folding impulse is across the weak
transition belts. After that the motion is taken up by linear folds and
fractures in one direction.
The models, after continuous or intermittent squeezing, were removed
from the chest and sliced with a hot wire for sectioning and
photographing. In one, brittle, broken series of folds in a hard layer,
the model was taken apart on that layer and the surface photographed.
The crest of the folds showed jointing or regular cracks. One set
paralleled the fold axes as would be expected; the other set crossed
the slopes diagonally and in curves. These last indicated the strains
of a twisting nature on a single layer between a downfold and an upfold.
What makes the end thrust, or piston push, in nature? According to the
old idea, it was contraction of the inner earth by loss of heat. Willis
wrote that the basin sank, isostasy or deep flow was at right angles to
the length of the basin, and general contraction took effect by reason
of the deep flow. The deep flow was toward the lighter continent, from
which the sands were originally lost.
The recent notion that radioactivity heat is in the outer shell denies
contraction of the inner earth. Furthermore, I do not believe in a
shallow underlayer of lava fifty or less miles down and capable of
flowing horizontally under shifting weight. I do believe in a deep
underlayer of fluid 1,800 miles down, under a block-faulted crust.
This fluid core adjusted itself to the ocean-bottom blocks originally,
making the upright slices moving-down controllers of the Appalachian
basin. There is no proof that sediment weight did it. It is more likely
that igneous, or fire-made, lava, as the thick outer armor plate of
the globe erupted in acts of intrusion, lubricated the vertical slices.
Intrusions are under every sedimentary mountain range on earth. It is
more likely that an agelong up of ridge fault blocks and a down of the
basin fault blocks decided where the central continental basin should
be, all of it well within the permanent side ridges of North America.
For this was a continental mediterranean sea, and the warping of its
highland of Philadelphia and its basin of Cincinnati was a mere episode
in the 2,000 million year history of Atlantic and Pacific borders of
the continent. The sinking of the intracontinental sea, relative to
the staying up of the highlands, was a wave in the history of globe
and core. Erosion and deposition were results, not causes. They were
results of the volcanic history of the ever moving active mosaic of the
globe. The permanent North America remained high, relative to Atlantic
and Pacific deeps.
The folding of the sediments merges into intrusions of magma in the
southern Appalachians. Here arose the granite problem on a tremendous
scale, which is repeated in our Ascutney Mountain in Vermont. What
it was doing under the bottom of those vast fields of limestone from
Ohio to Illinois we have no idea. No more do we know what is doing
under the vast fields of lime and red ooze at the present bottoms of
the deep oceans. But we do know that fire-made rock squirts up under
all sea-laid sediments which anyone has ever studied on islands or
continents. This fire-made rock, solidified, has thickness and a
bottom. We do not know its thickness nor its bottom. We do know that
under it are big cracks 2,000 miles long rupturing it into volcano
systems. The conclusion is that the globe is mantled by a layer of
igneous matter which has spouted up cracks since more than 3,000
million years ago. How did this matter migrate by new intrusions,
to pull, push, heat, and wrinkle through 500 million years the dirt
accumulated in shallow Appalachian trenches from Alabama to Indiana? We
do not know.
The last of the Harvard experiments that I took part in concerned
melting up powders of basaltic minerals and rocks, letting them cool
down gradually, and then sectioning them for the polarizing microscope
to see how they resembled lavas. V. F. Marsters of the University of
Indiana helped me. Based on the European work of Doelter, Fouqué,
Michel-Lévy, and others, we used a French furnace with gas flame
blast and small crucibles of diatomaceous earth mixed with clay. The
specimen powders of crushed natural basalts, or mixtures of pyroxene,
feldspar and olivine, were kept glowing for forty to 150 hours, and
cooled either rapidly or slowly. The belief in those days was that slow
cooling was the main control of coarse crystallization. Quick or slow
cooling certainly does produce these effects in lava flows.
From quick cooling, we generally got radial bunches of crystals or
spherulites, in a glassy groundmass. From slow cooling, we got diabase
structure or coarser crystallization, with some openwork hollow
crystals. And there were little grains of magnetite and spinel. Much
time was wasted on furnace safety and methods, and on fire-punctured
crucibles of platinum, carbon, and graphite.
Nothing had been learned in 1900 about stirring, nor about gas as an
ingredient in basalt. It was not until years later, at the Hawaiian
Volcano Observatory, that Emerson proved that aa lava was made by
stirring a crucible. Aa is crystalline. Emerson got glassy lava by
quiet melting. No one has yet subjected lava to hydrogen blasts like
those of a Bessemer furnace, nor to other gases. There is a big field
here for imitating Mauna Loa and Etna fountains, and for critical
petrography of artificial basalts. Modern work has been concerned with
physical chemistry of limited mineral systems. So far as I know, no one
has mathematically synthesized natural rocks as an object in natural
history since the work of Carl Barus for the U. S. Geological Survey in
the nineties.
CHAPTER III
Expedition Decade
“_The voice of thy thunder
was in the whirlwind._”
Whereas small scale experiments in the laboratory helped me to think
about the details of nature’s experiments, there remained the need to
measure nature itself. The deep lavas of South Dakota, squeezing among
shale beds, posed many questions. What penetrating of strata goes on
under Vesuvius? Does lava inrush tilt or lift the ground? Does this
measure up to eruptions in or from craters? Cannot experiments with
craters themselves be made by dwelling there? Certainly the progress of
lavas can be measured as they flow forth.
The decade following my mud-pie experiments saw me assistant
professor at Harvard and head professor of the geological department
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These appointments were
under Presidents Eliot, Pritchett, and Maclaurin. From 1901 to 1910 I
continued to serve the Geological Survey, writing up back reports. Then
nature took a hand. Along came earthquakes and eruptions in Guatemala,
a terrific disaster in the West Indies, expeditions to the Caribbees,
Italy, the Aleutian Islands, Japan, Hawaii, and Central America,
another in north Japan, and disastrous earthquakes at San Francisco,
Valparaiso, Messina, and Costa Rica. The destruction of St. Pierre in
Martinique set the stage for field work on volcanoes and earthquakes,
work which I was to continue for a half century.
When the evening papers of May 8, 1902, announced the sudden
annihilation of 26,000 people that morning at 8 o’clock at St. Pierre,
Martinique, I went immediately to President Eliot. Knowing that I had
been urging field study of volcanoes, he agreed that I ought to go
to St. Pierre and wired Secretary of the Navy, William H. Moody, to
arrange for transportation. Immediate financial support came to me
from Alexander Agassiz, the National Geographic Society, and numerous
friends; and my Harvard colleagues agreed to give my lectures.
I reported to the training ship _Dixie_ in Brooklyn, where I found
Captain Robert Berry, a stalwart Virginian, in command of a cadet
crew. On board were I. C. Russell of Michigan, author of “Volcanoes
of North America”; E. O. Hovey of the American Museum; Curtis, the
maker of topographic models; R. T. Hill of the Geological Survey, and
expert on Caribbean lands; and numerous other scientists, and newspaper
correspondents.
The voyage to the West Indies was unique. On the navy cruiser were
stores of food, tents, clothing, and medical supplies for the refugees
and an oddly assorted passenger list; all assembled because of warfare
against mankind by two utterly unknown volcanoes, Soufrière on the
British island of St. Vincent, and Pelée at the north end of the French
colony of Martinique. Geologists gave lectures to the crew on deck; and
in turn, we learned about naval discipline and efficiency.
When we arrived at Fort de France, thirteen days after the terrific
disaster, we were transported at once to St. Pierre on the naval tug
_Potomac_. We landed and walked through the ruined sugar city, the
streets puddled with molasses and rum. Thousands of dead were buried
underfoot amid the rubble, for the day before our visit, there had
been a second blast from Pelée, the 4,000 foot volcano smoking four
miles away. This had thrown down what roofs remained after the first
explosion.
We arrived opposite St. Pierre May 21, 1902, and saw a smoking, dusty
line of ruins along the shore. Before we landed we were warned that if
the tug’s whistle should blow we were to make for the boats. The dusty
hill lay on our left like a gray snow landscape, not at all like a
cone. The crater was a gorge in an ordinary mountain under clouds.
We wandered through the dreary ruin and found masonry completely
destroyed and no visible large volcanic fragments. The streets were
full of rubble, and everything was coated with green-gray powder. Roofs
were gone, an occasional timber was burning, and bodies were still
numerous in the shells of houses. We saw a baby in an iron cradle, a
man face down in a tank, and a big man on his back in a deep baker’s
oven. His flesh was shriveled and drawn away from his joints by heat.
Elsewhere eight or ten bodies were crowded at the foot of a cliff.
[Illustration: _3. Explosion cloud rising from Halemaumau
during explosive eruption, May 13, 1924_]
[Illustration: _4. Crag in lava lake, January 23, 1918_]
The end of the town toward the volcano, all backed by cliffs, was
deeply buried under gravel, but the southern end had a covering of only
a foot or two of sand. The second explosion was greater than the first
one, demolishing third storeys and the second belfry of the cathedral.
The beautiful bells “whose soft liquid notes used to ring across the
bay with touching cadence at the Angelus hour” lay tumbled in rubbish,
splinters, and steaming vapors; their ancient embossed inscriptions
half buried in dust.
The bodies were mostly shriveled to a crisp from the second eruption,
for earlier the bodies had not been much altered. The odor was a
haunting one that returned in dreams--of foundry, steam, sulfur
matches, and burnt stuff, and every now and then a whiff of roast,
decayed flesh that was horrible. It was impossible to realize that this
Pompeii had been a thriving French town two weeks before. Not a roof
was left, and scarcely a timber; steam came through little holes in the
wet brown sand, and a sickening whiff showed whence it came.
It was hard to distinguish where streets had been. Everything was
buried under fallen walls of cobblestone and pink plaster and tiles,
including 20,000 bodies. A New England town would have blown away as
white ashes before the giant blowpipe acting on the flame of burning
rum.
I looked toward the gray old volcano, with shrouded summit. The
landscape was dusty, like old statuary. Mountain slope and cliff were
denuded of trees. An overturned factory boiler had holes punctured by
flying stones. A circular marble fountain basin was chipped away on the
volcano side by bombardment. Old cannon used as mooring posts at the
quay had been uprooted violently. The green landscape ended abruptly at
the city along a sharp line, with coconut palms half green, half brown.
There was no motion except steam jets on Pelée’s slopes.
Suddenly I wondered what those steam vents were doing. At first there
had been one or two along the sea front; but now there were eight, ten,
twenty, spurting high and scattered all over the volcano. A physician,
Dr. Church, was standing near me, and we agreed that we disliked the
outlook. Now there were forty jets, like so many ghostly locomotives
run out from the Pelée roundhouse. Meanwhile, white-coated officers and
scientists were scattered about in groups under the cliffs, some out of
sight of Mount Pelée.
We looked toward the USS _Potomac_; she had seen the steam, and
her own white steam presaged quick, repeated toots of her fog horn.
Pellmell the passengers came tumbling to the landing. The sailors
had no sooner started the boats than two more white-coated figures
appeared, and we had to put back for them. The mountain looked as
though it were rifting in a hundred places preparatory to an outburst,
and there were many stories of new craters forming. What we saw was
actually the product of a smart rain shower, falling on red hot dry
gravel; but we were to learn later about rain rill explosion. Wherever
a stream rill runs down to such contact, a jet of steam forms at once.
The main water gorge of the Pelée crater was blown clear of clouds as
we steamed past, and we saw a cup under the summit amphitheater where a
lake had been, with a pile of scaly looking hot boulders in its midst
steaming violently. This crater extended into a deep gulch to the
ocean, whence had come a disastrous mud flood on May 5 which buried a
sugar mill. This had happened three days before the destruction of St.
Pierre. Water preceded steam. The cracks under the gulch undoubtedly
dipped away from the city, and from an unknown chasm athwart the gulch
line ejected water and superheated steam toward the city, like a jet
from a hose. This happened on May 8. The ejected material had been in
dry steam, and red hot, accounting for early reports of lava at night.
I saw molten rock five weeks after the _Potomac_ trip, when the
crater cone was above the rim of the gorge, apparently large fragments
of brown angular material resting on finer gravel. Cauliflower clouds
of reddish dust spurted up the bed of the gulch below every half hour,
and migrated down the gulch. This was followed by a low growl, perhaps
from avalanches. The basin widened during the month, and the dome
gained in height and breadth. A bright incandescent crack at night
was seen to cross the heap obliquely. A sudden increase of glow was
followed by a rumbling, as though the dome were heaving. Breadcrust
bombs of andesite, cracked on their surface in deep gashes, and picked
up on the mountain at both Pelée and Soufrière were pieces of the
internal lava.
A chance clearing of the whole dome came two months after the
obliteration of St. Pierre. This we photographed, when brown dust
was rising, and steam jets appeared southeast on the dome and in the
gulch. On top was an extraordinary spine, shaped like a shark fin, with
steep escarpment to the east, curved and smooth and scraped to the
west, pushed up and out of a central rupture of the dome. It was like
paste from a tube, a hard central pencil of lava that had been shoved
up by the expansive force within. Jagged surfaces of breaking showed
on the vertical east cliff and long, smooth, arched striations of
scrape appeared on the rounded west profile of the protuberance. Other
hornlike projections showed on the dome. The summit spine was 200 feet
above the surface of the heap.
On July 6, 1902, came the first report of the famous Pelée spine.
It crumbled in August, and a year later a new spine, facing in the
opposite direction, reached a height of 1,000 feet. It was a central
tongue of the semisolid lava of the dome, sufficiently plastic to be
urged out by forces within. Otherwise the dome was a nearly solid
extrusion covered with fallen bombs. This was the magma, or lava, of
the Pelée-Soufrière eruptions. Dike ribs extended radially from the
spine athwart the dome. I published an erroneous explanation that the
dome of boulders consisted of old fragments melted by a superblast and
was not true lava. I was so far right, however, as to anticipate the
gas-heat theory and melting of all volcanism.
The direct crisis of these Carib islands in 1902 was introduced by
Soufrière Volcano on St. Vincent, 100 miles south of Martinique, at 1
p.m. on May 7, nineteen hours before the St. Pierre disaster. Soufrière
exploded, as the common saying is, through a crater lake pit southwest
of its 4,000-foot summit, the crater edge being 3,500 feet high. It
is notable how many volcanoes are 4,000 feet high, and how many have
crater pits, not at the top, but along a rift below the peak. Just this
was the case of Pelée, just this characterizes the calderas of Kilauea
and Mauna Loa. A dozen other volcanoes could be named where the vents
are through the flank of the heap.
Hovey, Curtis, and I were taken by the _Dixie_ to St. Vincent,
where the hospitable English colonists provided us with houses at the
base of Soufrière, and with servants and horses; and the Government
supply steamer took us around the island. We made the ascent of
Soufrière to the edge of the great crater and looked down at boiling
waters far below, green and muddy, and sending up a column of steam on
one wall.
We three Americans guided by T. M. MacDonald, a Scottish planter, made
the first ascent after the fearful eruptions of May 7 and 18. Leaving
our quarters at Chateau Belair, we climbed on foot from the southwest
base, with six stalwart negroes carrying instruments, water, and food.
In the ruins of Wallibu sugar mill we encountered a wild-eyed East
Indian coolie and his helpers looting sugar.
The Wallibu River received the brunt of the heavy, dry, red hot,
gravel of the eruptions, drifted like snow and crusted with wet mud.
Water supplied by the river broke its way into the eighty feet of
incandescent fill of the valley. Instantly a steam explosion was hurled
up in white volutes, and the river dammed its own channel with the
stone shower from upblasts. This forced its own waters into fresh hot
cinder and so maintained explosive action. One such exploding river
sent up a column three quarters of a mile high, indescribably majestic,
causing the natives to report new craters. A shower of mud and sand
fell on our party.
The old road crossing Soufrière mountain was destroyed, the river
flats were deeply trenched, and difficult ridges and hollows were
encountered at every step. The gulches were deepened into gorges, the
slopes above furrowed with a feathery rill drainage pattern. Each spur
between gulches was like a very steep roof, with a smooth pathway
uphill along the watershed. This made progress easier. Big tree stumps
of _Ficus_ jutted ragged through the hardened mud, the branches
charred and sharpened by sand blast.
A whirl of volcanic sand made an unpleasant stinging shower of dust,
and sulfuretted hydrogen smelled of rotten eggs. But near the summit
the air was fresh and the sunshine bright. A rain would have made
the mud slippery and perilous, for the gulch slopes were practically
cliffs. Finally we did come to mud clots, resembling a cattle wallow,
knee deep and sticky. Large blocks of rock two feet across lay on the
surface, flung-out pieces of the old crater walls; and there were some
bombs of new lava.
After three hours we assembled at the rim of the old crater, which
before the outbreak had been full of a high crater lake. Suddenly we
came to an immense chasm almost circular, then the profile of a black
precipice falling away 2,000 feet; and up its face we saw a silent
steam column purling away in billows. The bottom was a green pool of
boiling water, muddied by springs from the wall; and a hundred tails of
white steam joined the column on the wall.
The inner walls showed horizontal bands of old lava, and intrusions
both in lens shape and as dikes. There were red brown puddingstones
made up of fragments. A funnel-shaped intrusion looked like the diagram
cross section of a volcano, making a perfect T of gray lava, like a
mushroom. A large fissure, filling west, rose from bottom to top. A
northern rocky horseshoe rim, or somma, at the top made the peak of St.
Vincent. The crater lip was a mile wide and the interior a half mile
deep; and the green puddle at the bottom was 1,200 feet across. The
base of the wall column sputtered fiercely and sent up spurts of black
mud and rock fragments. The lake level was 1,100 feet above the ocean,
800 feet lower than before the eruption; and the pool was shallow, with
mud flats and islets. We operated cameras, compass, and sketch books;
paced off a base line; and noted that the northwest corner of the
crater had been blown away to leave a big notch.
When we returned to Chateau Belair, the negro peasant women brought out
their children to gaze at us, the godlike men who had dared the crater.
Mr. MacDonald had to steer us through the crowd, and we felt like the
twelve apostles after a miracle.
The Soufrière eruption during the first week of May was more voluminous
and violent than that of Pelée, for Pelée was concentrated on one
target. Soufrière wrought havoc east and west, whereas Pelée was in
a sector southwest of the mountain. They were equally devastating,
however, and both made downblasts of superheated steam and gravels.
Scalding dust killed people, but so did water waves, conflagration,
steam, stones, drowning, and burial.
Soufrière’s dust fall was reported all the way to Trinidad and
Barbados; and from ships east and southeast, directly against the
trade winds, from 100 to 900 miles away. The dust column penetrated
the antitrades of the upper atmosphere. Sounds were loud 150 miles
away, but not heard close to the mountains. In the red hot gravel were
innumerable landslides, river waters rushed into the gravel and made
false eruptions, and shore cliffs collapsed.
No lava, except as fragments, appeared in St. Vincent, whereas it rose
as a crateral heap in Pelée. Floods of rivers radial to the volcanoes
appeared both before and after the first eruptions, and scientists
erroneously attributed them to cloudburst rains. Later, exact
descriptions by natives showed that the sources were hot waters gushing
out in places where there was no rain.
A succession of eruptions at increasing intervals from May to December
actuated both volcanoes. In succeeding years, explosions dwindled; but
over Pelée’s crater rose a mighty dome and spine of stiff quartz-basalt
lava, like ointment from a tube.
There was, on Pelée, a splitting of the bottom of the long crater
gulch. Cauliflower steam volutes charged with dust gushed up the
cracks, hard-edged in profile down near the shore, soft and diffuse
near the crater. Scalding waters in the gulch bottom carried mud. The
mountain was cracking open along radial gulches, and squirting up steam
and geysers, but this all concealed itself with sediment. Nobody ever
saw the cracks open. The migrating steam clouds charged with gravel
were called glow clouds and were believed to “flow” as gas fluids from
the crater.
An elucidation of all this mystery came many years later, after a
thorough study of all reports. The glow clouds, which were at first
confused with the gigantic blasts that had destroyed the city, were
gradually explained. It became apparent that radial cracks are ancient
characters of lava domes, and that lava domes lie under heaps of
agglomerate. Pelée and Soufrière are heaps of agglomerate. Kilauea and
Mauna Loa are lava domes. Vesuvius is an intermediate type of volcano.
I remained in the field from May to July, returned to Mount Pelée,
cruised through the northern Caribbee Islands, and went to the bottom
of the deep crater of Mount Misery, on St. Kitts. My guides on St.
Kitts were two colored men, Johnny Eddy and Samuel Jim. In the crater
we found steam and sulfur and a rotten-egg smell, on the bank of a
cold crater lake. We descended by seemingly vertical cliffs covered
with roots. This was a typical fumarole, or solfatara, one of the
unsatisfactory characteristics of craters. We collected specimens and
took snapshots, wondered how often such places change suddenly, and
knew hydrogen sulfide gas only by the smell. It all jibed with what I
was later to discover in Hawaii; that the only way to know a crater is
to live with it, and that gases can melt lava.
As I look back on the Martinique expedition, I know what a crucial
point in my life it was and that it was the human contacts, not field
adventures, which inspired me. Gradually I realized that the killing
of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to
geologists and then unexplainable was worthy of a life work.
The story of Rita Stokes made a tremendous impression on me. In
Barbados hospital I talked with this young white girl and her colored
nurse, Clara King, who had been passengers on the SS _Roraima_
which was at St. Pierre when the city was destroyed. When I saw them
they were swathed in bandages. Clara’s burns were severe on knee, arm,
and hand. Rita’s were on her head, hands, and arms, and one seriously
disfigured ear. Both were somewhat injured for life. Mrs. Stokes, a
boy, and a baby girl in the cabin with them had been killed. All saw
the adjacent mountain sending up puffs, as the ship lay at anchor
off the St. Pierre waterfront on the morning of May 8, but they were
reassured by the ship’s officers.
Suddenly the steward rushed by shouting, “Close the cabin door, the
volcano is coming!” Mrs. Stokes slammed the door just before a terrific
explosion came which nearly burst the ear drums. The vessel was lifted
high and sank down, and all were thrown off their feet by the shock,
and huddled crouching in one corner of the little cabin. Scalding moist
ashes poured in through a broken skylight in inky darkness. Next came
suffocation, relieved by the door bursting open and air rushing in.
When a little daylight came back, Mrs. Stokes and the little boy were
plastered black with hot mud, the baby girl was dying, and the nurse
and Rita were in great agony. A heap of scorching mud had collected on
one corner of the floor, and as the young girl put her hand down to
raise herself, her arm plunged to the elbow in scalding sand. They were
all taken out to the deck where mother, boy, and baby died. The ship
was on fire, and the nearby city was a mass of roaring flames. More
ashes fell and scalded the victims. Curiously, third degree burns were
left on flesh, through underclothing not burned at all.
Clara said that the mountain appeared gray with smoke rolling west,
that the weather was very calm, and that the dust smelled like
gunpowder. She saw no flames during the blast and did not know what set
fire to the steamer. The fires probably came from the city. Ashes came
in sputtering splashes like “moist marl.” No rocks fell and the grit
in cabin and on burns was wet sand. Before the blast there had been
falling dust but, according to Clara, no difficulty in breathing. The
sun was brownish red.
The bow of the ship was pointed seaward, and the vessel heeled over
left, then right. The stern, toward the conflagration, caught fire
first, the bow later. There was no rumbling, only shock and rattling
thunder all at once, no noise before or after. The only people Clara
King saw toward the shore were some men on a raft.
I wrote President Eliot and the American Relief Committee about the
case of Rita Stokes, half American and the only white woman saved in
St. Pierre. And I rejoiced to learn from her guardian and uncle, J. E.
Croney of Barbados, that she was provided for. The sum of $450 was sent
to the committee, and $6,000 in trust was set aside for her. She was
never separated from her devoted nurse, Clara King.
Apart from the experiences of the wounded, I found much to contemplate
in the findings of numerous geologists; in the accounts of doctors,
sailors, naval officers, resident government men, the local newspapers,
and photographers; in the specimens we collected; and in the work of
great newspaper and magazine correspondents.
The facts and photographs we collected were baffling. They did not
correspond with the text books. Two volcanoes a hundred miles apart
suddenly spouted death downward. Obviously they were connected along
the island chain, with ocean to the east and ocean to the west.
Telegraph cables were broken. Why? That which lay under the ocean was
totally unknown, both events and topography. The biggest part of these
volcanoes was submarine.
Earthquakes at Pelée were relatively small but often continuous. Tidal
waves were local and accompanied by downblasts of steam. The downblasts
were at first supposed to be due to fallen avalanches from the
upblasts. Then it appeared they were really sloping jets from concealed
holes or cracks in the gulches, with inclined orifices amid the blocks
of a cracked-up mountain. For at Pelée the blast that destroyed St.
Pierre shot from the crater gulch in cascades of water and steam, while
observers on high ground saw the horizon, or clear sky, over the crater.
The speed of the blast was six miles in two minutes, or 180 miles per
hour. This was different from the glow clouds in the later months,
migrating slowly along cracks in the gulch bottom.
Man’s perception of speed relative to himself has nothing to do with
actual speeds. It may be argued that a miniature volcano erupts faster
than a big volcanic system, but not if the whole terrestrial plexus of
systems is taken into account. An eruption of Mauna Loa is a very slow
affair, in comparison with the 10,000 underground squirtings of lava in
cracks totally unperceived, except as tremors on seismograph.
Pelée’s eruption was like turning on a hose. A structural valve or
orifice, suddenly opened by underground heaving of the mountain block
and letting out steam and mud, appears to be the only reasonable
explanation of what happened. And the only agents possible were glowing
stiff lava heating boiling water underground. Both of these were later
identified.
Grove Karl Gilbert of the U.S. Geological Survey, who had criticized
favorably my manuscript on the Black Hills intrusive lavas, wrote me
not to drop the enigma of Mount Pelée, because he found the published
reports unsatisfying. In 1949, forty-seven years after the disaster, I
published “Steam blast eruptions,” dealing with Pelée. In the interim I
studied many volcanoes.
Alexander Agassiz, who had been urging me to do a memoir on volcanoes,
financed a trip to Vesuvius when it exploded and poured out lava in
1906. Ottajano northeast of Vesuvius was demolished by jets of gravel
and stones; and Boscotrecase at the south was invaded by black streams
of heavy, sprouting, bouldery slag. Here was a change of habit,
from heaping up lavas for thirty-four years, to collapse, internal
avalanching, and pure steam explosion accompanied by remnants of
stirred lava flow.
Why thirty-four years? A third of a century? Three times the sunspot
interval? The previous steamblast explosion of Vesuvius before 1906 had
been in 1872. In the case of Mount Pelée and Soufrière the intervals
since past explosions had been fifty-one years and ninety years. But
it should be pointed out that the Carib volcanoes had two years of
terrifying rumblings, odors, and quakes just before 1902. Groundwater
exists in large volume under all three volcanoes. Soufrière, Pelée and
Vesuvius all began the steamblasts with collapsing craters, that is,
with internal lava going down into the bowels of the earth. The lava
usually showed in Vesuvius, whereas at Pelée and Soufrière it merely
made fumaroles, or gas vents. Man, a mere microbe, could make nothing
of hot sulfurous cracks.
On April 25 the electric train slowly pushed us up as far as the
observatory station, beyond which all was destroyed. Outside Naples
the fields were covered with two inches of gray-green dust, and pines
and palms were loaded with a two or three foot drift of sand. Near
the observatory a heavy six-inch mantle of sand and dust buried the
lava fields. The Vesuvian cone was covered with straight sand slides,
whitish gray, which occasionally slipped downward. The landscape was
shrouded in drifts of white ashes revealing obscurely the slaggy
contortions of lava beneath. Pure white steam boiled up from the cavity
in the peak, surrounded by an older rain cloud, like a hat on the
volcano’s crown.
My companions--Dr. Tempest Anderson and Messrs. Yeld and Brigg--were
all from Yorkshire. We started the ascent of the twenty-nine degree
slope in a strong west wind. The steam settled down on the summit, than
alternated with clear spells. We followed the west profile of the cone
straight up, noting how the funicular rails were twisted by landslides.
Everything was covered with pebbles, sand, and dust, with here and
there large fragments up to five feet across. We found solid footing on
the radial elevations of either scoured old lava or packed fragments.
The gullies were filled with deep sand.
The rim we could see ahead was the edge of the crater itself. The
abruptness of the fall off, when we finally came to it, was startling
in the extreme. The wind was pelting our necks with stinging sand
grains which, incidentally, were ruinous to my new Kodak. Only
occasionally did sunshine sift through the mixture of sand, steam,
and cloud. We could make out an inward slope of thirty-five degrees,
terminated 100 feet below by a jutting, fuming precipice. The circular
curvature of the crater was embayed. The only noise was the howling
wind. We could not see the opposite side of the collapsed cauldron a
half mile across. The summit was 4,000 feet above sea level by aneroid
measure, 350 feet lower than before the eruption. There was a great
notch northeast toward Ottajano where thousands of tons of gravel were
hurled clear over the top of Monte Somma, the encircling old ridge. The
east-west diameter was left much greater than that of the north-south.
The radial ridges and gullies were like a corrugated roof, and sand
made a flattened angle of scree at the base of the scoured cone. The
corrugations were not rain erosion, but were made by backfallen debris
sliding. I got some photographs and Mr. Perret gave me others.
The big thing was the line of mountain blocks of earth crust. In Italy
it is made up of Ischia, Pozzuoli, Vesuvius, Lipari, and Etna, whereas
the Carribbee line is made up of Mount Misery, Montserrat, Guadeloupe,
Dominica, Martinique, and St. Vincent. Such a line of broken earth
blocks is a volcanic system. Hundreds of miles long, it is never
quiet. A single place seems quiet because superficially we are totally
unconscious of the other places. A microbe on the scalp knows nothing
of the skin of the toes. Men are mere microbes on the skin of shore,
sea, and island. And they are remote from any consciousness of sea
bottom.
Vast distances and long intervals are writing records, but man does not
measure them. He measures civilization, wars, and dynasties, not the
adventures of the ground he dwells upon. Ground he considers static.
Actually it is intensely dynamic. Occasionally it explodes and man
is destroyed. Earth history and volcanic systems make wars look very
small.
The tremendous accumulations of broken rocks over lava beds on the cone
of Vesuvius, and on all the Caribbee Islands, recall the breccias, or
volcanic conglomerates, of the Yellowstone and of the High Plateaus
of Utah. Floods of basalt alternate with vast falls or outwashes of
volcanic gravel. Avalanches, landslides, torrents, floods--call them
what you will--cover immense areas of the Cordillera. Vesuvius and
Pelée pile up cones, but the Caribbees and Italy are also heaped with
agglomerates. Erosion destroys cones, but erosion makes agglomerations
or valley fills of rocks and mud. This is the history of every volcanic
system on the globe. Stübel discovered smooth basalt domes like Mauna
Loa under every volcanic system.
In 1904 Vesuvius had vented a lava flow which stopped in September, and
its cone was sharp, with only a little crater and inner conelet on top.
In 1905 lava had flowed from a northwest split. On April 4, 1906, a
splendid black cauliflower cloud arose. The northwest flow stopped and
a southern radial rift made lava mouths progress 500, 1,800, and 2,400
feet below the top, more than halfway down the mountain. From the lower
mouth came glassy pahoehoe, or smooth destructive streams intensely
incandescent and liquid, quickly cooling to aa, or sprouting rough
fudge, black crusts, and clinker. The molten porridge flowed as a snaky
avalanche into the masonry village of Boscotrecase.
On April 7, at the crater, a column of boulder-laden steam shot up four
miles, snapping with lightning. New lava mouths sent forking snakes
crushing and swallowing parts of the village. A graveyard was neatly
filled within its masonry wall, showing that internally the rocky
torrent was a liquid.
Meantime trajectories like those of a hose sent falls of gravel for
miles, to Ottajano on the opposite side of the mountain. These also
came from the central crater. On the west flank, at the observatory,
the house was rocking, and heavy stones forced its occupants to
retreat. Matteucci and his staff went halfway down the cone, to return
next day. Explosions dwindled during the next fortnight, though one day
an adverse wind from the crater carried carbon dioxide and hydrogen
sulfide almost asphyxiating some persons. Thereafter cauliflower clouds
of white steam arose and the noise of big avalanches was heard.
The clinker field that invaded Boscatrecase was 16 feet thick, and
houses were cut in two by a slaggy torrent. In Ottajano, on the
opposite side of the mountain, flat tile roofs collapsed, buried under
three feet of heavy gravel, some of it the size of an apple. Nearer the
crater, boulders five feet in diameter were thrown a mile. The volcano
was probably blocked inside by welling lava on the Boscotrecase side,
which caused it to vomit steam and earthy avalanche material obliquely
outward on the opposite, Ottajano, side.
The Italians have a word, _sprofondimento_, which means to make
profound by insucking, that expresses what happened. This plexus of
uprush of slag and inrush of avalanche, against a water-steam geyser,
both happening at once, was very different from the quiet outpouring of
lava during the preceding years. It definitely meant rupture of earth
blocks, deep escape of that lava probably at the underocean part of
the radial cracks, and deep entrance of spring water into incandescent
vacated chambers. It meant a rupture crisis, collapsing the peak, and
a new geyser quite unrecognized. The eruption ended when the slag
pressure was relieved, the mountain blocks had settled, and the frozen
slag had shut off groundwater. The remaining lava entered into decades
of deep accumulation and gas bubbling, the solfataric phase. That which
ended the thirty-year upbuilding was probably downward pressure due to
weight of surface heaping of the cone. Cracking released water inward.
The next thirty-eight years were to culminate in a similar crisis
for Vesuvius which lasted ten days, and again its peak collapsed.
This was in March 1944, when our American troops entered Naples. It
is interesting that these culminations have been from a third to a
half century apart, but the meaning of intervals can only be really
understood when volcanoes like Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius are
grouped together. The same thing is true of Kilauea and Mauna Loa,
and of Pelée and St. Vincent. Ponte reports the eruptions of Etna as
ten years apart, similar to the sunspot interval; and Perret notes a
ten-year interval for the smaller eruptions of Vesuvius. We measured an
eleven-year interval for Hawaii, with culminations close to the minimum
of sunspots. A culmination is when lava goes down and keeps quiet, or
when sunspot numbers go down and remain few. No one knows why, or of
any connecting cause.
Three eleven-year culminations make a third of a century, when at
Kilauea and Vesuvius, something bigger happens. Sunspots have numbered
a suspiciously similar curve at corresponding dates.
Photographs of Vesuvius taken just before the 1944 collapse showed
the 1906 crater hole completely filled and overflowing. There was an
inner flat floor, a conelet standing in the middle. The 1944 eruption
collapsed the conelet, split the big outer cone, and sent flows to
destroy San Sebastiano and several villages. The torrents of ash
killed people and the electric station of the funicular railroad was
destroyed, as usual. The mountain split in several directions.
Just as in 1906, the stages of the 1944 outbreak were lava flows,
mixed lava gushing intensely liquid, crateral caving in, tremendous
gas emission, black ash changing to vapor and white ash as the
emission increased, and ultimately white steam. The black ash was the
contemporaneous lava with dark augite; the snowlike white ash was
ground up old lavas, containing the white crystals, leucite.
The liquid phase took an unusual fountain form, resembling that of
Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and nine spells of bright incandescent explosive
fountaining occurred. The collapse began on March 13; the fountaining
occurred during March 20 to 22, with jets of bright liquid lava and
flames, 1,000 to 3,000 feet high; and the crater became a lava lake.
The flames were occasioned by hydrogen within the lava itself, and
perhaps some carbon gases. This liquid fountaining phase was the
culmination of explosions, making pumice, with water vapor the gaseous
product. Ash fell four feet deep three miles away, and some fell on the
Adriatic coast. Both white steam clouds and black ash clouds arose with
the fountains, white and black side by side.
The net effect was to leave a bowl 1,500 feet in diameter and 800 feet
deep, floored with avalanche gravel. This reconstructed the funnel
of 1906, and as in 1906, the height of the rim was 4,100 feet after
eruption. In other words, the thirty-eight years had filled the vast
crater, only to have 1944 engulf and eject the contents, and strew them
down the slopes, adding an immense weight to the outer shell of the
cone.
A hundred million cubic yards of lava was poured out, and 50 million
cubic yards of ash now lie on the volcano. Three times as much was
carried far away, and the volume of gases was ten times as great.
The rock fragments, probably 200 times as great, were engulfed by
avalanches.
The big achievement of an eruption is to wedge open a mountain, let
the internal lava effervesce and go down, admit ground water, and make
spectacular fireworks of burning gas and meltings. Release of pressure
by splitting open the crust permits a great show of fiery foaming,
but no geologist sees the profound accomplishment of lava sinking
and flowing away by underground channels. It may flow out along the
Mediterranean Sea bottom. At Vesuvius, it may slip through deep cracks
in the direction of Sicily.
Certainly a periodic adjustment of the big system
(Vesuvius-Stromboli-Etna) has taken place deep down in the earth, and
the thirty-eight years of accumulation mean a stress by weighting down.
The pressure of 100 million tons of stored lava inside a weak cone
mountain and ready to effervesce with heat and give up its hydrogen is
what science too often forgets.
The continental crack system between crust blocks and full of rain
water is waiting to assist the crisis, while the blocks are poised
over uprising gases of the ages. The gases of the ages, reaching to
the core of the globe, are eternally melting the walls with white-hot
core matter, walls of siliceous rock blocks 1,800 miles deep. In this
system, Vesuvius is a tiny pimple. Incidentally, the 1944 earthquakes
were recorded in largest number during the period when the liquid
pumice fountains were in action in the nine different spells between
March 20 and March 23. This means that the maxima of engulfing
crater, seething slag, outrushing gas, crunching mountain weight, and
avalanching inner walls were all happening together. The clogging of
vents forced the ground water steam into pulsations. This could not
last; the mountain blocks settled and resumed pressure, deep lava
drained off, heat dwindled, and gas was relieved. The bigger volcanic
system asserted its downward weight of the adjusted globe.
By making much of pulsations and thirty-three year intervals, we are
dreaming of an ideal volcano such as might be constructed as was our
geyser apparatus. But there is no question of the reality of tides
in rock, as well as in ocean; of day and night; cold and sunshine;
year and century. Continent and ocean are positive, globe and solar
system are positive. The ideal volcano is part of a tidal system and
is limited in size. Therefore science has a right to inquire how it
happens that through centuries most volcanoes stay 4,000 feet high. It
has a right to look for averages and periodicities, just as a doctor
looks for respiration, temperature, and heartbeats.
Like men, volcanoes are not all alike, but both men and volcanoes are
orderly organisms. The object of volcanology is to find order and
relate the small orderliness to the big regularity of globe and solar
tides.
My 1906 visit at the end of the Vesuvian eruption crystallized my
lifework idea, begun at Pelée; but my accomplishment was dwarfed to
triviality by that of Perret, whom I first met while he was assisting
the Italian volcano observatory. He was a photographer and observer
of rare merit. He had been living in Naples and photographing all the
Italian volcanoes, and he had worked out a solar control diagram for
predicting volcano tides. Italy had made a volcanologist out of a
physicist-engineer. Discovery of Perret meant to me much more than any
phenomenon of geology.
Frank Alvord Perret was an electrical engineer from Brooklyn, and a
genius with an ordinary Kodak. He took at Vesuvius, by sheer daring,
the most remarkable photographs ever made of an active volcano. His
knowledge of astronomy, meteorology, and physics made him see in a
volcano something to study close at hand, as Benjamin Franklin studied
a thunderstorm. He developed and printed his photographs himself,
and colored his lantern slides. He helped Matteucci, the observatory
director on Vesuvius, and was decorated as Chevalier by the King of
Italy. He tramped close to lava vents and explosion clouds, and took
hundreds of pictures.
Perret and I had exactly the same conception of a volcano. We thought
of it as a living organism to record, just as rainfall is recorded
by the weather man. For our recording, we had to invent volcano
instruments. Though the camera was Perret’s supreme instrument, he had
been an electrical inventor all his life. Businessmen in Springfield,
Massachusetts, financed his work in Italy; and I went to Springfield to
lecture and encourage their research association, the predecessor of
our Hawaiian association.
Perret photographed Etna, Stromboli, Teneriffe, Sakurajima, Kilauea,
the Carib cones and other volcanoes, and performed heroic work at the
Messina earthquake of 1908. When, in 1929, Pelée entered into another
of its periods of exploding and heaving it was studied critically by
Perret who had established a museum and observatory at Martinique. He
finally settled down at his museum in St. Pierre, and was of great
service at the Montserrat earthquake crisis of 1933 and thereafter. He
was not physically strong and the volcanic dust gave him pneumonia, but
several times he recovered from attacks. He died in New York, having
been forced north by the second World War.
I also met the Yorkshire oculist, geologist, and photographer, Dr.
Tempest Anderson, on Vesuvius in 1906. This was another happy meeting.
He too was a skilled volcano photographer, and had taken pictures
in New Zealand and Iceland with his privately built cameras, using
methods of extreme originality. He afterwards made for me a camera
with small glass plates, dark chamber, arm sleeves, no plate-holder,
alpenstock tripod, bottle strip-testing developer, self-drying metal
case, and great perfection of rigidity and focus. We were to meet again
and again in different parts of the world. He became one of the British
experts sent to Soufrière by the Royal Society. He died of typhoid on a
volcano voyage to the Philippines.
Shortly after my Vesuvius expedition I moved from Harvard to become
head of geology at Massachusetts Tech. My teaching overlapped that of
Professors W. Niles and W. O. Crosby at Tech and Wellesley, while for
a time I continued my Harvard work. It was at this time that I began
to think of possible ways of financing an expedition to the Aleutian
Islands and their forty active volcanoes. The year 1906–1907 was a
time of financial boom, so I went to Calumet and Hecla, the great
copper company of which Agassiz was president. To my astonishment they
subscribed $1,000 to start the Technology Expedition. State Street and
Wall Street raised this to $13,000 in ten days, and I learned much
about the availability of money during a boom of the stock market.
President Pritchett of Harvard approved the expedition, and I organized
it for a sailing schooner from Seattle, with nine in the crew and seven
scientists.
[Illustration: _5. Scientists of Technical Expedition to
Aleutians, 1907; left to right: Jaggar, Gummere, Vandyke, Eakle,
Sweeney, and Myers_]
[Illustration: _6. Captain George Seeley of the _Lydia_,
Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907_]
We set sail in the spring of 1907 and spent four months in that ocean
of gales, fogs, rain, and cold between Dutch Harbor and Atka--the
eastern half of the Aleutians. One man, Colby, was a bear hunter who
explored the Alaskan Peninsula and reported on coal and gold. The
scientists were two geologists, two mining students, a physician who
was also botanist and entomologist, and an astronomer. They were Eakle,
Myers, Sweeny, Vandyke, and Gummeré. The sailing master and mate were
uncle and nephew, both Nova Scotians named Seeley. The following poem
by the master tells the story better than I could.
AN ALASKAN IDYLL
An Eastern College of renown
Had purchased in Seattle town
The schooner Lydia of ill fame
And Seeley was the Captain’s name.
The Scientist they numbered seven
Their subjects ranged from H----l to Heaven
One on volcano’s one on stars
Botany, bugs, short cuts to Mars.
Like knights of old were they prepared to shoot
The mighty whale, ferocious malamoot.
Good fellows all. I hope they’ll lenient be
To him who writes this verse upon the sea
Prof. Jaggar, man of earthquake lore.
To climb mountain peaks and them explore
By delving mid their bowels, Pray dont scoff.
Could tell you how it was, the cussed thing went off
At other times on many a foreign shore
Had studied deep in seismologic lore
By looking down their throats and note the smell.
Could tell exactly just how far we were from H----l.
Prof. Gummere of the Drexel Institute
On mighty Mount Makushin burnt his boot
The crater sure was hot but when we did inquire
Found it was done while drying them to near the fire
Angles and dips of the magnetic kind
Dry bulbs and wet were ever on his mind
Strong in debate on theories scientific
Passed many a weary hour on the Pacific
Dr. Vandyke the foothills oft would skirt
Oe’r turning stones and delving in the dirt
Beetles and bugs, all things that fly and crawl
Were his delight, and well he knew them all
If one were ill, or hovering near the Brink
He’d bring you back with ointment made of Zinc
Fauna and Flora that is bugs and flowers
Were his delight. On them he’d talk for hours
Of stature slight by nature energetic
The way he’d chase those bugs was quite pathetic
Colby and Cody hunters of renown.
Whose specialty was bears, white, black, or brown
The Aleutian Is’ds yield but fox and rat
But little did these Nimrods care for that
Blood was their hobby they but lived for gore
And Colby’s stomach ever called for more.
They left us early much to our dismay
To hunt the grizzly down in Bristol Bay.
With grape nuts, flour, bacon in galore
They chase the caribou, what could they ask for more
Next is little Dr. Eakle with the twinkle in his eye
Who could cook a flapjack, pound up rocks.
Or climb the mountains high
I’ll bet when he gets home again on California’s shore
He will never travel the Bering Sea in a Sch’r any more
He left us at Dutch Harbor and took another way
To Berkeley’s Alma Mater on San Francisco’s Bay.
Messrs. Sweeney next and Myers, young men of good repute
The latter on his bugle would oft delight to toot
At any hour at any time either by night or day
Reveille, Mess call, any old thing
He’d lug her out and play.
He left with Eakle much to our regret
And in my dreams I hear reveille yet.
Now I’ve roasted and I’ve toasted these fellows good and true
Just incline your ear and listen
While I whisper unto you
With a better lot of shipmates have I never yet set sail
Mid the light Pacific breezes or the wild Aleutian gale
I’ll remember each and all of them
And I hope they’ll think of me
And the trip they made in the Lydia bold.
To the darned old Bering Sea.
_George Seeley
Sailing Master of the Technology
Expedition 1907_
[Uncorrected from the original manuscript]
We collected specimens and made notes on geology, magnetism,
topography, weather, photography, ethnology, plants, insects, birds,
ores, shipping, volcanoes and navigation--materials for years of
laboratory study. The journal of the expedition, thirty-seven pages
long with photographs, was published by the _Technology Review_.
Like every such volcano expedition, we were hampered by the
necessity of using a sailing vessel, by bad weather, by rain which
interfered with photography, by long spells on the open sea in fog,
and by inaccessible craters amid the ice of mountain tops. From the
administrative viewpoint, two things stood out: the need for an
amphibian boat, independent of harbors, and the need for a land station
more or less permanent, wherefrom an amphibian boat could operate to
reach and land on determinate beaches. A permanent station could work
on specimens in bad weather. These discoveries determined the policy
that was to eventuate in the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, to the
building of amphibian boats, and to five other Aleutian journeys by
1932.
I might describe sliding down the slippery grass of Unalaska, on the
steep slopes peculiar to the Aleutians; exploring ice craters on top
of Makushin in Unalaska; or getting storm bound for five days trying
to reach Atka’s Korovinski Volcano on foot. But these tales have been
published elsewhere.
The most exciting of the Aleutian volcanoes is Bogoslof, a peak
submerged north of Umnak, with its crater, a line of erupting crags,
just at sea level. We had good luck with weather and landed on Bogoslof
in the forenoon of August 7, 1907. Hundreds of sea lions, bellowing
close to the dories, would pop up and stare at us and then plunge
frantically beneath the waves. On the beach we found one bull asleep,
but he awoke and awkwardly floundered to the sea. The islet was then
four peaks with sand flats between, the central one a steaming mass of
lava protuberances shaped like potatoes. Next to it was a half cone
broken in two, with a horned spine like a shark fin; Pelée all over
again. It was also similar to New Zealand’s White Island. At the two
ends of the island were older, peaked lava rocks. The active heap was
450 feet high with bright yellow coatings, and a ring pool of hot salt
water around it, yellow with iron-stained mud. The rocky cliffs were
covered with thousands of murres, their chicks, and eggs; and the birds
darkened the sky in flight. The stench from offal and rotten eggs was
intense.
The sea was full of fish, the beaches were full of sea lions, the hot
lava and air were full of birds. Thus life and deadly volcanism lived
together. The active rock was refractory basalt, semisolid, crusting
and breaking into blocks as it rose from a submerged crater.
On September 1 after we left, the crater exploded, throwing sand and
dust a distance of 100 miles to the east. The middle heap was engulfed,
leaving only a lagoon; and the remaining peaks were shrouded in a heavy
mantle of debris. Such a history of building and bursting and spreading
out as a shoal has gone on for more than 111 years. Bogoslof is the
peak of a submarine Pelée, several thousand feet above sea bottom. It
is always active, the index volcano of the Aleutians.
It was about this time that the need for observatories began to be
recognized. Something new and of grave menace had come into geology,
terrible steam blasts capable of shooting out horizontally and
explosively. And even as I write in 1952 these have been taking human
lives at Mount Lamington in Papua and Mount Hibokhibok on Camiguin
Island of the Philippines.
At Vesuvius, under Palmieri, an observatory had been established
about 1859. The director was interested in meteorology as affected by
Vesuvius, and annual reports were published irregularly. Successive
directors became interested in making instruments for volcano science
and Mercalli, the director in 1907, published a book in Italian on the
active volcanoes of the world. When I went to Mount Pelée I was mindful
of the venture at Vesuvius; and Professor Lacroix of Paris established
artillery officers near St. Pierre ruins after the disaster, to watch
and report as a volcano observatory. They furnished details and
photographs of the many eruptions and the growth of the lava dome and
spine. Doctors Hovey, Flett, Anderson, Lacroix, and Heilprin returned
to Mount Pelée and added much to the observational and photographic
record, and Dr. Stübel published a special book inspired by critical
study of the Caribbees, in comparison with Andean volcanoes.
Hovey and I put through a resolution in 1907 at the meeting of the
Geological Society of America, “strongly recommending the establishment
of volcano and earthquake observatories.” Perret and I were both
inventors of instruments, both experimenters, and both convinced that
the expedition method alone would never solve the volcano problem. The
brothers Friedlaender of Zurich were establishing a “Zeitschrift für
Vulkanologie,” in Naples, and a laboratory with German, Swiss, and
Italian assistants. The Carnegie Institution established in Washington
a geophysical laboratory devoted to high temperature physical
chemistry. We others were influenced by field ambition, and since 1899
I had fought for a Hawaii geological survey, for I was convinced that
Kilauea Volcano there must have an American volcano observatory.
My experiments on erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption
convinced me that a field experimental science was bound to grow up in
each of those parts of dynamical geology. All of these needed field
observatories to determine index of erosion, index of sedimentation,
index of ground movement and earthquake, index of volcanism; these
indices to be quantitative just as the thermometer and barometer and
wind gauge made climatology a quantitative science of the air. I found
almost nothing being accomplished in these new field sciences. No one
dreamt of attacking the Mississippi as a field of pure science of
erosionology, compared to the Amazon. It was felt that these things
could be left to commerce and the engineers.
By index of eruption I mean the geographical peculiarity of Vesuvius,
for example, as an eruption center. Perret tried to reduce this to
diagram form. I published, in Washington, a plea for geophysical
observatories.
An earthquake in 1908, predicted and photographed by Perret, had killed
125,000 people in Italy at Messina, near Mount Etna. Hence I felt more
strongly than ever that something must be done. So it was that in 1909,
at my own expense, I made a journey to Hawaii and Japan with my family.
Everything within me converged on making a life work of the results of
my Pacific journey.
In Honolulu I was invited to show my colored lantern slides of the
Mount Pelée disaster and to describe Massachusetts Tech’s plan for a
seismograph station on Blue Hill near Boston. When the Honorable L. A.
Thurston of the _Pacific Commercial Advertiser_ interviewed me
after the lecture, and asked whether Kilauea Volcano on the island of
Hawaii would not be better than Blue Hill, I replied that it certainly
would have many more earthquakes and, in addition, would offer volcano
lavas to observe in action. Thurston asked, “Is it then a question
of money?” I replied that it was, largely, but that it also entailed
persuading Tech authorities that I was right.
After visiting Kilauea, where I stayed at the Volcano House and saw
Halemaumau lava pit in action, I went on to Japan. There I visited the
seismograph stations of Professor Omori and traveled to active Tarumai
Volcano in Hokkaido. Tarumai, which was undergoing an interesting
eruption at that time, is a 4,000 foot cone in pine forests on the
north island of Japan. (Notice the usual 4,000 feet.) It had broken
out explosively, sent up a great spiral of cauliflower clouds of steam
and ash thousands of feet, and followed this by piling up a lava dome
in its summit crater, the dome lifting the crater floor and protruding
above the top of the mountain.
This was an extrusion of andesite, more refractory and giving hotter
steam than Kilauea vents, as measured with an electric thermometer. We
got 450° Centigrade with Bristol thermocouple in sulfur-covered cracks
hissing on the actual face of the lava dome. Kilauea had given 300°
Centigrade in the famous “postal card crack” where visitors browned
their cards.
The stiff rising lava dome of Tarumai was a duplicate of the lavas of
Bogoslof and Pelée, but Bogoslof was a crater at sea level, and Pelée’s
big dome and spine above the mountain top developed in the second year
of eruptions. I found further inspiration in a visit to Asama volcano
in central Japan. Here, just as at Tarumai, the hard lava lay in a
rigid swirl, hissing and steaming at the bottom of the summit crater
after the crater had announced eruption by “cauliflower” uprushes.
It was evident that hard lava push-ups from the bottom of craters were
characteristic of the Pacific and Carib shores, in contrast to Hawaiian
and Italian flow-downs. The pressure upward breaks a mountain, the slag
and boiling groundwater inside churns up avalanche gravel and dust,
columns of dust-laden steam rush out, the break-up lets up lava, and
according to its frothing gas and heat and the air temperature, it is
capable physically of either foaming out liquid through radial cracks
or pushing up semisolid and piling as an aa heap.
The net effect is flat lava shields for Hawaii, with flows into and
under the ocean, and shapely high cones for the Andes and Japan, with
Italy somewhere in between. The difference in the lavas is a matter of
internal meltability, due to chemistry and gases.
In the first decade of the twentieth century this was new to me as
a geologist, for the books did not explain internal gas in lava.
Geography understood nothing of the relation of a volcano to lines
of cracking earth crust and depth of crust, and gigantic explosions
dominated history as exceptions. Refractory slags were then believed
to be stiff by reason of chemical fusibility, and gas in solution in
a melt is not understood even today. The Japan journey explained the
textbook contrast between oceanic Hawaii and continental Ecuador, both
volcanic, and the further contrast with Yellowstone agglomerates, and
intrusions of the Black Hills of South Dakota. Clearly Hawaii must be
studied, and experimental geology extended to the globe as a laboratory.
On my return to Honolulu, Professor Ralph Hosmer, forester, met me and
reported that Honolulu money was available, if Massachusetts Tech would
send me to Hawaii to found a volcano experiment station. Then and there
the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association formed by business leaders
in Honolulu became a reality, to crystallize later into an educational
corporation.
In 1910, while I was still a professor at Massachusetts Tech, the
United Fruit Company invited me to go in one of their ships to study
the earthquake destruction of Cartago, Costa Rica. I saw an opportunity
to study seismology in the field, as I had studied volcanology in
Martinique. The United Fruit Company owned the railroad and much of
the national debt of Costa Rica. F. R. Hart, treasurer of M. I. T.
and director of the fruit company told me to make my own plans and
the company would pay all expenses. Knowing that engineering is of
first importance in earthquake disaster, I invited Professor Charles
Spofford, head of our Civil Engineering Department, to go with me, and
he promptly accepted.
Our journey was from New Orleans, in one of the splendid snow-white
steamers of the fruit company. This ship, going by Belize in British
Honduras, took us to Limon on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, a place
of banana plantations and Jamaica-negro labor. From Limon we took a
mountain-climbing, narrow-gauge railroad, to the high and healthful
capital, San Jose. We passed the ruins of the city of Cartago, with
its earthquake tumbled churches and wrecked lower buildings, all
covered with heavy roofs of red tiles. Don Anastasio Alfaro, government
scientist, showed us seismographs and maps, and we called on President
Jimenez, who owned a dairy farm on the high slopes of Irazu Volcano
directly above Cartago. I arranged with the President to have the
government make an official inquiry all over the Republic, suggesting a
study of ten grades of earthquake damage, adapted to Central American
habits. These grades, from mere alarm up to wrecked churches, were to
apply to what had happened in each place. According to the answers, we
would make for each place a numerical value of intensity and plot these
on the map.
We visited the wreckage of Cartago, where the quake had come like the
crack of a whip on May 4, 1910, just at the supper hour. An American
railway conductor and his family were seated at table and with the
first jarrings, they all pitched forward under the dining room table.
When the low adobe house fell on top of them, the table saved their
lives. A pathetic object was the hollow square of the Carnegie Palace,
designed by a Costa Rican architect to promote Central American
peace. It was improperly braced, and everything came down, including
the ornate stone wall around the grounds; and a cracked gate post
held a melancholy buzzard in the hideous ruin. This and several of
the big churches, cracked and disrupted, gave Spofford food for his
architectural notes.
The President’s farm on Irazu was a lovely place of green glades, fat
cattle, and attractive Spanish dairymaids, at an altitude of more than
9,000 feet. The crater of Irazu at 10,300 feet was a tumbled depression
on the top of the mountain with a steaming solfatara on one side, and a
lot of circular holes inside, within a rim more or less circular.
Poas crater was very different, with a crater lake of boiling water
surrounded by bright-colored horizontal layers of ash. We found buried
bombs from a recent eruption which had punctured the soil with holes
one or two feet across. There was wild adventure for me in being given
a horse at 4 A.M., equipped with a rotten saddle, which slipped when
I mounted him. The horse resented me in the early morning darkness,
having just left his grain, and immediately bucked off both me and the
saddle. More adventure followed. On the ride up the mountain and in the
midst of the forest we encountered a jaguar trap which had recently
caught two big cats. It was a pen, roofed with logs baited with a
fowl, and disguised with brush; a shutter fell and closed the opening
when the bait was touched. On the way down we had a terrific tropical
thunder storm, with sheets of cold rain, and I got chilled to the bone
and was sick with dysentery for two or three days.
There are a dozen volcanoes like these two on the backbone of the Costa
Rica rocky mountains. They trend in a ragged line from the Panama
boundary on the southeast, to Nicaragua on the northwest. All have
records of explosive activity, but lava flows are rare. Beginning at
Nicaragua the line of the Cordillera, capped with volcanoes, continues
through Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; and some of the lower ones
have lava flows. Cosequina is famous among them; and conspicuous as a
frequently active volcano is Santa Ana in Salvador, one peak of which
is Izalco, the index volcano of Central America, erupting frequently.
Other index volcanoes are Kilauea for Hawaii, Stromboli for Italy, and
Bogoslof for the Aleutians. The next line of volcanoes, also trending
northwest, extends from Guatemala into southern Mexico. The Costa Rica
line overlaps the northeast side of the Nicaragua-Salvador line, and
this in turn overlaps the Guatemala line, and so on. The chains of
volcanoes are over an echelon of cracks, surmounted by heaped-up lava
peaks on the continental divide.
From the point of view of experimenting with volcanoes, the exploration
of the Cartago earthquake and Poas and Irazu craters and a study of
their relations typified the unsatisfactory combination of upheaved
mountains of strata and of volcanic eruptions and underground friction.
This extends all the way along the Cordillera from Patagonia to Alaska.
I say unsatisfactory because from the science standpoint, the action
of eruption or earthquake is far scattered in time and place, and only
local observatory geophysics and traveling scientists will do the work.
Cartago is directly at the foot of Irazu Volcano, but the volcano did
not erupt simultaneously with the earthquake. In the same way Messina
is at the foot of Etna, and Tokyo is at the foot of Fujiyama; and the
great earthquakes do not accord with eruptions. Sakurajima in 1914 was
an exception, it had a quake after outbreak.
The direct outcome of my study, on the map of Costa Rica, of lines
of equal earthquake effects, showed the maximum of the 1910 quake on
the continental backbone, and the lines were crowded together along
the western mountains. However, they spread out wider and wider along
the Caribbean coastal plain, which is an elevated sea bottom on the
northeast side of the country. In other words the terrific jolt was
a deep slipping or scraping under the volcano line, and the elastic
waves of like strong effects were close together in the mountains
on the Pacific side, opposed by hard rock. On the other hand these
waves, much feebler, widened out their lines in going through flat,
soft strata on the Caribbean side. The answer seems to be that along
the jagged rupture which underlies the volcanoes there is continuous
upward pressure of lava, which occasionally is accelerated into a big
bump or slip, now here, now there, as the whole great mountain range
volcanically heaves through the ages.
Our next journey was from Barrios across to Guatemala City, where we
had distant views of such volcanoes as the pure cone of Agua and the
sharp peak of Santa Maria, which in October of 1902 had blown out its
flank and left a vast hole. The Guatemalan plateau of rich soil and
abundant market products rises gradually from the wet banana lands on
the Caribbean side to a height of 4,870 feet at Guatemala City. This
is on the line of volcano cracks. Then the land plunges abruptly in a
precipitous down-faulted slope, to a low flat shelf along the Pacific
Ocean. This shelf is covered with the merging of many deltas formed
by the streams and torrents which drain the well-watered plateau.
Along this line at the top of the precipice is the chain of volcanoes,
with rich coffee lands at their feet on the upper slopes. Coffee
plantations were destroyed by steam, mud flood, and ash blasts in 1902,
and similar destruction was destined to begin again in 1923.
A large model of Central America has been built in a park in the
open air in Guatemala City, showing magnificently the upland plateau
and its mountains, the flat slope to the east, and the long straight
steep plunge to the Pacific coastal shelf. This is one of the best
illustrations of the block faulting of a continent, lifted like a huge
flat slab along a crack, and tilted away from the Pacific. The Pacific
block dropped down.
The same structure is true, on a larger scale, of the line of the
Andes, lifted as a volcano-covered slab, down-faulted along the Chilean
coastal plain. The upland slopes away to the basin of the Amazon. In
these studies we are experimenting with volcanoes on the scale of
geography, but the principles involved apply to Mexico and to the
Cascade Range in Oregon. They probably apply also to the Aleutian, the
Kamchatkan, and the western Pacific arcs, considered as upheaved and
eroded ridges. They are arcs because they are ancient calderas.
We traveled by steamer along the Pacific coast to Panama, where the
canal was being finished. We were impressed by General Goethals and
his associate engineers, and with the marvellous organization of big
engineering as the United States could administer it. Yellow fever had
been conquered, ships constantly brought dairy products from New York
to canal employees, houses were screened and unglazed, and the jungle
was cut back to limits of safety from the mosquitoes. We found lively
young American college graduates, both men and women, playing tennis in
the deep tropics, where earlier hundreds had died of fever. We arrived
just at the time when sides of the Culebra Cut were continuously
sliding inward like a glacier, to close up the ditch. The ground under
a village at the top of the bank was cracking in long crevasses, and
habitations had to be abandoned. The only answer was to dig away the
hill with hundreds of dump cars, until the slope was flat enough to
stop sliding.
An amusing episode occurred at the Pacific end of the canal, where
giant monitors, or hose nozzles, were being used to cut away the banks.
Engineer Williamson had conceived the idea of mounting these monitors
on concrete barges made on the spot. He covered the frames with steel
mesh, and sprayed concrete against the mesh until a water-tight hull
was produced. Fellow engineers jeered at Williamson and said that a
boat made of rock would surely sink. Someone asked Williamson, when his
first barge bore up the heavy monitors and was successful, what he was
going to name it. He painted the name in large letters on the barge
“Ivory Soap, it floats.”
We met in Costa Rica and Panama Arthur Herschel, city engineer of
Kingston, Jamaica, who was responsible for the reconstruction of that
city after the terrific earthquake of 1907. Herschel invited Spofford
and me to stay with him on our way home, stopping off when we passed
Jamaica. We did so, were delightfully entertained, and learned about
engineering and rehabilitation after the most intense earthquake of all
history.
The momentary intensity of the quake had been utterly without warning,
as though two mountains had collided, and the masonry of the business
section of Kingston crumbled almost instantaneously. A British major
was walking along the main thoroughfare, carrying a heavy walking
stick, when at the other end of the street, he noticed a commotion and
thought it was a negro riot. The disturbance came toward him with a
roar, and he saw clouds of dust rise from the street like a tornado and
approach him. He felt the ground jolting, raised his stick, and decided
to stand and fight it. The buildings right and left simply exploded,
and he was fending off bricks and stones and timbers. His feet were
half buried in rubble, and he sat down on a steel girder which had
lunged out into the street behind him. The dust was suffocating, the
noise was a traveling roar which went past him and on down the street
behind him. He called to a black man to dig out his feet, but the man
rushed by with staring, crazy eyes. He heard screams and saw women
running. It was some time before Red Cross stations were established
and the army men rescued him.
The lesson taught by this earthquake, more intense than the one at
Cartago, was that the wooden bungalows of the hilly suburbs on rocky
ground stood the disaster better than even reinforced concrete in the
congested waterfront district. The better built government buildings
were preserved in part.
The Jamaica law of 1907 had established definite boundaries for wooden
construction, limited to the suburbs, and made new and wider streets in
the business district. It had also established rigorous fire insurance
laws, and a city building code requiring specified construction for
all masonry. The result was a marked ring of parkway separating the
commercial center from the dwellings in the suburbs. The trouble with
such legislation, the effect of which I saw in Kingston twenty-six
years later, is that earthquakes are hopelessly discontinuous. With
no more big earthquakes as testers, such laws become dead letter, a
new generation remembers nothing, and an irresponsible and ignorant
native population poses new problems of poverty and vice. Earthquake
construction reform becomes an impractical dream. This is part of the
unsatisfactory quality of earthquake science, where assistance to
humanity is concerned.
So ends my expedition decade, 1901 to 1910, after a succession of
studies in the field, which may be called Operation Pelée-Soufrière,
Operation Vesuvius, Operation Aleutians, Operation Kilauea-Tarumai,
and finally Operation Cartago. I did not think of these at the time
as the strategic work of warring with a task force in geographical
volcanology; but now as I look back on it, I can see in each expedition
the organization of an institution and men, and progress of volcanic
geology.
The Martinique event was destined, through many explorers, to reform
geophysics. Vesuvius introduced me to the importance of superb
photography as represented by Perret and Anderson. The Aleutian Islands
introduced the question of nautical exploration and the importance of
a field base laboratory for work in a land of adverse weather. The
Japan-Hawaii expedition showed me the national seismometric work of Dr.
Omori in the field, and laid the foundation for the Hawaiian Volcano
Observatory. Finally, the Costa Rica expedition introduced me to the
complexity of seismological field work in a land of volcanoes, with the
problems of engineering ably investigated, and afterwards published by
Spofford. This decade thus logically leads into a totally different
one, field experiment in geography and founding a volcano observatory
in and on the most active volcano in the world, with a permanent
dwelling on a crater.
CHAPTER IV
Living with Volcanoes
“_He took his journey into a far country._”
The next decade began true experiments with volcanoes, when two
organizations some 5,000 miles apart combined their resources. The
Whitney Foundation created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology an
endowment of $25,000 for geophysical work on earthquakes and volcanoes,
expressing a preference for work in Hawaii; and a group of businessmen
in Honolulu, the Volcano Research Association, offered to pay my salary
for five years.
When President Maclaurin and a group of professors at M. I. T. gave me
a dinner at the University Club in Boston to celebrate my departure for
Honolulu, the dinner table conversation turned to the terrors of the
deep sea, the dangers of volcanoes, the awfulness of leprosy in Hawaii,
and the heroism of giving up a secure teaching job in Boston. I replied
that their pessimism reminded me of the last words of Daniel Webster,
as quoted by a New England farmer, who said “Dan’l opened his eyes,
took one look at the glass of whiskey on the table at his bedside,
another at the pretty nurse, and said ‘I ain’t dead yet.’”
I had organized the funds available so that a pair of Bosch-Omori
seismographs were shipped from Strassburg, and other seismographs
were ordered from Omori’s instrument maker in Tokyo. I collected
experimental instruments such as high temperature thermometers and
chronographs, of the type used in experimental physiology. Vaguely,
I was going to take the blood pressure and pulse of the globe. Also
I obtained a full set of weather bureau instruments for temperature,
rainfall, barometric pressure, and humidity, together with the electric
pyrometers, range finders, and photographic apparatus used in my
previous expeditions. And I had some small Japanese transits, as well
as plane tables and alidades for topographic experiments.
I was unable to go to Hawaii until 1912, so I was delighted when
Perret consented to go to Kilauea Volcano in company with E. S.
Shepherd, gas chemist of the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory of
Washington, in the summer of 1911. Dr. A. L. Day, director of the
Carnegie laboratory, kindly supplied at our expense two Leeds and
Northrop resistance pyrometers and the accompanying Wheatstone bridge,
as well as thermocouples loaned from his equipment. Perret and Shepherd
went to Kilauea Volcano House; and Perret built a hut at the edge of
Halemaumau pit, where an inner lava lake was bubbling and maintaining
an island some 200 feet below the rim. Kilauea is the big cauldron,
Halemaumau is the firepit in its floor. “Kilauea” activity generally
means Halemaumau. They have separate cliff margins.
L. A. Thurston, leading journalist and publicist of Hawaii and keen
promoter of a proposed Hawaii National Park, did everything possible to
help the scientists. Perret wrote weekly reports on the condition of
Halemaumau lava, and sent in photographs to Mr. Thurston’s newspaper,
the _Pacific Commercial Advertiser_. Living and camping at the
fire pit, Perret inaugurated something new for Hawaii, and set a
standard for the Volcano Observatory. These continuous reports had been
my dream for such volcanoes as Vesuvius, where publication had usually
been in delayed annuals and gave no current news of what the volcano
was doing. Furthermore, the Vesuvius observatory was at the foot of the
peak.
I had ordered from the Lidgerwood Company an equipment of cables,
including some containing electric wires. These were to span the 1,500
feet and to lower a thermometer into the pit of Halemaumau. Assisted by
Alex Lancaster, the active little half-breed guide from Virginia, and
by numerous laborers from the plantations, whose managers, spurred on
by Thurston, took a great interest in the project, Perret and Shepherd
erected two high A-frames on opposite sides of the fire pit and built
a trolley on the cable stretched between them. Perret kept constant
angular measurement of the changing height of the liquid lava, as the
glowing slaggy pool rose and fell overflowing its banks. At one side
of a triangular island was a point of ebullition called “Old Faithful”
where gas bubbles burst in a fiery dome, irregularly, but approximately
once a minute. The objective was to find the temperature of the liquid
lava in the vicinity of the bubbling. This was achieved by actually
dipping the electric pyrometers into the molten slag, then observing
the precise temperature at the recording box, which was in the hands
of Dr. Shepherd, who remained on the pit rim at the upper end of the
connecting wires.
Finally the day came, after numerous rehearsals, when the long steel
tube, or terminal, on the end of the movable cable could be moved out
by the trolley to a middle point over the pit, where it would make
contact with bubbling liquid lava when lowered. This was an extremely
ticklish procedure, for the lava was a heavy mat of self-crusting
liquid rock with the crust forming hard slabs; few places kept up an
appearance of bubbling porridge. No one had ever made contact before
with the liquid of a fountain like “Old Faithful.” It was fortunate
that the apparatus, which was expensive, consisting of platinum wires
imbedded in silica glass, was made in duplicate so that we had two of
everything. The splashing liquid of “Old Faithful” looked as harmless
as a kettle of boiling soup, but Perret and Shepherd were in for a
surprise. When Shepherd lowered the terminal directly into the liquid,
“Old Faithful” exploded, for the molten slag proved to be a suction
whirlpool which threw tentacles of lava over the steel pipe. The
apparatus went down to destruction “like a bass under a log,” and the
cable was bitten off like a piece of line. The entire terminal vanished
into the vortex, leaving only a corroded wire.
To shorten a long story, the second terminal was lowered into a
seemingly safer liquid place. A wave of the melt slapped and strained
the pipe, and though it was recovered, no electric resistance reading
was obtained at any time with the box at the rim of the pit. Close to
$1,000 in equipment was lost. The resistance pyrometer is a sensitive
tool in the laboratory, for giving precise degrees of temperature in
the region of 1200° Centigrade, supposedly the melting point of basalt.
But it was unsuited for the rugged bubbling of basalt slag, where
flaming gases and chilling air play more important parts than mere
melting.
Fortunately Shepherd and Perret were not at the end of their resources.
There still remained the thermocouple, a simpler pair of wires of
platinum and iridium encased in a steel tube. The connectors from these
go to a simple galvanometer in the hands of the operator. The trolley
could still be used, and the thermocouple pipe had no glass inside it
to be shattered. A temperature of 1000° Centigrade was recorded in a
bubbling area, and this was considered good enough for an approximation.
Another experiment was to lower an iron bucket into the liquid, and
pull it up full and dripping with black lava glass. This was sent off
to Washington for analysis. Afterwards the lava lake went down, no more
experiments that year were possible, and Perret began the plotting of a
curve of high and low in the rise and fall at the bottom of the pit.
It may seem extravagant to waste valuable apparatus on such seemingly
small results; but as a matter of fact, the Shepherd-Perret journal
of the summer of 1911 was epoch-making in the history of volcanology
and in the work of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. It proved that
skilled observers could dwell inside an active crater and there apply
their skills in photography, chemistry, note-taking, and continuous
publication. The substance of active lava lakes was proved to have
viscosities and solidifications quite different from those implied
by gases, and it was shown that different types of thermometers
gave negative or positive results useful for the future. Above all,
the notes on volcano chemistry by Shepherd and Perret demonstrated
that engineering apparatus could be applied to the hottest and most
continuously active pit in the world. Their success was at the
relatively small expense of a journey and a few machines. Brun of
Geneva had set an example of similar work, but Perret’s curve of rise
and fall added a more detailed record of the Kilauea pit from day to
day than had ever been made before.
An observatory is a place of observation and measurement, whether the
things observed are glaciers, rivers, stars, the weather, or volcanoes.
The motive of observation in modern science is either the quality of
what happens or the quantity expressed in lengths and degrees and rates
of speed. Remembering the precedent of Vesuvius, I was confronted
in Hawaii with the necessity of determining how a volcano should be
observed, the need to measure changes in a single volcano, and the need
for permanent records of what those changes are. We chose measuring
instruments, photographic equipment, and thermometers, and I invented a
note-taking system which was compiled into a single record book, from
field notes taken uniformly by many different assistants.
[Illustration: _7. Volcano House from Observatory, 1913_]
[Illustration: _8. Island in Halemaumau lava lake, 1911. Photo
by Perret_]
[Illustration: _9. Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, 1912_]
[Illustration: _10. Jaggar in seismograph vault beneath Volcano
Observatory, 1916_]
The textbook needs for volcanology are records of the shape, height,
number, distribution, temperature, and differences among volcanoes. How
gaseous is lava? how radioactive is it? how often does it erupt? and
how dangerous is it for human beings? With reference to the source,
crack or crater, we need knowledge of how the earth crust is ruptured,
how deep are the fractures, and how much accompanied by earthquake
is the wedging upward of lava in those cracks.
My first job on arriving in Hawaii was to make contact with Mr.
Thurston and his associates. The next was to get a good map made of
Kilauea Volcano as a basis for measurement of changes in the fire pit.
Governor Walter F. Frear came to my rescue and immediately sent Colonel
Claude Birdseye and Captain Albert Burkland to make a topographic map
of the proposed Hawaii National Park. These engineers brought into the
field the topographic camp of the U.S. Geological Survey, and they were
extremely sympathetic with my project, furnishing me with surveying
monuments, and sketching out methods wherewith to make an accurate base
line for measurement of changes inside the pit.
A laboratory on the northeast edge of Kilauea Crater was quickly
provided through the energy of the brilliant Demosthenes Lycurgus,
hospitable Greek manager of the Volcano House, the hotel where I
stayed. All the merchants of Hilo, thirty miles away, contributed funds
and in a few weeks carpenters were at work, on land belonging to the
Bishop Estate and sublet by the Volcano House. Furniture was paid for
by the Whitney Fund.
A cellar for seismographs was blasted by Territorial prisoners in
the hot rock under the laboratory, at the actual northeast edge
of the greater crater of Kilauea. The lava pit Halemaumau, always
smoking, was in full view two miles away. The cellar lined with
concrete, which shut off the steam cracks, became a warm, dry place
for instruments at a constant temperature of about 80° Fahrenheit.
Concrete tables on the floor of the cellar held the pair of east-west
and north-south horizontal pendulums, recording with delicate pens
on smoked paper, stretched over a chronograph drum. These paper
records, removed every day and fixed with shellac varnish, became the
seismograms of the permanent files. Long belts of wavy lines on each
paper exhibited seconds, minutes, and hours; and when a sharp zigzag
in one of the lines occurred, it was evidence of either a local or a
distant earthquake. H. O. Wood, who had been my assistant in field
geology at Harvard and had had experience with Omori seismographs
at the University of California, was summoned to the Observatory as
seismologist.
Thus in the first six months of 1912 I became a resident of a volcano
in Hawaii and had an adequate laboratory of eight rooms, and suitable
porches, a darkroom for photography, and the beginnings of seismograph
records in the basement. Horses and saddles were purchased, the
necessary outer houses were built, and Alec Lancaster was employed as
janitor and field man. Francis Dodge, athletic young Honoluluan and son
of a government surveyor, was appointed topographic assistant. He was a
hardy cowboy, with some experience as rodman for the Geological Survey.
From the moment of my arrival I adopted uniform pocket scratch pads
with detachable sheets for the use of all employees, insisting that
anyone who went to the lava pit should write notes, inscribe the
date and hour, tell what he saw, and hand the notes to me. Even Alec
Lancaster, whose father was a Cherokee Indian carpenter and whose
mother was a mulatto, took notes and learned about the points of the
compass and the names of the coves and blowholes of the lava lake in
the bottom of the pit. Some of Alec’s notes were very amusing, as when
he wrote, “9:30 A.M. April 3, Old Faithful is on her job right
sturdy.” However, he quickly learned the correct technical expressions
for surface streaming of the lava, brightness of the fountains at
night, numbers of the bubble fountains, and places of smoke on the
bottom of the pit. At all times Alec was a useful camp man, a good
cook, and a fearless climber of cliffs. When it came to making and
using rope ladders with hickory rungs for descent down a 200-foot cliff
to the edge of the lava, Alec was the first to volunteer. He drove
spikes into cracks in the rock and tested out the ladders, surrounded
by smoke. This was done in June and December of 1912, when the gas
chemists of the Carnegie Institution were conducted to the bottom to
collect gases, by pumps and vacuum tubes, from flaming spatter cones.
I hope this introduction gives some idea of what the first year of
the Observatory accomplished. Meanwhile problems of policy and of the
publishing of results crowded upon me thick and fast. The notes of all
employees had to be compiled; critical scientific visitors had to be
convinced of the usefulness of the new effort; the Massachusetts Tech
and Honolulu sponsors had to be given suitable reports; a permanent
record book, reproducing surveys, notes, and photographs, had to be
devised; and I had to make occasional journeys to California, Boston,
and Washington for contact with the Government, with scientific
societies, and with scientific magazines.
It was necessary to keep track of improvements in photographic plates,
for the fire pit with its dark red heat and dark red rocks was a
difficult subject for photography. Fortunately, the panchromatic plate
had recently been invented by Dr. C. E. K. Mees, and was a godsend for
experiments in recording liquid lava splashing at night. Dr. Mees,
chief of research at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, has since
been a visitor and good friend of the Observatory. Both surveying and
photographing were difficult during 1912 because the inner pit sent up
a dense column of fume which diminished only at those times when the
liquid lava became hotter and developed fountaining. There was such
smokeless development with hundreds of roaring fountains of liquid lava
in January and July. The intervening period showed a great deal of
smoke, and in August there was a dense column of silently rising gray
fume the full width of the pit, so that nothing of the bottom could be
seen.
To determine the height of the bottom lava it was necessary to work
from a fixed station with a transit, using a flashlight at night, and
waiting for a view of a glowing spot or fountain. This involved reading
vertical and horizontal angles, dependent on difficult determination
from two stations, of the distance to the glow spot measured. Often
in daytime one had to wait hours in order to get a view of the bottom
through the fumes, from stations at the ends of a base line on the edge
of the pit. At no time later, fortunately, were the fume conditions
so bad as during 1912. A procedure was adopted of making a daily
photograph of the smoke of the distant pit from the window of the
observatory, and this proved of value when the inner lava lakes and
crags rose to view in 1917.
Like Perret, I made reports to the newspapers in Honolulu; and
gradually these reports took the form of a monthly bulletin, edited
in Honolulu by Dr. Howard Ballou, who was the secretary of the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. This association had occasional
Directors’ meetings, which I attended and before which I made reports
and gave lectures. The report of the complete work done during
the first few months of the year 1912 was published in Boston by
Massachusetts Tech.
The earlier history of Hawaiian volcanoes had been recorded in
excellent books by such travelers as the Misses Gordon-Cumming and
Isabella Bird, William Lowthian Green, and Drs. C. H. Hitchcock and
W. T. Brigham, and Professor James D. Dana of Yale. Dana had been
furnished with data from 1840 to 1890 by a Hilo missionary, Titus Coan.
When I arrived in Hawaii, two books on Kilauea’s activity in 1909 had
just been published, and a big monograph by Brun of Geneva who had
determined that Kilauea lava was free from water vapor and was the
hottest lava in the world.
Furthermore, R. A. Daly of Harvard had published his “Nature of
volcanic action” on the basis of his summer at Kilauea in 1909. There
was strong controversy against Brun on the water question, but the
experts, including Day and Shepherd, came to the conclusion that
lava eruption of the Kilauea type was actuated by such flaming gases
as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and sulfur; that these gases were in
solution in some elemental form deep down in the earth; and that the
chemistry of their emission heated the lava on its way up. The lava
lakes were hotter at the top than at the bottom. We shall see that all
lava partly solidifies at its own bottom and stays liquid above.
The items of activity at Kilauea Volcano during the decade from 1911 to
1920 were marked fluctuation up and down in 1912–1913, with a notable
low level in 1913, culminating in a strong earthquake in October. In
1914 the liquid lava came back into the bottom of Halemaumau pit, and
in December Mauna Loa erupted in a fountain at its summit crater. The
lava lakes of Kilauea grew bigger in 1915, and a triangular island
appeared, lifting itself up from a shallow flat and even rotating or
hinging horizontally. Its uplift was as a peaked escarpment of lava
layers tilted in one direction, something very like Perret’s island of
1911.
An affinity between Kilauea and Mauna Loa was obvious. In 1916 Mauna
Loa completed its summit gushing by splitting open the mountain’s
southwest rift and making a lava flow into ranch and forest lands of
South Kona. But just as Mauna Loa activity ended, the entire Halemaumau
bottom thirty miles away lowered dramatically during one day, leaving a
deep seething puddle of melt, surrounded by roaring red hot avalanches.
The coincidence, along with appropriate earthquakes, was unmistakable.
Immediately after the lowering, the liquid lava of Halemaumau welled up
border wall cracks and cascaded through the talus to form an oval pool
in the bottom funnel of broken rock. The lava column rose 600 feet in
the next six months and a lobate lake developed, its coves separated
by sectors of overflow lava which lifted slowly into crags in the
center. In 1917 the lakes and crags inside Halemaumau were less than
100 feet down, the lake shores became accessible for experiments with
iron pipes, and the crags came into view from the Observatory, fully
justifying the daily photograph for comparing changes of the distant
pit.
[Illustration: _11. Lava lake, showing bench, March 30,
1917_]
[Illustration: _12. Halemaumau, showing lava lake and crags,
December 8, 1916_]
[Illustration: _13. Jaggar holding pipe for sounding lava lake,
1917. Cylinder on end of pipe holds Seger cones for measuring
lava temperature_]
By 1918 and 1919 the pit was full and overflowing the Kilauea floor.
During the whole of 1919 Halemaumau, as a pit, was obliterated by its
dome of fill. In autumn the south flank of Mauna Loa broke out again,
into a flood of lava that reached the sea in South Kona. Remembering
1916, we predicted that, even though Halemaumau was full to the brim,
the sinking away of Mauna Loa lava would pull down Kilauea lava
suddenly, like a siphon. Exactly this happened on November 28, 1919.
During the night the crags, the clover-leaf lake, and the bulging
dome of the lava fill above Halemaumau’s edge went down as a cylinder
to a depth of 400 feet in two or three hours leaving incandescent
avalanching walls, a gratifying confirmation of theory.
As in 1916, the Halemaumau lava immediately returned to the bottom of
the pit, and lifted itself thirty feet a day for three weeks, so that
in December it was a violently boiling ringshaped puddle, surrounding
a horseshoe of crags with a quiet inner lagoon and resembling a coral
atoll. The Kilauea floor, which is dome-shaped outside of Halemaumau,
split open radially to the south, made floods of lava into the Kilauea
Crater wall valley, and even escaped out into the Kau Desert. This was
extended into a mountain crack, making flank lava flows of Kilauea
Mountain, nine miles away to the southwest, something which had not
happened since 1823 and 1868. Concentric craters like Kilauea caldera
and Halemaumau pit are thus ring-in-ring, or cup-in-cup, structures
by means of slag heapings over a deep fracture in the rock crust, the
circularity determined by occasional central sinking.
This circularity has sometimes reached perfection. In 1894 and 1909
the liquid pool inside Halemaumau, by steady welling up about a
central hole, became perfectly circular within a circumferential
rampart of overflow. This is a rare condition dependent on steadiness
of upwelling, temperature, and viscosity. It is important because it
shows how the perfect circles, and rampart cauldrons, were made on the
moon, where there are also angular calderas of subsidence like Kilauea
Crater. Evidently gas heating and liquidity changed on the moon, just
as it has done in Hawaii. The sources there are over cracks, as in
Hawaii. The analogies are so complete in these and many other ways that
I completely disbelieve in meteor impact for the moon craters. The moon
awaits a complete comparison with active terrestrial basaltic lavas,
by a modern volcanologist.
This is only a thumbnail sketch of the astonishing luck which met the
photographers and note takers of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
in its first decade. There were similar decades in the nineteenth
century, and there were similar jagged crags rising as islands and
shorelines around clover-leaf lakes in 1879 and at other times. There
were undoubtedly earlier similar sympathetic movements whereby Kilauea
had lowered following the end of Mauna Loa outbreaks. But none of this
had ever before been measured from day to day. Our staff from 1912
on occupied the trig stations, every day or night when the weather
permitted, in order to measure within one foot the level of the live
lava up or down. The lava was like the mercury in a barometer and
needed incessant watching. This was done with a telescope, by people
who dwelt on the edge of the vertical pipe. After 1913 the measurements
clearly showed that sinkings were just as important as risings. They
proved that the solid overflow matter and slide-rock slopes around the
edges of lava lakes and coves measurably were a paste. This containing
bank rose and fell at a different rate from that of the gassy liquid
which streamed and fountained inside. The compiled results showed that
the source of the liquid streaming was always at the west side of the
pit bottom and that the streaming was toward fountaining grottos at
the east. The liquid might at any time overflow its banks or sink down
leaving inner cliffs, by failure of full supply up the west wall crack.
All of this may sound highly technical; but notes, photographs,
seismograms, records of weather, and unceasing press releases and
reports to the sponsors, while difficult for literary description,
created a new technique. Science, when one is devising a new approach,
consists of observation first, of experiment second, and of explanation
or theory third. Something of that order has to be followed in the
record of a scientist’s life.
The surprising sympathetic lowering of Kilauea following the end of
Mauna Loa eruptions was only one of numerous surprises during the first
decade of the Observatory. For instance, the temperatures of hot cracks
were repeatedly and systematically measured, and nothing sympathetic
with lava motion was found. The same may be said about the weather.
At the beginning it was supposed that rainfall, air temperature,
barometric pressure, and possibly fluctuation of the trade wind, would
affect the volcano. However, the only quickly evident effect was the
visible vaporing of many cracks on the Kilauea floor which dried up and
diminished when the sunshine appeared, becoming dense and increasing
in cold or wet weather. This obviously meant that the moisture content
of the vaporing cracks, some steam, but mostly moist hot air came from
shallow rain water a short distance underground.
An effect that was more volcanic, but similar in principle, was the
visible vapor inside of Halemaumau, close to the lava lakes, which
always increased when the lava lowered and let the groundwater seep
inward. These visible vapors dwindled when the hot slag bubbled and
rose, and acquired a brighter glow. No steam vapor rose from the
glowing lakes. There was drying up of groundwater by increased volcanic
heat, just as the cracks of the bigger crater had their moisture dried
by the action of sunshine.
I shall have more to say on the subject of the seasons, the calendar
effects on the plat of rising and falling lava, and especially the
solar equinoxes and solstices. There appeared the hint of a daily
tide-like rise and fall of the lava in the pit.
Finally, there arose the question of counting earthquakes, measuring
their spacing in time and place, and seeing which belonged to Mauna Loa
and which to Kilauea fault rifts. We had to plot earthquake frequency
and size in relation to lowering lava, to day and night or to the
seasons. The study of rhythmic swelling and creaking inside the great
pasty mountains became an exciting quest. It gave promise of cycles
from the hours of the day to the decades of the century.
We also discovered, by measuring vertical angles, that the inner floors
rose and fell differently from the liquid lakes, hence the floors
could be called the bench magma, as distinct from the liquid magma.
This led to a bold experiment in 1917 when the liquid lava lakes
became accessible, after a casual visitor, Mr. Walter Spalding of
Honolulu, discovered an easy path down to the overflow floors at the
edge of the north lake. Here the streaming slag rushed toward a glowing
grotto, built up by spatter of a border fountain into a huge half-dome
containing a glowing cavern hung with stalactites on the shore of the
lake. The platform outside of the grotto was overflowed, and built up
as the liquid lake rose, the platforms of overflow sloping away to
the wall valley under the pit cliff. Thus the lake was at the top of
an inner dome a thousand feet across, just as Halemaumau pit rim was
at the top of an inner dome of Kilauea floor three miles across. The
outer edge of Kilauea Crater is a big oval at the top of the outward
sloping greater dome of Kilauea Mountain forty or fifty miles across.
When a little conelet formed on the northern or western floor platform
inside Halemaumau, its slope around a splashing and fountaining crack
would make a fourth innermost dome a few feet across in the series
of progressively smaller cone-in-cone structures from the outer rim
of the big mountain inward to the Halemaumau centers of eruption. We
saw such a conelet cave in just where I had stood and tested a flame
the day before. Quietly the cone collapsed into a fountaining well of
boiling lava beneath. The ring-in-ring conception must be held in mind
with regard to any volcano, for one thing which we discovered is that
cones are not only built up and collapsed but they are also swollen
up by internal percolation of cracks and expansion of the hot stuff.
This tumefying, or swelling, is concerned with the experiment now to be
described.
Even after Perret described his “floating island” of 1911 and I saw the
triangular islands appearing like shoals in a mud flat and gradually
rising into crags in 1916 and 1917, I remained incredulous of the
possibility of a basaltic island floating. When solid lava cracked
off in pieces from inner cliffs around the lava lakes, the fragments
immediately sank. Furthermore, when solid crusts formed on top of the
foaming and streaming slag, the shells, when they got thick enough,
cracked up, tilted up, and slid down and foundered in the melt beneath.
It was obvious that lava rock is heavier than lava foam. Hence as an
island is a rock, it would not float. This raised several questions.
Where was the bottom of the lava lake on which it rested? Did the lava
lake have a bottom, and if so how far down was the bottom when the same
lake rose 600 feet in Halemaumau pit between June and December of 1916?
In other words, was the lake 600 feet deep in December?
What would be the answer at any time if a stiff iron pipe were thrust
down vertically into the liquid lake as a sounding rod? No one had ever
raised the question. Cross-section drawings had always depicted the
liquid as extending downward indefinitely within a vertical tube. When
the lake became accessible in 1917, it seemed to me that a long steel
pipe might be shoved over the border rampart, end on, and allowed to
bend and sink, or to strike bottom. If the pipe could be recovered by
dragging it back, fusible samples of known melting point might show the
temperature of the depths.
For the experiment, 200 feet of one-inch iron pipe, which was screwed
together in a single long piece, was laid across the north floor of
Halemaumau. Ten assistants were distributed along the pipe twenty feet
apart, and I stood on the rampart with Alec at the edge of the central
portion of the lava lake. This was a high bank ten feet or more above
the streaming liquid lava. The men were instructed to lift the entire
long tube and walk forward with it, so that it would plunge into the
liquid lengthwise, arching down toward the center of the lake as it
came past me. Alec helped guide the pipe over the bank, and the men
came forward with it at a steady walk. The end of the pipe, covered
with a screw cap, was plunged into the liquid lava, traveling toward
the bottom at a good speed. The strong current toward the left dragged
it somewhat, but not enough to prevent its sinking. After two and
a half 20-foot joints of the pipe had plunged into the liquid at a
slope of about fifty degrees, I could feel the pipe encountering the
increasing resistance of a pasty bottom. Continued forward progress of
the pipe caused it to stop and arch up, while the surface lava streamed
past it, and its lower end was definitely stuck in the bottom substance
of the lake.
I then gave the signal to the carriers to try to walk back to the
place where they had started, with a view to pulling the pipe up and
recovering the terminal length. The pipe trailed upward out of the lava
lake like a red hot rope, then stuck and refused to come out. It came
close against the bank where it was frozen solid in the stiff blankets
of pahoehoe crust, which gripped it like hot iron.
The terminal length had been equipped internally with a spiral of
spring steel, containing Seger cones which are used in the porcelain
industry and which bear numbers indicating they melt at graded
temperatures. This first thermometer by meltability was never
recovered. The free lengths of pipe had to be unscrewed close to the
bank, and four twenty-foot lengths were lost. In later tests we learned
to keep the pipe oscillating back and forth so it would not freeze.
The epoch-making significance of this experiment was not understood
until later. Calculation of the angle of slope of the pipe, where it
went down into the liquid and hit on the bottom, showed that vertically
the liquid was about fifty feet deep. With the aid of soldiers from the
Kilauea Military Camp, this experiment was repeated several times; and
each time the lake was found to be the same depth.
This conclusion was later verified by sudden subsidences of the liquid
lava until the cliffs bordering the liquid were fifty feet high. The
eastern grottos turned into cascades, with the liquid pouring down
a well. The liquid lake had become a river pouring over a ledge of
its own bottom, across from the western source wells to the eastern
sinkholes. These latter were fountaining grottos when the lakes were
full, but they exhibited internal rectangular upright sinkholes
when the lake level was down. This was verified repeatedly, and the
phenomena of source wells at the west and cascading sinkholes at the
east were confirmed and photographed. It thus became evident that the
lava lakes were nothing more than convectional lava flows over pasty
solidified substance of their own bottom sediment. Convection means
rising foam, loss of gas, and sinking gas-free heavier liquid.
In other words, the bench magma capped with overflows on the marginal
platforms was a paste, cooled from the top and bottom and sides
and making the saucer of streaming liquid. It was this paste which
constituted the swelling heart of the bench magma. The fountaining of
gas bubbles escaping from solution robbed the lava of heat and caused
it partially to solidify, always at a depth of about fifty feet. Thus
there were necessarily three substances: The deep lava fizzing with
self-heating gases (later proved to be inflammable hydrogen, carbon
monoxide, sulfur, and inert nitrogen and argon), the streaming foam
into which the deep lava expanded, and the semi-solidified refuse of
the foam created at the bottoms and banks of the liquid lava when it
cooled from bright yellow heat (about 1150° Centigrade) to a dark-red
heat (about 900° Centigrade).
The streaming across the bottom from west to east meant that during six
months of rising lava, some 600 feet in the last half of 1916, the lava
column was a cylinder of semicooled lava, maintained by upward pressure
of the deep lava bubbling up in the western crack between the cylinder
and Halemaumau wall. Meanwhile, at all times, the lakes were nothing
more than streams of foam fifty feet deep and skinned over on top,
congealing on their bottoms and shores and cascading down sinkholes in
the eastern wall cracks of the cylinder. A convectional circulation
was what maintained the rising, foaming, heating, and cooling and the
changes in density of the liquid as it lost its gas. Thus the entire
fountaining phenomenon of the lava lakes was due to the self-heating
of what is known as exothermic reaction of gas escaping from solution
in molten basalt. Much of this is actually the burning of hydrogen in
air, creating a convectional circulation wherever the deep lava can
find an outlet.
Ordinarily these outlets are along cracks or rifts in the slope of the
mountain, where they are seen to break out in gassy fountains 500 feet
high, and often to flow along the crack to a cavity where they cascade
downward when less foamy and heavier. A lava flow is always solving a
problem of foaming and liquefying, just as does champagne or beer.
There still remains the unsolved problems of how much of the deep
lava is gas and whether it is mere pressure which holds the gases in
solution, as in soda water. The alternative is for the deeper magma
to be entirely gas, oozing up cracks in the globe, and reacting with
oxygen from the air and solid rock, percolating from the core of the
earth upward, and melting its walls.
In a sense, the entire decade to 1920 was an experiment. The results
of that decade showed that the mountain swells and shrinks in tides
with the passages of the sun and moon, but that Kilauea Mountain and
Mauna Loa Mountain are all parts of what might be called Hawaii Island
Mountain. The island of Hawaii is above an old ocean bottom 18,000
feet deep and is only the end of a ridge 1,700 miles long, which even
at its lowest end, Midway and Ocean Islands, is still 12,000 feet high
above the smooth mud-over-rock ball of the Pacific Ocean bottom. All
the evidence shows the ridge to be a pile of lava flows over a crack,
with a veneer of coral. If, then, the relatively small Kilauea dome
is swelling and shrinking in sympathy with the sun, the long Hawaiian
ridge is doing the same thing to a much greater degree.
Michelson has shown that the solid rock of the globe rises and falls
in a tide about one foot every half day. As I have said, our daily
measurements in 1912 showed that the lava in Halemaumau had a daily
tide and that the larger movements reached maxima in June and December
and minima in the intervening months, which proved it must be a solar
effect. This was very exciting information and suggested a long train
of experiments, which were to be successful in the next decade, based
on the idea that the whole mountain swells as shown by leveling. This
extends out to a radius of twenty miles from Kilauea Crater, and
probably extends all the way to the seashore.
The actual measurement of a lava tide in Halemaumau was done during
July and August 1919. R. H. Finch had just come from Washington to be
my assistant. Oliver Emerson of Honolulu was another assistant, and two
Harvard youths, Sumner Roberts and Charles Thorndike, who had been on
war missions in submarine chasers, sent word through their parents that
they were anxious to do something dangerous around an active volcano. I
jumped at the chance to employ them to help me measure the lava tide.
The north lake in Halemaumau was quite accessible, and we organized
night and day shifts for surveying measurements from a canvas shelter
on the actual bench lava near the lake. For twenty-minute periods, each
observer critically measured a number of monuments on the bench magma
and glowing places of the lake edge. Then a new measurement was started
by leveling the transit. This sequence was kept up night and day for a
lunar month, namely twenty-eight days. One of the monuments was a fixed
Halemaumau benchmark, equipped at night with a lantern and used as a
datum for the fluctuating lake points.
A second tent back from the Halemaumau rim was a camping base. Ford
cars were kept running from the Volcano House for the changing of crew,
Mrs. Jaggar looked out for the food, and I directed repeated surveys of
the position of monuments and of the observation shelter.
Meantime the lava steadily rose during July, and at one time split
open the Kilauea floor making an outflow back of the shelter. The
vertical angles kept track of the movements of both the liquid and the
semisolid lava. The instrument was planted on the lava column itself.
On one occasion, Mrs. Jaggar’s glove fell into a floor crack inside the
shelter and burst into flame.
In all, there were more than 20,000 observations recorded. These were
plotted on coordinate paper, and results were reduced to a smooth
curve by overlapping averages. The actual curve of measurements was
subjected to harmonic analysis at Yale University by Professor E. W.
Brown, mathematician and specialist on motion of the moon and on lunar
tides. The results showed a definite daily tide in both liquid lava
and semisolid lava; of a few inches for the lunar tide, and of larger
amounts for the solar effect. The curve plotted reached its greatest
perfection of daily up-and-down waves during July at periods when the
lava was steady. This became interrupted and ragged when accidents of
drainage out on Kilauea floor pulled the liquid lava down.
[Illustration: _14. River of Alika flow, Mauna Loa, October 6,
1917_]
[Illustration: _15. Lava streaming into a sinkhole in
Halemaumau lava lake, July 7, 1917_]
[Illustration: _16. Sakurajima Volcano, Japan, 1914_]
[Illustration: _17. Fountain in lava lake, March 19, 1921_]
H. O. Wood, seismologist at the Volcano Observatory, was skilled in
compiling the volcano’s historical heights and depths of the nineteenth
century and in plotting our curve of surveys of the liquid lava. He
published a commentary on such plots for 1912–1913 in relation to
solar curves of solstice and equinox, and to the oscillations of the
global axis. He demonstrated a definite correlation between seasonal
fluctuation of sun and moon and the seasonal rise and fall of the lava,
presenting an extensive analysis of the rock tide in the globe and its
application to Hawaiian volcanoes for a century. Perret had made a
similar analysis for earthquakes and volcanoes in Italy.
These curves applied to the seasons, if compared with our lava tide
applied to the hours of the day, left me with the conviction that the
cyclical variations are a fact. They show correspondence between the
swelling and shrinking of the globe and the movements of lava, when
those movements are free and subject to surveying measurements. For few
volcanoes are surveys possible, and our measurements were the first in
the world of any continuity.
Earthquakes, too, were studied. Dr. Arnold Romberg of the University
of Texas--who has become a distinguished inventor in the world of
seismology, magnetism, gravity, and oil prospecting--was Professor
of Physics at the University of Hawaii about 1918 and for several
summers came to the Hawaiian Observatory to assist me in experimental
seismology.
From 1917 to 1920 I took the records of earthquakes and other seismic
movements, as recorded by our Omori instruments, and Romberg remodelled
these instruments. With his knowledge of the fundamental mathematics
of pendulums, for at Harvard he had experimented with sensitive
galvanometers, his facility for making instruments out of nothing but
wire, solder, and old clockworks was wonderful and inspiring.
I spent many months measuring our smoked-paper seismograms of 1913
through 1918, with the assistance of Mrs. Jaggar, to whom I dictated. I
measured types of local earthquakes, of volcanic tremors (some of which
definitely accompany lava fountaining), and tilting of the ground,
publishing the results in 1920. Tilt upswelling is shown in amount and
direction by gradual change of the writing seismograph pens, and this
is correlated with the recorded rise and fall of the lava.
In the course of three years, with Romberg’s valuable advice, we
changed the seismographs to record with little mirrors supported on
silken fibers and with beams of light projected on photographic paper.
And Romberg invented an ingenious improvement with a vane and a bath of
oil, whereby a tilt-free seismograph for earthquakes only would keep
the spacing of its lines uniform. Ground tilt crowds the lines.
We also experimented with a heavy cylinder which hung as a normal
pendulum and which was capable of swinging in any direction, so that
it threw a beam of light vertically upward to a chronograph covered
with bromide paper. The chronograph was capable of being revolved and
stopped, until the mocroseisms and microtremors reached their maximum
of amplitude, for any given period of recording.
The permanent waviness of ground motion, the tremors with periods of
about two-tenths of a second, and the microseisms with periods of
about five seconds showed their maxima of back-and-forth movement
when the chronograph was revolved to a position where the pendulum
swung northeast-southwest. This northeast-southwest tendency was found
to be a characteristic of the seismograph cellar for many seismic
measurements, including local earthquakes.
This was the direction at right angles to the edge of the cliff
on which the Observatory stood. We concluded that this motion was
characteristic of the upright flat slabs, with cracks behind them,
which constitute the face of the crater cliff, and decided that any
motion communicated to these slabs would tend to be a swaying toward
the crater, rather than in the direction of stiffness parallel to the
crater’s edge. Omori has found a similar permanent tendency for Tokyo
city, where the directions are northwest and southeast for maximum
amplitude. This means that any spot on earth oscillates easiest in one
direction.
These first ten years of the Observatory answered many questions and
pointed the way for future experiment and study. It now appears that
liquid lava is a gas froth, that Kilauea and Mauna Loa are all one
system, that hydrogen is the most elemental gas in eruption, that a
gas-free paste is the residue of flowing foam both in pits and lava
flows, that earthquakes and vibrations are a function of this paste
wedging up cracks and sinking back underground, and that the rise and
fall is in tides and cycles, short and long. These things are not
guesses, but measurements.
The earthquake problem at volcanoes is misunderstood in geology. The
superstition that volcanic quakes are small is wrong. “Volcanic” in
volcanology is not limited to volcanoes. Los Angeles, Charleston,
Lisbon, and the deep ocean bottom are all volcanic, are all tremulous;
and all have “lava” underneath. Kilauea and Midway Island are one, Rome
and Etna are one, Iceland and St. Helena are one, Redlands and Mount
Rainier are one, and the paste is underneath. These facts concern the
globe, not a little bundle of wrinkles like the Alps.
We do not know what an earthquake is or what lava is. However, “lava”
falling suddenly and rising slowly with big and few earthquakes
accompanying fall, and little and many earthquakes appearing with
rise, are facts observed at Kilauea. At Tokyo in 1923 the greatest
quake in history centered at lowered lava and lowered sea-bottom next
to Oshima Volcano island. The Messina quake in 1908 made a hissing
noise, and nearby Etna lava was low. There are long cracks in the earth
shell somewhere deep down, and we know little about them except that
volcanoes and faults are in lines. So long as the three-quarters of
the globe under oceans are unexplored by man, with no rock specimens
or even decent maps, and so long as there are no instruments planted
on sea bottoms, we cannot use the term volcanic intelligently. Most
volcanoes of the earth are undiscovered. Kilauea measurements whet
the appetite for a new scientific frontier, the prospecting for ores,
volcanoes, and mountains under the sea. The absence of core drilling
and rock sampling over three-quarters of the earth is a disgrace to the
oil-drilling and quarrying sciences of mankind.
The founding decade of the Hawaiian Observatory produced two effective
expeditions, one to Japan and one to New Zealand.
The Research Association voted to send me to Kagoshima in Kyushu, the
south island of Japan, where the volcano Sakurajima made earthquakes,
explosions, and lava flows in January of 1914. About the same time
Perret was sent to Sakurajima by Friedlaender of Naples, so we met in
Japan.
Sakurajima, or Cherry Island, is a 4,000-foot cone in Kagoshima Sound,
a deep inlet at the southernmost end of Kyushu. The volcano threatened
22,000 persons in villages on Sakurajima Island itself, and 70,000
in Kagoshima. It is a land of orange groves, fisherfolk, Satsuma
porcelain, and maritime commerce, situated at the north end of the
Okinawa-Ryukyu islands, a volcano chain extending north to Nagasaki.
Authorities in Kagoshima knew all about Pelée; and the army, navy,
and governor wasted no time. Professor Omori, who had a seismograph
at the weather station of Kagoshima, went at once to the volcano, and
profiting from the lesson of Pelée, guided the lives of 90,000 persons.
The Sakurajima eruption began on a Saturday and Sunday with hundreds
of earthquakes locally identified as coming from the volcano. Public
and private vessels were called into service to move all the people of
the island over to Kagoshima and beyond. With a general of the army in
command, this was accomplished in two days. On Monday at ten o’clock
the great, picturesque peak, quite like Pelée or Vesuvius, suddenly
ejected vertically and quietly, from a crack in its flank, a column of
“smoke” 30,000 feet high. This was answered by another, similar column
on the opposite side of the mountain; and the two columns joined above
into a colossal arch of cauliflower clouds consisting of sand, dust,
and boulders. The crack in the mountain which gave vent to all this
opened with slight rumble and behaved like two radial ruptures meeting
toward the peak, extending southwest and southeast. The sector of the
mountain between them appeared to have been lifted like a piece of pie
shoved up in the center. But the summit craters played no appreciable
part in the eruption, unless it was a gush of steam on Sunday evening.
The line of craterlets along the cracks and only half way up the
mountain quickly developed lava flows, and these poured down, the one
toward Kagoshima Strait, the other toward the narrow Osumi Strait,
which separated the volcano from the wilder eastern mainland. This
strait was filled up with heavy block lava, or aa, converting the
island into a peninsula. A similar aa lava flow, fifty feet high in
front, swept down to the beach on the Kagoshima side, with boulders as
big as a house tumbling over its andesite front.
Tidal waves made by these two lava flows entering the sea were small
but perceptible. The principal effect was thousands of white steam jets
where the red hot blocks entered the ocean. Culmination of glowing heat
came the second night, Tuesday. The flows continued for months, but the
maximum of seismic effect had happened at six o’clock in the evening of
the first day, Monday.
This was a really big earthquake damaging masonry and causing landslips
from the cliff next to Kagoshima city and killing a number of people.
The flux of refugees from the volcano villages on Monday was a
dramatic event. When the lava outbreak occurred in the forenoon,
the schools sent the children home. On their way, the children gazed
entranced toward the terrific arch of cloud over the mountain, vomiting
trajectories of stones. Shops closed, and the city was quiet while
everybody sized up the crisis. As a schoolboy in English class wrote,
“Monster rocks went horizontally from the down to the up, with smokes
on their behind.”
After the evening earthquake, however, when many buildings had shaken
down, all except public officials were ordered to leave for the back
country. Young men’s clubs organized to receive the refugees along
the roads which led into the interior of Satsuma province, while
temples and schoolhouses were impressed into service to house them.
The migration of more than 50,000 people with packs on their backs and
with handcarts bearing household goods, demonstrated how easily the
Japanese people took to a nomad existence. This hegira came to an end
on Wednesday, when Dr. Omori arrived from Tokyo, sized up the seismic
record and the fiery crisis of Tuesday night, and took the grave
responsibility of announcing that the population of Kagoshima might
safely return. This was done, he was right, and no further damage beset
the city.
Through all of this eruption, so different from Pelée in administrative
control, no one was killed by the volcano, though one or two old people
died of shock. One old lady who refused to leave her home on the island
survived. Village roofs were bent down, crushed, and half buried under
a heavy snowfall of ash, and it was notable that flat-roofed cottages
were crushed, whereas those with steeper roofs were less damaged.
Orange orchards were hopelessly destroyed.
At the west shore of Sakurajima in a place called Hakamagoshi, a fiery
blast rushed down to the sea from the rift. Trees were stripped of
limbs and bark, saplings were bent away from the volcano, and wood
fiber on stumps was shredded by flying rocks. This blast was very short
lived and never reached across to the city. It bore the marks of being
similar to the downblasts of Mount Pelée. The lava flows kept on for a
year and built new shore islands.
I had the remarkable experience of being rowed in a skiff over the
submerged tongue of an eastern flow, trailing a thermometer in the
increasingly boiling water. When the steaming water about us reached
scalding temperature, we had the unpleasant thought that if we should
capsize we would be cooked. We found boiled horses and cattle along the
beaches, and thousands of dead fish. A climb near the eastern flank
vent showed a portion of the moving lava flow pouring down the slope
into a glowing cavern under a shell of its own bouldery texture.
The thousands of dollars of relief which came to Japan from America and
elsewhere were handled with scrupulous honesty, and the inhabitants of
the island were rehabilitated on Tanegashima, another island of the
Ryukyu Archipelago.
Scientific investigations showed by leveling that the mountain had
been lifted a few feet by the internal penetration of the lava, and
reexamination of the benchmarks along roads extending out radially
indicated that the north end of the bay bottom and shore had definitely
sunk, as though underground lava had been withdrawn from that region,
to push up, swell, and overflow the mountain. This effect of subsidence
outside was traced and shown to gradually lessen for a hundred miles
from the place of greatest sinking. Investigation carried out by the
geologist colleagues of Omori culminated in a monumental publication
which demonstrates the solidarity of the Japanese methods of science.
And both Omori and Professor Koto published books on Sakurajima in
English, with maps, photographs, curves, and seismograms.
Omori, in 1910, had anticipated movement of the earth about a volcanic
center as swelling up one place and sinking down in another while
eruption was going on. At that time, he described Usu Volcano at
the opposite end of Japan, where leveling instruments showed graded
changes in height made by the Usu eruption. A remarkable physiographic
character of Usu Mountain, and of the adjacent basin of Lake Toya,
is that basin and dome appear complementary, just as Kagoshima Bay
was compensated by Sakurajima. This same pairing of lake with volcano
has been noted in other parts of Japan, as though tumefaction by
lava penetration and lava eruption had robbed the underpinning of an
adjacent piece of ground, which lowered and became a lake by filling up
with groundwater.
From Sakurajima I went to Bandaisan, or Kobandai, a famous volcano in
central Japan northwest of Tokyo and on the shore of a beautiful lake.
It looks like an ordinary rocky peak, but its fame was made by a steam
explosion from its flank which blew out the side of the mountain and
left avast sulfurous quarry with numerous solfataras and hot springs.
Bandai was known by geologists to be one of a chain of volcanoes, but
prior to 1885 its activity was in question. One morning the sky was
darkened by the overwhelming explosion, and vast volumes of rock from
the outbreak poured down as a landslide and completely dammed a river
system. It left extraordinary little heaps in the new dammed up lake.
These appeared to be individual blocks of rock against which heaps of
debris were piled so as to leave pyramidal humps scattered over the
surface of the impounded water near the volcano. An excellent report in
English on this eruption was published at the time, and the eruption
became the type of what geologists call a phreatic explosion, meaning
pure steam. There was doubt as to whether any fragments of new lava
were thrown up.
I took with me to Bandaisan a photographer-guide. We camped in a
mountain inn with thatched roof, visited a hot spring resort, and hiked
to the crater where we measured temperatures and took photographs. It
was a vast flat-floored shelf, dug out of the side of the mountain,
with steam jets and puddles of boiling water at the back. Looking out
at the new water-filled valley with its many islands at the base of
the slope below the crater, we could see shoreline levels higher than
the present beach, where the damming had produced the highest stand of
the water. The eruption and landslide overwhelmed villages and killed
many people, though it lasted only a few days. It was on the side
of the mountain remote from the older lake. In clambering over the
broken debris, which looked more like glacial deposits than volcanic
agglomerate, I picked up some pieces of vesicular basalt that were
definitely lava. Wada, a Japanese geologist, had found the same thing,
and we both concluded that these were an internal live basalt blown to
fragments in the Bandaisan eruption, but that most of the material was
from the shattered old mountain.
My interpretation of Bandaisan is that it is an old volcano in the
line of Asama and other volcanoes of central Japan, and that the line
is a deep crack always full of lava in the depths, which is selective
of outlet, depending upon what part of the crack opens as the path of
least resistance. Eruption may be occasioned by lava wedging upward at
one volcano, or by lava sinking downward at another volcano, according
to the way the medial rift of continental Honshu is warped and stressed
by the earthquake forces. One part of a volcano chain is always
sinking, with lava withdrawn. Another part is always swelling up, with
lava penetrating the cracks under active crater pits, like that of
Asama.
Asama is the Vesuvius of central Japan near the village of Karuizawa,
famous as the resort of American missionaries. Bandaisan is one of a
line of volcanic peaks north of Asama, all of which have hot springs
and solfataras. The explosion of Bandaisan, where the big natural lake
represents the groundwater level of abundant rainfall, occurred when
the underground lava column suddenly sank rapidly by the gaping open
of the deep rift. The water poured into red hot cavities, while the
lava was rising and erupting by frothing up in the depths of one of
the other volcanoes. The results of Bandai’s explosion were first,
earthquake collapse, which was assisted by vast outjets of boiling
steam from groundwater, and then the blowing out of the mountainside.
Of special interest is the spacing, twenty to forty miles, between
volcanoes along such a system as Asama-Bandai. The underlying cracks
must be in echelon arrangement, and the spacing is a function of the
thickness of the upper earth crust and its capacity through the ages of
producing spaced-out widenings or bends in the crack, above whatever
shell confines the lava. The same spacing of the new and old volcanoes
is true in the Caribbees and in the Costa Rica-Mexico line. There
an old peak might make a Bandaisan by unforeseen breakage and steam
development.
This applies also to the Ryukyu-Sakurajima line. I visited Kaimon at
the extreme south end of Kyushu, a steep dome blocked on top by a
lava plug. South of here to Suwanose Island, an active volcano, the
spacing of islands is similar to the northward spacing of Sakurajima,
Kirishima, and Asosan, following the same law of selected vents
and offset cracks. Kirishima thirty miles north of Sakurajima is a
treacherous and dangerous volcano that made a bad explosion just prior
to the Sakurajima eruption. I saw on the rim of its summit cavity a
breadcrust bomb, a triangular block of rock eight feet long, with its
surface beautifully tessellated with gaping cracks. This breadcrust
fracture indicates that the fragment of glowing andesite was thrown
up while pasty, then congealed on its surface to smooth glass and
continued to swell evenly with internal gas, so as to rupture the
glassy surface as expanding dough.
At Aso Volcano farther north I entered a natural gateway into a
cauldron nine miles across, surrounded by a wall, and with a hilly
country inside, from which a river escaped through the gateway. The
summit peak in this landscape proved to contain an active pit on top.
The pit was steaming and the source of the steam was boiling puddles
of mud at the bottom. This was the “Halemaumau” of Asosan, which has
had a record of many eruptions near the city of Kumamoto. The chain
of Kyushu volcanoes ends, after the usual spacing, with a volcano at
Nagasaki.
From Shimonoseki Strait, going northeastward, new belts of volcanic
fissures have built the mountains of central Japan, cut across
northwest of Tokyo by what Naumann called the fossa magna or big
trench. This is famous in the history of Japanese geology, for which
this German geologist laid the foundations. The fossa magna extends
northwest and southeast, through Fujiyama and Oshima Volcanoes to the
Ogasawara Islands and the Bonin Islands, scene of volcanoes making and
disappearing, from craters under the ocean.
Omori had discovered historical similarities between the eruptions of
this chain and those of the Ryukyu chain. This is significant, because
as we go from the small spacing of the individual volcanoes, we come to
some deeper and larger fracturing of the whole crust of the earth that
determines a spacing of hundreds of miles between such larger arcs of
rupture as those of Kyushu and the Bonin Islands. As all are volcanic
and have been so since the birth of the globe, it is unthinkable to me
that they are anything but deep fractures which go down to the earth’s
core. The surface geology of marine strata is a mere veneer compared
with the deep and ancient igneous rocks.
I went to New Zealand in 1920, taking with me in manuscript form
the Hawaiian Observatory results of the past decade. Notable among
geologists there was Dr. Allan Thomson, director of the Dominion Museum
in Wellington. Dr. Thomson and his distinguished father, the Honorable
William Thomson, guided Mrs. Jaggar and me all the way from Auckland to
Dunedin. It was my task to give lectures on volcano research, to show
lantern slides of Mount Pelée and Kilauea, to tell about seismographs
and cycles, and to urge upon New Zealand science the importance
of establishing a volcano observatory system in the Taupo Belt of
volcanoes.
Here, in 1886, had occurred the terrific eruption of Tarawera. Here
are spaced out volcanoes extending north into the islands of Tonga.
Here, possibly, along the Cook Channel between the North and the South
Islands, is a transition from volcanoes to earthquakes, and quite
possibly another fossa magna worthy of comparison with Japan. Off to
the east lies the profound linear Tonga Deep, compensating the New
Zealand volcanic uplift. This is analogous to the Tuscarora Deep east
of Japan.
We were fortunate to procure accommodations in Rotorua, the boiling
geyser district, at the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales, later
King Edward VIII, and to see the hakas, or dances, of an encampment of
5,000 Maoris, gathered to honor British royalty.
I was interested in the relics of liquid basalt collected on the lip
of the great rift through Tarawera Mountain. The rupture extends the
length of Rotomahana Lake, which sank away as a groundwater phenomenon
in 1886. This, like Bandaisan, was one of the great steamblast
eruptions of history. It was right on the line of volcano spacing
extending from White Island in the Bay of Plenty, to Ngauruhoe and
Ruapehu Volcanoes, beyond Lake Taupo at the south. Here was a land
of echelons of deep cracks, building up along scores of miles from
submarine eruptions such as Falcon Island in the Tonga group. Farther
south is the dangerous looking White Island close to the New Zealand
shoreline, resembling Bogoslof, and so on to the lava volcanoes at the
south. Big earthquakes have been characteristic, along with uplift, of
both shorelines of Cook Strait.
This kind of gradation is certainly like the transitions from
submarine eruption to continental uplift, crowned with volcanoes, so
characteristic of Japan, the Aleutians, California, and Italy. It is
impossible to think of it, when we consider water depths of 4,000
fathoms, and a step upward to such altitudes as the New Zealand alps,
all linear for a distance of several hundred miles, except in terms of
the faulted deep earth crust. And seismologists tell us that that crust
is 1,800 miles deep.
The associations made on this trip were destined to have far-reaching
effect in meetings with New Zealand scientists at later dates. I
met Professor Bartrum of Auckland; the officials of the New Zealand
Geological Survey; Dr. Ernest Marsden, distinguished physicist who
had worked with Rutherford in England; and Dr. C. A. Cotton, physical
geographer and author. Cotton showed us the elevated shorelines
of Wellington associated with the big earthquakes of 1851. Other
personages were Professor Speight, geologist of Christchurch College,
and in Dunedin, Professor R. L. Jack, physicist of Otago University
and our host. Dr. C. E. Adams, government astronomer of Wellington,
we were to meet again on Tin Can Island in 1930, during the United
States Eclipse Expedition. Dr. J. MacMillan-Brown, chancellor of
the University of New Zealand, and his daughter entertained us in
Christchurch; and he later visited us several times in Hawaii in the
course of his extensive travels.
I was glad to stimulate volcanology in New Zealand and pleased when
there eventually appeared the splendid work of Dr. L. I. Grange, on
the “Rotorua District,” with a project for geophysical surveys made
imperative by the Napier earthquake disaster.
Before this chapter is closed, some personalities of the first decade
of the Observatory should be mentioned. Foremost was L. A. Thurston,
founder of the Volcano Research Association and its president for many
years. It was his interest and enthusiasm coupled with that of the
other members of the Association that made the Observatory possible.
Prominent among those members was L. W. de Vis-Norton, for many years
secretary of the Association and a devoted apostle of volcanology.
Mrs. Isabel Jaggar, from 1917, was my helper not only as wife and
amanuensis, but as general assistant at the Observatory. She could
operate instruments, take notes at the pit, keep the record books, and
act as buffer against an overinquisitive public.
There was Demosthenes Lycurgus, genial Greek host of the Volcano House,
who did all in his power to help us, by grants of lands, raising money,
and personally promoting science with all the vigor of his wonderful
personality. He went home to Greece to be married, and alas, died
during his honeymoon. Later came my good friend George Lycurgus, who
still operates the Volcano House.
Colleagues of the founding decade included H. O. Wood, who came from
Berkeley in 1912, acted as seismologist and geological assistant, and
established a seismological bulletin. He left to enter the army in
1917. In years to come Wood established in Pasadena under the Carnegie
Institution one of the great seismographic laboratories of the world,
and his name became coupled with a California Institute of Technology
physicist to name the Wood-Anderson seismograph. Later came R. H. Finch
who had worked with Dr. Humphreys of the Weather Bureau in Washington
and had been a flight meteorologist in Ireland during the first World
War. He was assigned by Marvin to me as assistant in 1919, when the
Congress took over our work for the U.S. Weather Bureau.
Finally, I should like to name the numerous workers of the U.S.
Geological Survey in topography and geology, notably Birdseye,
Burkland, Stearns, Wilson, Clark, Meinzer, and Macdonald. These men
brought to reality my Geological Survey estimate of 1899, when I
recommended to Walcott a survey of the Hawaiian Islands.
The Hawaii geologic survey included investigations of water, highways,
and minerals, and was to map lavas, volcanic processes, and island
growth. The annual cost of the work had been estimated at $22,000,
including $6,300 for salaries in geology and $10,000 for the total
cost of topography study, or $90,000 for five years. The project was
begun in 1909 in cooperation with the Territory of Hawaii. In 1951 the
mapping was completed and the cost had been many times the original
estimate.
Among visitors who contributed to the Observatory work were Sidney
Powers, a voluntary observer who had been one of my students in Boston.
He explored and published on many volcanoes around the world and
followed me in Sakurajima and the Aleutian Islands. He later became an
outstanding petroleum geologist of the Amerada Company in Tulsa. Arthur
Hannon, an architect from Cleveland, acted as a volunteer mapper, and
for months aided with sketches of the changes in Halemaumau. William
Twigg-Smith, an artist from New Zealand, joined us in the lava-sounding
experiment and made numerous sketches and paintings. He later became
the illustrator and photographer for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’
Association. Dr. A. L. Day of the Geophysical Laboratory visited us
repeatedly, in association with gas chemist E. S. Shepherd. He wrote
important monographs, along with E. H. Allen the chemist for the
Carnegie Institution, on the Yellowstone and Lassen National Parks, and
on Geyserville. Allen came to the Observatory for critical analysis of
the steam of Sulphur Bank.
Among other visitors were geologists, geodesists, and biologists of the
Pacific Science Congress, held in the spring of 1920. These included
H. E. Gregory, Griffith Taylor, Frederick Wood-Jones, William Bowie,
T. W. Vaughan, E. O. Hovey, E. C. Andrews, F. Omori, H. S. Washington,
and Dr. Chilton of Christchurch, who had been one of our inspirers in
the New Zealand trip. This Honolulu world congress assigned one meeting
to Kilauea Volcano, which enabled me to summarize results before a
cosmopolitan group of scientists.
The Washington executives who at this time promoted the Observatory
were Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston, Director George Otis
Smith of Geological Survey, Chief Charles Marvin of the Weather Bureau,
and Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian. Later came W. C.
Mendenhall, firm friend of the Observatory, and Director of the Survey.
It was my good fortune that between 1914 and 1919 Mauna Loa and
Kilauea were building up lava toward a fiery crisis, and that the
sugar business of Hawaii boomed at the same time. When the 1920
science congress convened there was much fresh lava to be seen, and
our Research Association was so prosperous that M. I. T. in Boston
kept up its financial interest. The _American Journal of Science_
under Edward Dana of Yale published our results. This was fitting, as
Dana’s father, J. D. Dana, had published much about Hawaiian volcanoes.
Consequently the end of the foundation decade made easier the financing
of the next five years. Just at this time the Geological Survey spurted
ahead, the National Park was opened, the Army built a recreation camp
and a trail up Mauna Loa, the Inter-island Steamship Company took over
the Volcano House, and a Promotion Committee was bringing many tourists.
[Illustration: _Fluctuations of Halemaumau lava from 1790 to
1952, the verticals indicating maximum lowering preceding repose
periods; minor fluctuations not shown._]
CHAPTER V
Expansion Decade
“_There shall be famines and earthquakes
in divers places._”
The decade from 1921 through 1930 was a period of tremendous events and
of experimentation at Kilauea and Mauna Loa. It was also an expansion
decade for the Observatory, and for me. Additional funds made possible
new buildings and equipment on Hawaii; observatory activity was
established at Lassen Volcano in California; and expeditionary work
included a study of the 1923 Tokyo earthquakes, explorations on Alaska
volcanoes in 1927, and a visit to Niuafoou in Tonga, part of the great
New Zealand-Tonga volcanic chain.
Increased government aid was largely due to the help of the Honorable
Louis C. Cramton of Michigan, Republican floor leader of Congress, who
took great interest in extending activities within national parks.
After we moved from Weather Bureau control to Geological Survey in
1924, Cramton visited our Observatory, concluded that it was an orphan
child of the government, and asked me what I wanted. I told him that
I needed men and machines, and I suggested expanding our studies to
California and the Aleutians.
Meantime, the Research Association was persuaded that we needed a
fire-resistant iron building to house library accumulation, record
books, and photographic negatives, as well as seismograms and lava
specimens. These were precious relics of the very active overflows
and experiments of the 1912–1921 period. With the advice of Walter F.
Dillingham and Engineer John Mason Young of the University of Hawaii, I
built a sheet-iron house with concrete floor and wire-glass skylights,
and installed steel furniture. This became an invaluable office,
drafting room, and workroom, as well as a place for files.
The Volcano Research Association, in cooperation with Hawaii National
Park, built a trail side museum and lecture hall atop the high western
bluff of Kilauea Crater. Later, when the drive was extended completely
around the greater crater, the museum was on the road to Halemaumau.
This museum had a plate glass front, concrete floor, skylight
illumination, and an esplanade looking down on the caldera and across
the vast panorama of Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and the Kau Desert. The
building protected the lookout platform from the trade winds.
We housed in the museum a gleaming, nickel-plated seismograph from
Japan, suitable photographs, and the best of our specimens for visitors
to see. This combined with the magnificent views to instruct the public
in volcanology as nothing else could have done. At the same time, I
equipped machine shops and added a first class mechanic to the staff.
It was during this decade and after my New Zealand trip that such
persons as Omori and Nakamura, in Japan, and geologists in Seattle,
Berkeley, and Pasadena began to take an interest in the volcano problem
as dominant in the study of earthquakes.
There were conflicting theories about the earth crust. Earlier, in
Hawaii, Wood was a disciple of the tectonic or contracting theories of
the earth, whereas I increasingly believed volcanism to be profound,
crustal, oceanic, and ancient. It is more fundamental than the strata
and mountain folds of continents.
This conflict extended to the water question in volcanology. I was
inclined to believe the waters of eruption to be oxidized hydrogen,
whereas such physical chemists as Day, Shepherd, and Allen believed
water vapor, like carbon dioxide, to be fundamental in magma.
The whole question of the origin of oxygen--the most abundant element
of the rocks, air, and water--is a matter of startling doubt in
geology. Where oxides are known to exist in lava, flames of oxidation
make the gaseous fires; and underground water full of oxygen plays a
part in steamblast eruption. All the waters of glaciers and oceans are
oxides, and prove that the volcanic oxidation of hydrogen was the most
primitive of the volcanic processes. Dr. E. H. Allen found water vapor
dominant in the Sulphur Bank gas at Kilauea, whereas Day and Shepherd,
who opposed Brun, thought water dominant in the gases of live lava.
Its great preponderance in geological theory for such eruptions as
Vesuvius led Allen to review theories and publish a long paper designed
to refute my notion that oxidizing hydrogen is the primary volcanic
ingredient.
As to earthquakes and so-called tectonic faults, the whole of geology
has its thinking so warped by continents, the dwelling place of
mankind, and so diverted from the great linear trenches and the ridges
of the ocean crowned with volcanoes parallel to the deeps, that I
became incredulous, along with Willis and Oldham, about the textbook
cause of earthquakes.
The fascination offered by fossils, by ages of shellfish and reptiles,
and by mountains of folded strata like the Alps and the Himalaya makes
the votaries of evolutionary science neglect the mud-covered rocks and
oceanic mountain ranges of almost three-quarters of the surface of the
globe. This seventy-two percent they have never seen, nor collected
hard rock specimens from, nor even mapped topographically. They are not
acquainted with it by exploration, and their theories about it are a
blank, except that gravity pendulums indicate it to be basalt.
The so-called geosyncline, or continental basin of sediments, filled
with shells and strata as is the Mediterranean, is at the heart of
all the theories of continents and mountains; and geology expressly
excludes the geosyncline and its strata from the probabilities of deep
ocean valleys. The most interesting subjects of continental geology
are simply banished from conjecture. Interest in deep-ocean geology is
lacking because science has made no field effort to bore or blast into
it, and so extend engineering science to the deep ocean bottoms.
Earthquakes made a theme wherein I instinctively distrusted the word
“tectonic.” For generations the geological mind thought the earth
losing heat, contracting internally, and wrinkling a crust in bumps,
with vast overthrusts of broken strata, thus folding the Appalachians
and the Andes. All sorts of accommodations to a thin crust thirty miles
deep were invented; by Dana and Geikie, by Suess and Wiechert, and
finally by one who should have been the foremost block faulting expert,
Dutton. Hawaii convinced him that volcanoes are only skin deep and that
the thin crust is so sensitive that a shift of the weight of river
muds and sands is enough to push down the great valley of California,
while an underflow pushes up the Sierra Nevada. This is the doctrine
of “isostasy.” It agrees with the Stübel idea of shallow remnant
reservoirs for the lava of volcanoes.
Isostasy was devised by Dutton and pounced upon by the mathematicians,
until they had gravity proving the whole world thin-crusted over an
understratum of plastic lava. The seismologists on continents agreed,
finding a density change, but with no evidence of fluidity. The world
became, mathematically and petrologically, a sphere built of layers
all the way down to the heavy fluid hot core, which was conveniently
imagined to consist of iron and nickel, because some bolides of the
solar system made of those metals occasionally fall on the earth.
All my experience of volcanoes and of deep oceans militated against a
thin crust, a shallow underlayer of basalt to feed volcanoes, and a
nickel iron core. The core is heavy, and sixty-two elements are heavier
than iron. All reason seemed against the notion that the vast volcanic
sea bottoms are a thin crust wrinkling under contraction. Reason found
every evidence on both earth and moon for a thick peridotite or olivine
crust, broken into ancient blocks, bounded by long lines of fracture,
the blocks variously settling and scraping against each other from
time immemorial, actuated by volcanic forces from the core. The whole
of volcanology points toward sinking and down-faulted ocean basins,
alongside the remnant upstanding continents which are the minor feature
of the primitive earth surface. Water condensed and filled hollows.
The processes of the core that made all this were volcanism--mother of
air, ocean, seabottom, land, and life. The crust was thick enough to
make cracks 2,000 miles long on a globe 8,000 miles in diameter. If
there was a balancing of weights as in “isostasy,” it was between high
silica in continental lava and low silica basalt that spread under the
oceans. This is not static, but is a continuing process of a kinetic,
or changing, earth.
This excursion into theory is intentional, so that in the middle
of this book the geologically trained reader will understand that
experience of volcanoes in Hawaii, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Alaska,
Italy, and Japan had made me a rebel against conventional geology. The
reason is that the great submerged mountain range of the long Hawaiian
Archipelago is different from the mountain ranges of Europe and Asia
and must be accounted for in global history. How would the three
decades 1921 to 1950 confirm expectation that the deep ocean bottom is
the most important and volcanic thing in geology, just as it is the
biggest thing?
Routine observation and photography at Halemaumau pit reached a climax
of recording brilliant fiery events in March 1921, and it changed
to the recording of explosive steam in May 1924. The first of these
fireworks, after lava flows from a rift in the Kau Desert, draining the
pit and fluctuating with the ups and downs of the pit lava, occurred in
1919–1920. This was a return to Halemaumau of effervescence in frothy
volumes, so that the pit was overflowing on five sides. On March 20,
1921, occurred the most intense display of brilliancy, culminating the
gradual rising of the lava column to outflow following 1918.
Then came, in the later months of 1921, a sinking away and recovery of
the lava. In 1922 came a sinking again, with the lava breaking out in
the Chain of Craters of the eastern rift, as though it had been blocked
by freezing in the southwest rift and was forced over to split open the
old cracks of the mountain to the east. This was confirmed in 1923 by
another outbreak in the forest adjacent to the sixth crater, Makaopuhi,
which with Napau pit beyond, had been the scene of the 1922 outflows.
This action was all extended in April 1924 to the shoreline end of
the eastern rift, thirty miles away from Halemaumau, when the Kapoho
country cracked open with many earthquakes, and a block of the mountain
settled beneath sea level. Coconut palms at the beach were left in a
lagoon of sea water eight feet deep. Seventy-five earthquakes in a
day frightened away Filipino plantation laborers; railway and roads
were ruptured, with new cliffs forming nine feet high; and all of this
followed a monumental sinking of Halemaumau bottom, from a vast sea of
lava to a tumble of debris in two months.
It was evident that between 1920 and 1924 the fracture of the long
curved rift athwart Kilauea cauldron from the Kau Desert to the east
point of the island was draining the lava out under the ocean to the
east. Forty miles from the shore, the submarine slope is covered by
18,000 feet of water.
What is the result? The whole of Kilauea Mountain is charged with
groundwater, which trickles warm through the beach at Pohoiki and
partly warms ponds near Kapoho. Obviously this groundwater of the
southeastern lobe of the island mountain surrounds the shaft of
Halemaumau at some undefined depth, and the rising and falling glassy
lava in the shaft ordinarily glazes itself with a water-tight skin, and
may be thought of as a crusted tube. About this tube the groundwater
shows only as the lazy steam of the little vents of the pit margins.
On May 10, 1924, came the collapse of the Halemaumau pit walls,
introducing an explosive steam eruption such as had not been seen by
five generations of Hawaiians.
The adventures of this period were glorious ones for the scientists.
First should be mentioned the amazing subsidence which occurred
suddenly at 2 A.M. November 28, 1919, just as Mrs. Jaggar
looked across Kilauea Crater at the outline of crags and lava lakes
making a glowing dome where Halemaumau pit should have been. We felt
a lot of little earthquakes and saw the dome of lava heapings, with
glowing lakes on top, sink slowly and majestically and leave the old
familiar glowing pit. For almost the whole of 1919 this had been a
dome, with overflows, now here, now there. At ten o’clock only the
evening before, old Alec had conducted tourists to the top of the dome,
where they looked down at the clover-leaf lakes. If it had started to
go down while they were there--and any of us might have been there--it
is awesome to think of the inevitable fiery engulfment.
After watching the sinking, which was followed by puffs of dust and
smoke and some avalanche noise, we took a car to the pit at once. And
when we got there in the early morning hours we found the pit enlarged
to 2,000 feet across, with the pattern of the lava lakes still apparent
at the bottom, indicating that the entire cylinder had lowered as a
unit to a depth of about 700 feet. Red hot avalanches were tumbling
inward with a roar, from the veneer of lava plastered on the wall.
By the forenoon of that day the liquid lava started to pour up and
inward as a ring of bubbling fountains all around the edges. What this
ring represented was the wall crack between the subsided cylinder
of semisolid lava, now pushing upward, and the funnel of rock wall
outside. This V-shaped filling grew wider as the uprising progressed,
and so the ring lake became wider, while the top of the harder column
became a ring of crags and the space inside became a quiet lava puddle
supplied by inflow from the ring lake. The whole column of ring crags
with the lagoon inside and the brilliantly fountaining lake outside
rose with unheard of rapidity during the next three weeks.
In mid-December, I took Mrs. Jaggar and a woman friend down to inspect
this amazing corolla, or lily, of hard crags which had blossomed up in
less than a month, so that the outer ring of boiling fluid was less
than a hundred feet below us. We stood at the rift in the Kilauea floor
which heads toward the southwest cliff, and suddenly we felt slight
earthquakes and saw the face of that cliff crumbling in a visible
tumble of rocks. The mountain was quietly breaking open athwart the
Kilauea caldera floor, and while we watched we saw forty or fifty low
lava fountains in a straight line burst up along a floor crack between
us and the cliff.
Remember that this crack traversed the downslope between Halemaumau
edge and Kilauea wall. Looking back at the ring lake, we saw it
beginning to lower and leave a shoreline of black plastering spatter.
When we looked into the rift crack at our feet, only one or two feet
gaping open, the liquid lava showed about twenty feet down. We were
standing on the side of the crack away from the motor car terminus, and
floods of lava on the Kilauea floor were spreading right and left from
the straight line of vents between us and Kilauea wall. We had to get
away from there pronto, as no one could tell what ground might erupt
between us and our car.
I carefully instructed our friend to be deliberate and step across the
fissure; but the girl felt sure that crossing a red hot crack called
for a leap. She stepped on a loose slab at the edge of the narrow chasm
and slipped into the crack, where she was wedged until we pulled her
out. We then stepped across the fissure, for the live lava was far
below, and made our way back to the car without further trouble.
The lake lowered only apportionately to the slowing black outflow on
the south floor, which was short-lived. This was the beginning of a
splitting open of the main Kilauea Mountain flank southwest and outside
the crater which continued for months.
Another adventure, and an important one, happened with the outflooding
of lava in the Kau Desert, where terrace upon terrace of pahoehoe lava
was building up. This finally became a hill over the rift, two miles
long and 200 feet high, which we called Mauna Iki, or little Mauna Loa.
The exploration, day after day, of the extending quiet lava outwelling
along this rift made it necessary to find new trails from the Pahala
roadway and across the desert to the lengthening hillock.
Following the new Mauna Iki trail, Mr. Finch noticed that the ancient
ash beds, two or three feet thick, had surfaces as hard as Portland
cement. And on one of these he, like Robinson Crusoe, found the print
of a naked foot, made when the old ash was a mud. On the trail across
these old surfaces many more hardened, ancient footprints were found,
of men, women, children, and pigs headed both up and down the mountain.
[Illustration: _18. Isabel and Tom Jaggar in woods on Kilauea
Volcano on their return from viewing 1923 eruption in Napau
Crater_]
[Illustration: _19. Lava lake, fountains, and crags, March 20,
1921_]
[Illustration: _20. Footprints in ash west of Mauna Iki, said
to have been made by Keoua’s army during Halemaumau eruption of
1790_]
These prints recalled the story of Keoua’s army when there was a big
explosive eruption of Halemaumau in 1790 and the mud rains of the
period were from ash which had been baked by the volcanic fires. If
roasted and moistened, the chemical composition of powdered basalt
is that of weak cement, and these surfaces were in hollows which had
resisted erosion wash for 130 years. Part of the slopes closer to
Halemaumau had been eroded bare, but they also showed footprints.
Later the trail was followed up the mountain close to Kilauea Crater
and down toward Pahala, and the ash of 1790 was found to be made up of
pisolites, or fossil raindrops, in many places. Evidently the eruption
had been accompanied by torrential thunder storms, and the natives had
walked through the deposits of mud, which had in a century been dried
by the sun into a resistant surface. These fossil footprints were to
become one of the attractions of a tourist trail in the National Park.
One night in 1922, after some earthquakes of the evening, we were
awakened by friends who told us that a glow like a forest fire could
be seen from the high cliffs of Kilauea in the easterly direction of
Makaopuhi. This big crater had a platform at one end and a pit at the
other. We aroused Mr. Finch, then traveled by car as far as we could go
on the truck trail, got lost, and with flashlights made our way on foot
toward the glow and fume in a rugged wilderness, over cracked ground
and old aa lava and obstructing vegetation. We were chilled by a cold
drizzle and not at all sure where we would emerge.
Fortunately, the country is sufficiently open so that we could see the
“pillar of fire by night.” It turned out that the new fire was in the
deep end of Makaopuhi itself. From the western edge of Makaopuhi pit
we looked down on ten or fifteen ribbons of lava, made by a line of
spouting fountains at the top of the talus heap, and pouring from the
top of the big slide-rock slope. We spent the night on the edge in much
discomfort, and watched the puddle of accumulation in the bottom of the
funnel and the glowing streaks which fed it. It was evident that the
eastern rift of Kilauea Mountain had opened, and the lava outflow was
found to extend to Napau Crater, a shallow saucer pit farther east.
At the same time the lava in Halemaumau went down, enlarging the pit,
and cauliflower dust clouds arose from much internal avalanching. This
anticipated and resembled the avalanche steam blasts of 1924.
The adventures of the 1924 explosive eruption were too numerous and
complicated to elaborate here. However, it was a tremendous event in
the history of Hawaii and was totally unforeseeable on the basis of
earlier experience. Mrs. Jaggar and I were in New York writing magazine
articles and I was giving lectures, when word came from Finch and the
newspapers that Halemaumau was caving in and throwing up rocks. We
traveled with all haste to Honolulu, where the Navy agreed to send me
by plane to Hilo, though they refused to take Mrs. Jaggar.
The Admiral’s car took us to Pearl Harbor, where a seaplane was ready
and Mr. Thurston was waiting to see me off, accompanied by a motion
picture cameraman. Then pilot Chourré took me into the sky over Diamond
Head on my first flight. A companion plane was piloted by Lieutenant
Sinton, who had radio communication with Pearl Harbor. Crossing high
above the Molokai Channel, I looked down at the beautiful pattern
of trade-wind formed whitecaps, and was surprised after a half hour
to observe that the wave crests were farther apart. I was even more
surprised to see Sinton’s plane far above us. The mechanic in the
forward cockpit had been putting up his fingers repeatedly during our
flight, to indicate, I later learned, how many cylinders were missing
in the Liberty engine supported above us. Our plane was getting closer
and closer to the waves and flying fish raced beside us. Finally we
felt the bump of wave after wave on the bottoms of the pontoons, and
the pilot brought the seaplane to a squelching stop, close to the surf
of the Molokai reef.
We found ourselves in fifteen feet of water, the coral reef visible
below. I was deputed to throw out an anchor and make the line fast to
a cleat, while pilot and mechanic climbed up to the engine, which had
been losing compression and could not keep up the requisite speed.
Lieutenant Sinton’s pilot plane came down and circled above us until he
saw we were safe, then went on to Maui. Meanwhile, I watched the water
with great interest, for sharks. When our boys got the engine going
with a roar, I pulled up the anchor and we took off against wind and
wave, with the pontoons going bang, bang, bang, against the tops of the
waves. But finally we were airborne and out above the blue water.
Then the engine gave out again and we came down. This time the men
rigged a sea anchor made of buckets with a line attached to the bow,
to hold the ship’s nose up to the wind, and battened the hatches with
canvas covers. We clambered up on top of the upper wing to wait for
rescue. The wind was blowing a gale, the whitecaps hissed by us, and we
lay on our bellies. The aviators told me that this was the first forced
landing they had had. The word landing seemed to me inapplicable.
We drifted for five hours, moving slowly down the wind, before a white
motor boat appeared, coming from Molokai. At the same time smoke showed
from two rescue vessels in the Pearl Harbor and Maui directions
respectively. Sinton, who had radioed for help, flew back and circled
above us, reminding me of the goonies soaring over a wounded bird on a
fish line which I had seen in Alaskan waters. The Molokai boat reached
us first, picked up our sea anchor and towed us into Kaunakakai. We
pitched so and took such a pounding from the gigantic trade-wind waves
that it didn’t seem possible that the mahogany hull and the two lateral
pontoons could hold together. However, we made the harbor and tied up
to the buoy.
I hoped and prayed that the commercial packet, the _Mauna Kea_,
might take me to Hilo. But no, the navy tug _Navaho_ came from
Lahaina, and Captain Green put up his megaphone and announced that the
Admiral’s instructions were that he was to take Dr. Jaggar to Hawaii.
My heart sank because I knew what a seaway would be running against
that little tub. The second rescue ship proved to be the _Pelican_
equipped with a crane to swing the plane on board and take it back to
Pearl Harbor.
On board the _Navaho_ I was assigned a canvas camp cot in the
lower, circular wheelhouse at the bow; and all night long waves broke
over the bow and a foot of water sloshed back and forth under my cot.
The pitching was so heavy and our speed so reduced that it took us all
night to get across the Hawaii Channel, and we didn’t make Hilo until 2
P.M. the second day. After that wet and seasick night, I found
wry humor in our reception at Hilo Wharf, where we were met by Frank
Cody with his motion picture camera and a bunch of hula girls and leis.
Instead of five hours, the journey took thirty and quite failed to make
me air-minded. Furthermore, I arrived at Kilauea Volcano in time for
only the final stages of the explosive eruption.
Finch had organized volunteers, including Oliver Emerson as
photographer, and even our collie dog, Teddy, who could hear and feel
an explosion coming before we had any other warning. All observers
wrote notes and fondled the seismographs during the three weeks of
steam blast and cavings in of the pit, which had enlarged itself by
collapse 700 feet outward radially in all directions. When I got there
it was 3,500 by 3,000 feet in diameters and 1,300 feet deep, the bottom
a funnel of converging taluses, made of avalanches from the pit walls.
The taluses were wet and steaming vigorously in vertical lines, and
at night showed red hot avalanches from the north and west walls,
where two intrusive bodies of hard rock were red hot inside. The talus
below stayed hot, and slides occurred for only a few seconds. The
incandescent matter was not flowing in any sense, but was, rather, the
peeling of a rocky boss of reddish color at the west and a canoe-shaped
ledge at the north about 600 feet below the rim.
This showed the cross section of old screes, revealed above it, and
horizontal basalt flows overlapping above that. It was a beautiful
section of an ancient pit, of the same quality as Halemaumau itself,
and the incandescent canoe sill at the bottom appeared to be an
intrusion of fine-grained gabbro, which had pushed its way in under an
older talus funnel, similar to the present talus cup of Halemaumau, the
bottom of which was 700 feet lower.
On the opposite wall of the pit the Kau Desert rift was displayed as
a vertical cavern or arcade, merging into a group of dikes higher
up and tapering to zero thinness at the top. These same dikes, less
conspicuous, cut the canoe sill on the northeast wall, to indicate
that the ring of the pit was fractured vertically from below. This
fracture is the main deep rift of the mountain which crosses under
Kilauea, bending in the direction of Kilauea Iki, and this it was which
had opened as a curved chasm to let the lava down. Lava had gone down
in a succession of flank outflows, with intervening rises, from the
Kau Desert in 1920 to the final drainage under the sea at the east.
This drainage had let in the groundwater, made a steam boiler, and so
caused the explosive eruption and engulfment of Halemaumau walls as the
mountain yawned open.
A. L. Day made one of his return excursions to Kilauea at this time
and thus saw the extraordinary phenomenon of the hard basaltic
intrusive bodies half way down the walls, caving to a red hot talus.
The explosions, which started with two-hour intervals, gradually
decreased, coming at four hours and eight hours; and on May 18 came the
culminating cauliflower clouds with torrents downward of broken rock,
some of it showing low red heat. At all times the motive power was
steam jets 10 to 15 thousand feet high, which plastered the pahoehoe of
the pit edge with broken wall rock fragments of every size.
There was no sign of pasty lava or glassy bombs in the ejecta, and
the red incandescence seen at night in some of the explosions was the
avalanche material of the western boss and the canoe sill.
It took the pit less than two months, to mid-July, to recover its
liquid lava, which poured through the talus and made aa puddles,
to form a new pattern of cone source and short-lived flows. Then
everything came to rest, and lava activity was not resumed there until
the summer of 1927. However, in 1926 Mauna Loa went into action on its
southwestern rift, and sent an aa flow into the sea at South Kona,
destroying the village of Hoopuloa.
Here was history in the island lava column of majestic decline and
recovery from 1914 onward. Outflow in Mauna Loa crater at 13,000 feet
in 1914 extended to outflow from the southwest rift in 1916 and 1919 at
8,000 feet. Next, in 1920, came outflow in the Kau Desert from Kilauea,
at 3,000 feet. There were alternating spurts upward within Halemaumau
pit, acting as a crater similar to Mauna Loa’s at the lower Kilauea
level of 3,700 feet.
Then this whole progress downward moved over to the Chain of Craters at
2,500 feet, and finally to the ruptured earthquake rift of Kapoho on
the east point of Hawaii and at beach level. Some miles farther east,
on the same rift beneath the sea, the gigantic submarine mountain of
Hawaii drained the last lava from Halemaumau pit and let in groundwater
which caused steam explosions.
July 1924 saw the deep lava recovering in the crack and sealing off the
water, so as to bubble up in the bottom debris of Halemaumau and push
its way upward into the crevices of the island. It reached the top of
Mauna Loa in 1926 and reactuated outflow at the center of the island.
This migration of vents from top to bottom and back again took twelve
years of fracturing, and it relieved from lava this big piece of the
Hawaiian ridge. In reaching the groundwater and steamblast phase, it
accomplished something which had not happened since 1790, making a
supercycle of 134 years.
The decade after explosion at Halemaumau was marked by small lava
gushes in the bottom of the pit, bringing the depth from 1,300 feet in
1924 to 750 feet in 1934. The layers were something less than 100 feet
each, and they were fed by pahoehoe conelets at the slide-rock margin.
As usual, the lava was gushing up the western wall crack along the
margin of the bottom magma cylinder. There was no trace of recurrence
of steam blasts.
Despite the excitement of actual events, experimentation continued; and
I continued working on inventions for the experiments. Two approaches
to our problems concerned seismic recorders which could be put in the
hands of amateurs, and range finders for improving pit surveys. I had
been convinced for many years that the three-component seismograph was
too elaborate to be operated by volunteer school teachers or telephone
operators who have other things to do. Such a seismograph records with
photographic paper the north-south, east-west, and up-down motion of
the ground, on a chronograph which keeps accurate time and registers a
wavy line every second, so that the recording paper has to be changed
and developed every day. Moreover, these instruments are for measuring
distance to earthquake origins by physics of wave motion, and they have
become hopelessly mathematical. Such mathematics makes for assumptions
of uniformity about a rock crust which is not uniform. Qualitative
science wants to know what happens at a specific rock location and
wants the motion recorded by the simplest possible mechanical device.
It also wants a value in number at each location, for size and
direction of the first motion. This is for an earthquake, identified
as one incident, over such an island as Hawaii, where the rock units
are many and different. This is especially true of long periods of time
when there may be no earthquakes to record.
I devised a simple shock recorder, consisting of a horizontal boom of
very light wood attached to a hinged weight which swung like a door,
so that the boom scratched a line on a circular card which was rotated
and moved along by a common alarm clock. The result was a spiral mark
on the card, such that an earthquake interposed would write a zigzag
opposite a place on the clock face appropriate to the time of day. All
that was necessary was to remove and date the card, wind the clock once
a day, and measure the zigzag.
Mr. Ingalls of _Scientific American_ read an article by me in
which I described my shock recorder and thought it would lead amateur
machinists to devise their own machines and to record the vibrations
about them. Numerous amateurs did send in designs for instruments, and
Ingalls believed that the seismograph hobby would become as popular as
the amateur astronomical telescope hobby. But it failed because the
amateurs were waiting for earthquakes, which didn’t happen. They were
not content with vibrations from trucks, railroad trains, waterfalls,
surf on rocks, artillery practice, or wind storms.
My improved shock recorder gained some use later in New Zealand
and Montserrat, after big earthquakes in those places stirred the
authorities to build simple instruments. However, popular seismoscope
simply doesn’t exist.
The range finder I had been working on since my teaching days in
Massachusetts Tech, where I had made an optical device with a traveling
index mirror which moved along an upright scale of centimeters, and
a sextant telescope. The idea was a transit, with self-contained base
line close to the operator. My theory was that in such measurements of
distance as we had to use--to about a thousand feet or less, to the
lava fountains in the bottom of Halemaumau pit--we might read off the
vertical distance from a single station, when all other stations were
enclosed in smoke.
In the Aleutian Islands and elsewhere I experimented with a Zeiss
stereoscopic rangefinder designed for artillery ranges, but it was
not accurate enough for short distances. Everything in my instrument
depended on moving a telescope parallel to itself with superlative
precision, on a scale within the instrument. I finally hit upon using
a track of taut piano wire, probably the straightest line in all
mechanics.
If one first looked at an object twenty miles away (infinite distance),
the telescope could be moved along right and left and the image would
remain immovable on a vertical hair. If it were now focussed on an
object 1,000 feet away, the displacement of the telescope on the
centimeter scale would measure the distance with a high degree of
accuracy. This was the stadia principle inverted to contain the rod at
the observing position.
I also made several graphic devices for surveying Halemaumau daily from
the rim benchmarks. However, when lava overtopped the rim and destroyed
the datum posts, mapping became difficult.
Drilling temperature wells into the floor and rim of Kilauea Crater
was a project I had anticipated when Mr. John Brooks Henderson of
Washington came to Hawaii and offered to help finance it. We had taken
the temperature of hot cracks in many places, and found them to range
from 320° Centigrade at the Postal Card Crack close to Halemaumau, down
to 96° Centigrade at Sulphur Bank, and then on to lower temperatures at
many cracks which yielded visible vapor in damp weather but no vapor at
all in sunshine. A spectacle for tourists was a crack on the Sulphur
Bank flat, where a cigar to windward or the exhaust gas of a car would
nucleate the invisible vapor and cause a big puff of white “steam” to
show. This phenomenon, which depends on smoke particles condensing
invisible water vapor, is well known at Solfatara near Naples.
The experimental approach to finding out what the temperature of the
ground really is, is to drill a hole and keep the temperature measured
repeatedly with a thermometer, and to find out the thermal gradient
change vertically if possible. This means to measure how much the
temperature changes with depth. The whole problem concerns how much
unusual heat energy is released at a place like Kilauea Crater.
With the aid of Hobart, a drilling engineer, I started at Sulphur Bank
with a churn drill. We quickly discovered that we were going through
intensely hard basalt, containing metallic sulfide which appeared to
be pyrite but turned out to be marcasite. After drilling for several
years--with four holes at Sulphur Bank, one sixty-foot hole under
the observatory shop, and about twenty-five holes in the eastern
part of the Kilauea floor over a surveyed map pattern--we changed to
a rotary core drill using steel shot, and then changed again to a
percussion drill actuated by compressed air, for shallow holes to show
cross-country temperatures. Unfortunately core drilling requires large
quantities of water, which we did not have, for the Hawaii National
Park depends upon rainwater collected from roofs in redwood tanks.
Without water cooling, rotary bits heat and expand in hot rock, stick,
and are often lost.
Two seventy-foot holes, one at Sulphur Bank and the other in the middle
of Kilauea floor, showed no definite thermal gradient; and in general
it turned out that drill holes were dependent on steam in the cracks
for their temperatures.
Heat was brought up by vapor, and in a number of ten-foot holes
scattered over the Kilauea floor, the hottest were at the edge of the
floor. The Postal Card Crack, near the edge of Halemaumau and 600
feet above red hot intrusives, was exceptionally hot, and it is not
at all clear how the water made contact with the hot intrusive rock
underneath. This place completely caved in and was lost forever within
the enlarged pit of 1924. Sulphur Bank itself is at the edge of an old
Kilauea floor on a shelf at a high level. The extra heat at floor edges
means a wall crack between the crater fill and the confining funnel, so
that hot gas comes up from intrusive lava somewhere deep down toward
the center.
Thus when a mercurial thermometer was lowered, ten-foot holes would
show a hot place half way down and cold rock at the bottom. Some holes
had no heat at all, which meant that an inclined steam crack was cut
across by the hole or that no steam crack was present. The heat supply
was dependent upon vapor channels from heated rainwater, but we were
never able, owing to lack of funds, to drill a hole deep enough to find
the water supply which made the steam. It is a remarkable fact that the
casings on three wells at Sulphur Bank emit continuously a column of
steam exactly at the theoretical boiling point for this altitude, as
though the groundwater were boiling only a short distance below. Dr.
Allen by his analyses proved that Sulphur Bank vapor was ninety-nine
percent steam and that the remainder contained fractions of a percent
of sulfur and carbon dioxide, but this sulfur was enough in the course
of months to coat the interior of our casings with yellow crystals over
black iron sulfide. It coated the Sulphur Bank with yellow crystals of
sulfur and soaked the rock below to generate brassy iron sulfide.
The result of these experiments was to exhibit the complexity of any
solfatara in its relation to underground lava, and to the soakage
of a volcanic country by rainfall. This is especially important for
Martinique and Montserrat.
Another experiment was conducted by Emerson, who was equipped by the
Observatory with chemical apparatus to make qualitative analyses of
numerous Kilauea products, and he also did critical photographic
work, including some photography in the infra-red. In one valuable
experiment, he melted Kilauea lava in a refractory crucible at a
temperature of about 1200° Centigrade until it was as fluid as honey.
Allowed to chill and harden naturally, it was shiny glass like pahoehoe
lava. If stirred with an iron rod, it made sprouted black needles,
crystallized all through, like aa lava. Thus he proved that stirring
made Hawaiian lava crystallize and sprout like fudge, or like the
solidification of such metals as silver and bismuth. Sudden outbreak
and stirring anywhere will convert pahoehoe to aa; but never does aa
become converted physically to pahoehoe, unless flame melts it. The
standing pinnacles in the midst of an aa flow, which breaks up into
boulders, give evidence of the stirring process.
When Emerson’s discovery is applied to basaltic lava flows, it appears
that the glassy lava of a source, when stirred by gas fountaining or
by flowing, will change from its glassy condition to a sprouting and
crystallizing condition. All flows are glassy pahoehoe pumice fountains
at source vents, and a quarter of a mile away they become aa. Later the
source pahoehoe preserves itself within a glassy skin and pours forward
under glassy shells and frontal toes.
R. M. Wilson’s work supplied proof of a swelling mountain. Wilson
was one of the three leading members of the topographic party of the
Geological Survey. The other two were C. Birdseye and A. Burkland.
Wilson, whom I had known as a student in M. I. T., was a product of
Spofford’s Civil Engineering department and was to become the chief
computer of the Survey in Washington. As levelman in Birdseye’s
organization, he became topographic engineer of the Observatory, and
produced by precise leveling and triangulation the brilliant experiment
which showed [the swelling and shrinking of the mountain during fifteen
years.
By close cooperation with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey we
placed a tide gauge at Hilo, both for a sea level base and to record
tidal waves. Wilson also, in 1921, ran a level line from Hilo to the
Volcano House benchmark, where the Geological Survey had run levels
in 1911. The county roadway was marked with bronze plates inscribed
with leveling heights, and Wilson’s results showed the edge of Kilauea
Crater to be three feet higher in 1921 than it had been in 1911.
Wilson’s determination of heights above sea level certified that the
whole mountain swelled up during the ten years prior to 1921. About
1918, lava and seismographs had proved rising overflow at the center,
while the edge of Kilauea Crater was being tilted away from the
center. This went on during the massive rising of the interior lava
of Halemaumau into a dome where the pit had been, and it proved that
Kilauea Mountain was being injected along cracks, not only under the
pit, but along the rifts, as indicated by outflow on the southwest and
east in the years 1920 and 1924.
But this was not all of Wilson’s work. He revisited all surveying
stations after the big collapse of Halemaumau that accompanied the
explosive eruption of May 1924, and found that the Volcano House
benchmark lowered a little more than three feet during May 1924 and
that places close to Halemaumau dropped nearly fifteen feet. This
lowering of the mountain was graduated outward twenty miles from the
center at trig stations, or concrete posts, in the Kau Desert and at
stations along the road to Hilo. These stations changed altitude to
show that the big mountain tumefied or swelled up to that distance of
twenty miles during the big intrusion of cracks at the overflowing
time, as though the mountain dome were a tumor forty miles in diameter
with Halemaumau at the center. Of course there is no certainty that
the shore line in Puna, or even the Hilo tide gauge itself, did not go
down with the slumping of the mountain, for the thing called sea level
is nothing but an average of tide gauge readings at a fixed wharf.
Remember that the east point of Hawaii sank eight feet on the Kilauea
rift during the April crisis.
Wilson also surveyed by horizontal triangulation in 1921, determining
that stations around Halemaumau had moved inward toward the center,
by a specified number of feet, different at each station, and that
other stations outside of Kilauea Crater had changed position
horizontally on the map, as though the mountain were shrinking. This
entire series of measurements of change between 1911 and 1926 jibed
with the seismograph’s measurements of the tilting of the ground.
The seismograph picked out 1918, when Halemaumau overflowed, as the
swelling year. In 1924 the tilt reversed itself, turning inward toward
Halemaumau, and became tremendous when the pit collapsed and exploded.
It is impossible to accent sufficiently the importance of the discovery
of a measured swelling and slumping of a volcano throughout a lava
crisis occupying fifteen years. It was so tremendous that critical
engineers in Washington refused to believe Wilson’s results. However,
his findings were verified by the contemporaneous lava measurement
results, earthquake enumerations, and tilt meter results. These showed
that earthquake frequency increased when Kilauea slumped and that a
lava mountain had swelled until it was three feet higher at the summit
in ten years and had contracted by a larger amount during the years of
an explosive eruption period immediately thereafter. This all agrees
with the excellent results in Omori’s volcanic and seismic events,
obtained by Japanese army and navy engineers at several volcanoes and
earthquakes. It also agrees with the positive facts of Vesuvius and the
Canary Islands, starting with the controversy about “elevation craters”
started by Leopold von Buch in the first half of the nineteenth century
and carried forward by Mercalli on Vesuvius in 1894 when a lava hill
was seen to swell up. There, too, others would not believe. The
opposition always insisted that a volcano was built by heaped material,
that it could not possibly swell.
Wilson’s results are far-reaching, for the whole of geology depends
on uplift of continents and downsinking of sedimentary basins. Most
geologists account for these things by the theory of weighting and
underflow at a thin crust (isostasy), refusing to grant that volcanic
heat and tumefaction yield intrusive power everywhere through cracks in
the deeper crust.
I wish that I could describe adequately the high adventure of this
fruitful time. We built a vehicle from a model T Ford with a Ruckstell
axle, stripped of mudguards and equipped with balloon tires doubled at
the rear, so as to travel and carry loads over the smooth pahoehoe
of the Kilauea floor. We found that a powerful light rig of this
type, with excessively low gear, could climb up on lava lobes one to
two feet high. But this called for experienced driving and special
methods. Sending a man on foot ahead to pick a way and to drag a
crowbar which scratched a track, we could drive anywhere on the lava.
And we used this rig to haul drums of water and drill apparatus. I once
drove artillery officers out over the rough floor of the crater, and
afterwards saw similar cars used by the army in the first World War as
cross-country transportation for the doctors and wounded in No Man’s
Land.
Before a roadway encircled Kilauea Crater, Mr. Finch and I, carrying
two-inch planks for bridging cracks, made the complete circuit of the
crater by way of the rifted Kau Desert in our special vehicle, which
has now been succeeded by the jeep, the most universal vehicle of World
War II. Volcanology prospected the field of war in more ways than one,
so I named my popular book “Volcanoes declare war.”
Inventions led to expeditions both in Hawaii and in distant lands
during the decade of the twenties, some by invitation, some to offer
assistance at disasters, and some for the natural extension of my own
work. On September 1, 1923, came the big earthquake at Tokyo. With
Mrs. Jaggar, I was permitted to land in Japan and make a study of the
effects of the disaster. The destruction of Tokyo and Yokohama was a
final, sad tragedy for Omori, who for years had worked to protect the
Emperor and Japan by studying earthquake forecasts for Tokyo and by
conducting research in earthquake-proof engineering. It was a cruel
commentary that the disaster came while he was attending a science
congress in Australia, particularly as the great destruction of life
was occasioned by fire and typhoon winds. But Omori’s organization
handled the seismic event admirably. Omori returned at once, but almost
immediately died.
We steamed into Yokohama harbor, were welcomed by Captain Gatesford
Lincoln U. S. N. and his destroyer flotilla. We went on board his
flagship, and were sent in his launch to the broken jetties of
Yokohama, where we found no custom house or police. We walked up to the
camp of United States marines, amid the wreckage of the United States
Consulate, where the Consul had been killed.
Yokohama, which I had known well in 1909 and 1914, was a tumble of
ruins; and the long Bund with its splendid waterfront structures,
including the Grand Hotel, was a heap of rubble. My classmate
Purington, a mining geologist who had been staying at the Grand with
his family escaped with one child and went back to rescue his wife. A
second shock brought down more masonry and crushed him.
We were given a tent and allowed to mess with the marines, and next
day we crowded into a train for Tokyo. It was packed to the doors and
had people seated on the roof. We were warned by Americans to dress
as roughly as possible, as the populace was on edge, and foreigners
must not appear to be tourists. By great good luck we got into the
Imperial Hotel which had withstood the shake and fire, though it was
considerably damaged.
We visited the Honjo district of the river bottom, where the damage
was at maximum, and we saw the remains of a pile of corpses, clothes,
and household goods in one small yard where 30,000 people had been
incinerated. Fire had closed in from all sides, and the shrieking
mob of men, women, and children piled up on top of each other, amid
handcarts and clothing bundles--kindling which added fuel to the horror.
The mayor of Tokyo sent us in a small steamer to the island of Oshima,
on which is the volcano Mihara, close to the earthquake center. We
climbed up and looked down into a glowing pit which was making no lava
outflow at the time, though Mihara is famous for basalt flows.
Water soundings showed 900 feet of subsidence in Sagami Bay opposite
Oshima, and there were changed depths elsewhere, some of them
shallowing by underwater land slips. We went to the Boshu Peninsula
east of Tokyo, where the beach had been rising for many years, and
where the earthquake rising left wharves high and dry. The principal
effect of the earthquake, occurring at noon just when all charcoal
braziers were lighted for luncheon in the flimsy Japanese houses of
wood and paper, was to set fires in an area of hundreds of square miles
and a score of towns. Water reservoirs were destroyed, there was no
adequate fire department to care for a conflagration, and a high wind
was blowing in the bright sunshine. A characteristic of Japanese cities
was the absence of open parkways for refugees, hence the crushing,
burning, drowning, suffocation, and annihilation of hundreds of
thousands of people and the destruction of factories, railroad trains,
water supplies, power plants, and every essential utility in a great
metropolitan area with a population of many millions. The horizontal
movement of the ground in the shock was about eight inches, and
aftershocks kept on for many months.
We explored Yokohama, clambering up to the Bluff where everything was
wrecked and where land slips had tumbled down the precipice. We visited
what remained of a beautiful English type villa with a slate roof,
which had been occupied by two missionary ladies and their numerous
parrots. These people were encamped, along with their parrots, in a
shack built by their yardman, for the residence had tumbled down like a
house of cards. One woman had been imprisoned between her bed and the
wall, and was quite uninjured when the gardener dug her out through
cracks of the roof.
Scientifically, what happened to the ground in this earthquake was
not explained by any single fault. Whatever happened to the bottom
of Sagami Bay was not communicated across the beach to the coast as
any great rift. Small faults were identified in a number of places,
the shoreline in one place lifted a few feet and lowered in another;
but no such movement as the big subsidence of the bottom of the bay
crossed the contact of sea and land. It appeared as though the margin
of the bay itself outlined an area of sudden slumping, somehow related
to Mihara Volcano on Oshima; but the shoreline of that island was not
seriously affected. The great mountains of the foothills of Fujiyama,
and the Hakone district, were shaken to a hash of broken railway
tunnels and land slips, but the topography was not altered.
A resurvey of trig stations west of Tokyo revealed movements that
indicated the country had been spirally twisted. However, it has always
seemed a mystery to me that all the motion on land was so small, when
change on the bottom of the bay was so great.
There was a local tidal wave at the bay shore of Kamakura, but no great
tidal wave from the deep ocean came to Tokyo. Some volcanic effort of
deep lava had wedged open and jolted the sea bottom, but how it acted
is entirely obscure. It was quite different from the San Francisco
quake, with its side slip of twenty-one feet and a crack 400 miles long.
When we returned to Japan in 1926 with the Pacific Science Congress,
the restoration of Tokyo was practically complete and a magnificent
greater city had been built with wide and large parkways. The
government was lavish in its entertainment of the scientists attending
the congress. Dr. Lacroix and I were sent to Osaka to lecture, and to
show lantern slides of Mount Pelée; and expeditions all over Japan were
arranged for the visitors. I had an opportunity to see for the first
time the large basaltic lava fields of the lake district at the base
of Fujiyama, and I was astonished at the similarity of the basaltic
pahoehoe to our Hawaiian outflows and the freshness of the lavas and
the lava caverns. I had never thought of Fujiyama as a “lava flow”
volcano.
My next expedition was in the autumn of 1924, when I was invited by
H. E. Gregory, Director of Bishop Museum, to go on an expedition
on the USS _Whippoorwill_, Commander Samuel King, to Howland
and Baker Islands. Others on the expedition were C. Montague Cooke
(malacologist), George Munro (ornithologist), Erling Christophersen
(botanist), Ted Dranga (marine shell collector), George Collins (Museum
Trustee), and Bruce Cartwright (naturalist). These men were invited to
make up one of several Bishop Museum parties which were sent out to
south sea islands for collection and report.
As geologist, my job was to carry a portable seismograph and record
earthquakes or microseisms and to take photographs. We had made up
at the Observatory a one-component horizontal pendulum, in which
the chronograph drum used smoked paper. In camp I lowered the box
containing the seismograph into a hole in the sand under my cot, with a
view to finding out what tremors occurred on these flat coral islands.
However, no movements were detected during the period of our stay,
within the sensitivity limit of the small seismograph.
Howland and Baker are coral islets, not atolls, close to the equator,
with no lagoons and with deep water all around them. Howland later
became famous in the tragedy of Amelia Earhart, for whom the Coast
Guard prepared an airfield on the island. These islands had been guano
diggings for parties from Honolulu fifty years earlier, and we found
old cisterns and tracks. The islands were inhabited by thousands of
goonies (gannets), man-of-war birds, and terns. In some places they
covered the ground with their nests, eggs, and young, rising noisily
in terrifying swarms as we walked among them. The land was perfectly
flat brown guano and red weeds, with beaches of coral boulders and
_Tridacna_, or giant clams, the highest bit ridges on the windward
side. The easterly trade winds blew a powerful gale most of the time,
and our ship had to land us on the leeward beaches, where we made our
camp in a line of tents. The staff was divided into pairs for each
tent, and Filipino mess boys did the cooking.
Landing was arduous, for there was heavy surf, even on the leeward
side, and it was necessary to have a man swim in with a line in his
teeth. The swimmer, Ted Dranga, made the line fast between a buoy and
the shore, then built a signal fire while the ship stood off. Men and
baggage were loaded into a skiff and hauled ashore by the sailor in the
bow, who pulled, hand over hand, on the rope from the buoy, when the
waves were favorable. The ship had to drift away each night and come
back, as there was no anchorage. A few stunted kou trees still survived
from guano-digging days, and numerous grasses and fleshy-leaved salt
weeds grew. The beaches were covered with rats, hermit crabs, and some
white ghost crabs. The ghost crabs were seen at night flittering down
into the water when a flashlight was turned on the waves.
The hermit crabs, with borrowed shells, came clanking over the canvas
floor under our cots at night; and as one walked along the beach with a
flashlight, Polynesian rats pattered away in all directions. They had
been brought by the guano schooners and doubtless lived on shellfish,
birds, eggs, and fledglings.
The principal products of this expedition were notes, pictures, maps,
and collections.
Within the next few years we were to combine expeditions with
experimentation in the organization of new observatories in California
and Alaska.
California volcanoes as a field of observatory study were an obvious
choice when Judge Cramton proposed enlargement of the volcano
enterprise. He succeeded in getting me a Section of Volcanology in the
Geological Survey, and I sent R. H. Finch to Lassen Volcanic National
Park, where he made his headquarters at Mineral. Lassen had made
steamblast explosions in 1912 through 1914 which had rushed down into
the forest with such horizontal destruction as occurred at Mount Pelée.
It was not realized that this blast was terrible, for it was in the
backwoods on top of the Sierra Nevada and little known. The national
park there was created later. It is an area with a recent (1871?)
cinder cone and rocky lava flow, boiling lakes and mud pots, numerous
solfataras and hot springs, and a lava cavern much like those on Hawaii.
[Illustration: _21. The_ Honukai _on Alaska beach, 1928.
Jaggar on the right_]
[Illustration: _22. The_ Ohiki, _first amphibian truck,
with passengers Isabel Jaggar, Tahara, L. A. Thurston, Jaggar,
and Ted Dranga, 1928_]
[Illustration: _23. Lava flow entering village of Hoopuloa,
1926_]
[Illustration: _24. Lava flow of 1926 Mauna Loa eruption
approaching Hoopuloa Village, which was destroyed. Photo section
U.S. Army Air Force_]
Lassen Peak is the southernmost volcano on the line where the
Cascade Range merges with the Sierra Nevada. The line of volcanoes
extends beyond Mount Baker into Canada. North of Lassen is the Glass
Mountain region where there are obsidian lava flows. Like Mount
Shasta, Lassen is a volcano of very few recent eruptions, but there
were at least two outbreaks in the nineteenth century. These two
volcanoes resemble Pelée and Soufrière. Their linear quality implies
a long ragged rift in the earth’s crust, and south of Lassen there
is suggested an offset rift at Mount St. Helena, near the famous
superheated steam of Geyserville. This is near the northern end of the
great San Andreas rift, which extends many hundreds of miles southeast
of San Francisco. The rift shifted in a north-south direction during
the earthquake of 1906, and is one of the many evidences that the
north-south faults of California are all a part of the faulting up,
over lava, of the Cordillera, relative to downsunken Pacific Ocean
slabs.
I put Finch in charge of Aleutian Islands seismographs, as well as
the one he was to establish at Mineral. With Wilson as seismologist
and instrument designer in Hawaii, we started constructing horizontal
pendulums, like those used in Hawaii, making the weights out of
large iron pipes, to be filled with sand at the place of operation.
These were two-component seismographs, recording on a single
chronograph drum. We sent one to the Coast Survey station at Sitka
and built two more for Kodiak and Unalaska. Finch built and set up
his own seismograph at Mineral. He started systematic surveys of the
temperatures of hot springs and steam jets in different parts of
Lassen Park and kept close contact with the Geological Department of
the University of California at Berkeley. Lassen was the subject of
geological surveys by Anderson and Finch, and later the park area was
studied by Howel Williams.
I went to Washington to see government authorities, particularly
Professor Charles F. Marvin, Chief of the Weather Bureau, and Dr. G.
O. Smith, Director of the Geological Survey. I can never express my
indebtedness to Marvin, a good designer who built an inverted pendulum
seismograph in Washington. Finch had worked with Marvin when he was
weather observer in airplanes based on Ireland during the first World
War. Hence methods of government contact and reports, in the early days
of our Observatory, were kindly guided by Marvin. The Weather Bureau
was a place of self-recording instruments, something new for geology,
and much needed for volcano observation. For weather is a matter of
present changes, whereas geology had long been a matter of ancient
specimens.
Director Smith was instrumental in calling a meeting in Washington,
of scientists of all bureaus interested in the Aleutian Islands. I
was selected to lead the symposium, which included representatives
of climatology, biology and fisheries, geology and geochemistry,
oceanography and geodesy, hydrographic charting, gravity, and
magnetism. There proved to be great interest in the Alaskan Peninsula
and the islands, and the Survey published a special bulletin on the
symposium.
W. C. Mendenhall, who had written a monograph on the volcano of Mount
Wrangell in the great bend of the continent around the Gulf of Alaska,
became director of the Geological Survey and one of my best friends.
In 1927 I was ready with cross-country cars and a seismograph to
explore once more the volcanoes of Alaska. Organizing an expensive
expedition which called for a special ship was obviously out, but
in the years after the Technology Expedition of 1907 I had learned
many economies which I wanted to try out. Also I had two experimental
and mechanical tests to make. The first was to set up in Alaska
a seismograph, the second was to test Alaskan beaches with a
cross-country car, with a view to building an amphibian boat. I had
read in several languages on the subject of motor vehicles with boat
bodies, and my 1907 experience of finding no anchorage on Umnak Island
had convinced me of the need for a vessel on wheels which could climb
up an Alaskan beach and be converted into a camp. So I started from
Seattle with a low gear Ford runabout. I unloaded it first in Kodiak
village, where there were only one or two cars, and made tests of
driving it along beaches.
At Kodiak the Agricultural Experiment Station allowed me to set up the
seismograph in a vacant basement, and I arranged with a local housewife
to operate the instrument. Aided by a sheet of instructions, she made
tests, changed the smoked papers, varnished them, mailing them to
Hawaii, and kept notes on earthquakes which were felt.
The roadster and I then traveled by the local mailboat steamer
_Starr_, Captain Johanssen, and sailed along the south shore of
the Alaskan Peninsula to King Cove, visiting Bradford on the way.
Disembarking at King Cove, I made runs on the beach with the car. With
the aid of the cannery mechanic, I tried attaching winch spools to
drive wheels, in order to haul the car up to grassy land behind the
beach. No car had ever landed at the cannery, there were no roads,
and the problem of getting from the wharf to the tundra, and from
the tundra to the beach and back again, posed practical mechanical
problems, the solution of which was to be useful later. We ran along
the beach as far as a rocky headland, until we needed an amphibian boat
in which to round the point and rejoin the stony beach at some place
beyond. How that boat body should be constructed was planned from this
experience.
The superintendent, the physician, and the boatbuilders of the large
King Cove cannery planned an exploration for me, with John Gardner as
boatman and Peter Yatchmeneff as his mate. These two were on their way
to hunt bears for an eastern museum and were going to Pavlof Volcano,
the Vesuvius of the Alaskan Peninsula. I transferred my baggage to
their motor sloop, the _Plug Ugly_, and we headed for Pavlof Bay.
At Volcano Bay we landed for a bear hunt, which was very exciting for
me. When we found bear tracks in an amphitheater under big mountains,
we climbed toward the divide at the head; but we could find no pass
over it. From the high ground we looked across the river at clumps of
alders. John borrowed my field glass, handed it back, and pointed out
a black spot far away under the bushes. “I just saw it move,” he said,
“that spot is a big brown bear where he has been holed up.”
I remained watching while John and Pete, with their 25-caliber Savage
carbines, crept across the valley bottom, keeping down the wind from
the bear in the shelter of bushes. I saw that they were getting very
close to the game, lost sight of them for a few minutes, then heard two
sharp cracks and saw the bear in violent motion, thrashing around and
tearing up the ground, then quickly subsiding. I made my way across the
valley and found they had neatly shot a year old Alaskan brown bear.
The rest of the day was given to skinning it, and we sank the skull,
tied to a fish line from the sloop, to the bottom of the bay where
marine organisms would eat away remaining flesh and leave the bone
clean.
Next we sailed up to the head of Pavlof Bay and camped at a barabara,
or sod hut, preparatory to a trek to a small volcano that lies near a
shallow lake on the north side of the magnificent pair of snowy volcano
cones known as Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. We were early in the season
and could see a glacier extending down from Pavlof Crater, which is a
cup containing a conelet at the side of the summit. The crater is like
a collar, the conelet like the knot of a necktie, while the glacier
is the ribbon of the necktie, itself, extending down to a jumble of
snowy hills with rocky moraines at the edge of the lake. We made camp
and ran into some adverse weather, and also into a party of mainland
sportsmen. We gave up further hunting and returned to King Cove, for
John had his bear and that was enough. The curved beauty of the Pavlof
cones, with a sweep of lava flows to the west of them, heavily mantled
with snow, was exquisite and a knowledge of the cones was useful when
plans were made for a later expedition.
Mrs. Jaggar, after a trip by way of the Yukon into the interior of
Alaska waited for me at Kodiak while I took Captain Johanssen’s SS
_Starr_ to Unalaska where I saw my friends of the Coast Guard and
received an invitation to go later on the _Unalga_ to Attu. I
stayed on the _Starr_ to Bristol Bay on the Bering Sea side, in
order to see the Alaskan Peninsula from the north.
A rewarding view showed me the almost inaccessible Aghileen Pinnacles,
a marvelous mountain west of Pavlof, consisting of dozens of upright
spires, all covered with ice, and looking like a cluster of cathedrals
in a snow storm. At the head of Bristol Bay I saw one of the government
Indian schools, met some of the teachers, and met trappers who came
on board with interesting collections of fox furs. They told me about
Naknek Lake, which gives access to Katmai from that side by dog sled in
winter. The necessary husky dogs were tied out in the fields around a
mission station.
A rumpus on deck between a storekeeper of the district and the United
States Marshall arose over a feud between two villages which were
quarreling about the placing of a United States post office. There was
no shooting, though it looked bad for a few minutes, and I realized the
far north was a replica of the far west.
On my return to Unalaska, Coast Guard officers and I were invited to
a dinner on board the German cruiser and training ship _Emden_.
I had nothing to wear but a hunting coat, whereas the others were in
dress uniforms, but the Germans didn’t mind. I greatly enjoyed the
_Emden’s_ officers, whom I heard from later, including Captain
Foerster, an acquaintance of my son in Seattle.
On board the _Unalga_ I was given the Captain’s cabin, for he was
absent on sick leave. Executive Officer Perkins, who acted as skipper,
preferred to live in his own quarters. Another guest on the trip to
Attu was Jack McCord, whose interests were sheep herding and whaling,
two industries which were making experimental progress in the islands.
We saw a sheep ranch in the western part of Unalaska Island and learned
that a recent landing on Bogoslof had found the conditions much like
those I had seen in 1907 when I noted the smoking cone, the millions of
murres, the three islands, the connecting beaches, the warm lagoon, and
the dozens of sea lions.
At Nikolski on the west end of Umnak Island, a flat land where
sedimentary rocks appeared, we had to mine and blow up a schooner
recently sunk in the harbor. Going westward, we passed cones in groups
or on individual islands, and we met the usual fogs and gales. The
officers were interested in Adak Harbor, but our plan to enter it was
defeated by storms.
We anchored off Chugul, where two Aleutian men and a boy had been
marooned for months by the non-return of the wrecked schooner. A trader
had leased the island and left them to collect blue foxes for him. When
their supplies gave out, they lived on fish, vegetation, eggs, and sea
birds. They had matches left but no ammunition, so they had loaded
cartridges by assembling match ends. However, they were sheltered in a
sod hut at one side of the grassy volcano, and were living proof that
an Aleut cannot starve. They were fat and healthy and had a good load
of furs. When we transported them to the village on Attu, the first
thing one of these men did was to marry an Attu girl, with the aid of
the local priest.
Chugul was the last of the shapely volcanic cones. Attu geology was
different, with old metamorphic and sedimentary rocks and ancient
lavas, but without any sign of fresh volcanoes. It is a mountainous
island with deep fjords, and we crossed a divide in order to look down
on Sarana Bay, made famous by World War II. McCord and I walked out on
the peninsula west of the village of Chernofski, and saw snowy ranges
beyond the next bay to the west. The Aleutian uplands are covered
with luxurious grasses, many flowers, and much mossy swamp; and there
are signs of terracing in places, as though made by old elevated
beaches. The country is too wet and stormy to be attractive for raising
livestock. However, when we landed on Amchitka Island on the south side
of the chain, we found it drier with fine grassy uplands. We found also
the usual shore cliffs and foxes.
We returned to Unalaska, where I was attracted by the empty hotel
building and wharves at Dutch Harbor, deserted by the Alaska Commercial
Company after the booming maritime trade of the Cape Nome gold days. I
talked to Company officers about using the buildings as a scientific
station. An old powder house would be suitable for a seismograph
cellar; the wireless station was nearby; and there was water, lumber,
and housing for every possible purpose. It was ideal for an Aleutian
geophysical station, if financing and collaboration could be had.
Later, in Seattle, I addressed the Chamber of Commerce and published in
our Bulletin a proposal for an Aleutian Geographical Observatory, but
nothing came of it at that time. The Aleutian Islands became a center
for landing craft, airfields, and defense forces during World War II,
and eventually our men Howard Powers and Austin Jones were employed
there.
In 1928, Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society, in
cooperation with the Geological Survey, equipped me with an expedition
to map, photograph, and survey 2,500 square miles in the vicinity
of Pavlof Volcano. Again I had John Gardner and Pete as camp men.
McKinley, our topographer, brought pack animals and Alex Bradford
transported us to our base camp in Canoe Bay. I slept during summer
in the _Honukai_, a twin-screw steel amphibian boat, which was
manufactured in Chicago, after a preliminary vessel made of wood
and impelled by paddle wheels had been constructed at our Hawaiian
Observatory shop and tried out over a 400-mile course along the shores
of Hawaii.
The trial of the preliminary vessel, which we called _Ohiki_,
Hawaiian for ghost crab, took place during the spring of 1928. The
entire staff of our Observatory were engaged in it, with Mrs. Jaggar
as stewardess, as usual. Mr. Thurston went along as a passenger and
publicity man on the trip up the west coast of Hawaii, where I tested
out Kona beaches and checked on the craft’s seaworthiness.
We had misadventure at the start, in that the driving wheels tended to
dig in on soft beaches; and we found it necessary to build washboards
to raise the gunwhale amidships to avoid shipping water in choppy seas.
In the cross country trek from Kilauea, using the boat as a truck, Mr.
Thurston was overwhelmed with admiration for the twenty-one foot work
skiff, thundering down the steep hills of Kona on wheels, controlled by
the low gears of a Ford. Its boat body excited all the roadside kids to
wild antics of delight. My excellent truck builder, Boyrie, used the
same Ford which had run along the beaches in Alaska, reconstructing it
in the observatory machine shop.
Wilson’s photograph of the _Ohiki_, with Mr. Thurston on board,
became the frontispiece of a top secret publication on amphibians of
World War II’s joint army staffs in London. The amphibian war of the
Pacific Ocean and Normandy was to develop dozens of different designs
of landing craft, but war use was unforeseen by me at the time of our
experiments.
With a crew of four we cruised from Kailua to Kawaihae along the west
coast of Hawaii, landing on beaches and lava flows, and camping at
Makalawena, Kiholo, and Puako. We encountered real grief at Kawaihae
against the front of a soft submerged bank in shallow water, where the
front wheels made too much resistance and the rear wheels dug into a
mud bottom. We needed front wheel pull, but we finally got the craft up
the beach by power hauling with gypsy and cable and a tree. More grief
developed on our way up to Waimea when we fractured wooden rear axle
attachments. We went gratefully into the Parker Ranch shop for some
days, until we were able to return to Hilo and the volcano, completing
the circuit of the island.
The National Geographic vessel was built by George Powell who
advertised a Ford “mobileboat,” designed for the use of fishermen to
enter midcontinent lakes. He had started on a larger model, which
Grosvenor accepted for the National Geographic Expedition. Powell and
I tried it out on Bellingham roads and lakes and on beaches of Puget
Sound. We provided everything extra, for Alaska had no roadside filling
stations. A wheeled vehicle on the peninsula was unheard of. We had
elongate steel mats to give traction across the upper sands of a beach,
and this plus bow winch, levers, and manpower enabled us to abandon
beaches and enter the tundra. Our planning paid off, for in the 400
miles along the coast of Alaska from Shumagin Islands to King Cove,
over water, beaches, and tundra, we did not even have to pump up the
tires. The _Honukai’s_ numerous excessively low gears even enabled
us to drive to the snowline and bring out the heavy fur and bones of a
bear that I had shot on a snowy volcano, Mount Dana.
The expedition was very productive. McKinley made an excellent
topographic map; we corrected errors in old maps; we obtained many
photographs through Richard Stewart, who carried still, color, and
movie cameras; and we obtained minerals, fossils, geologic notes, and
many plants which I collected. McKinley used a panorama camera for his
topographic work and his wide photographs were invaluable as a record
of the country.
Meanwhile, I kept in tough with the seismograph station at Kodiak. The
steamers of the Pacific Commercial Company, which owned several of the
canneries and had headquarters in Bellingham, transported us from
Puget Sound to King Cove, and the many tugs for the canneries’ salmon
traps enabled me to make local explorations along the southern coast.
At one trap the fishermen had a tame baby seal, who would eat nothing
but little trout caught for him from the brook. He lived in a box,
and went off to sea by himself at night; but he always came home next
morning.
In 1929 Finch sent Austin Jones, a seismologist, to construct and
establish a hut at the Dutch Harbor radio station for a second Alaskan
seismograph, of the Hawaiian type designed by R. M. Wilson. Jones
taught the wife of a radio operator to manipulate the station and
transmit the seismograms. The women in charge of the two stations at
Kodiak and Dutch Harbor kept their work up for several years, and kept
in constant correspondence with me. Though in the winter time they had
to dig the stations out of snowdrifts, and to cope with all kinds of
damage from rain and storm, they courageously and faithfully visited
the instruments. It is a hellish country for weather.
Although both stations were within fifty miles of active volcanoes,
earthquakes were not numerous, and the story was very different from
that told by our records made at the edge of Kilauea caldera, only two
miles from an active lava center. Thus we have demonstrated that the
only way to study an active volcano is to live close to the crater
itself, even if a shelter has to be built underground.
In concluding this story of our Alaskan expeditions of the twenties, in
contrast to my windjamming experience of 1907, I must underscore the
importance of water transportation and credit those who have provided
it. In fact, all transportation was by water until aircraft became
supplemental. I feel that the U.S. Coast Guard, which takes care of the
Pribilof Island seals, is the supreme achievement of our government in
policing these stormy waters. Their 60-foot motor cruiser, equipped
with sails has come to be standard for such government bureaus as
the Biological Survey and has replaced the earlier, 80-foot sealing
schooner among the traders.
The canneries maintain big boatbuilding yards and operate large and
powerful tugs for visiting the salmon traps. The traps are heavy
weirs made of northwest pine logs, which are battered to pieces by
the winter storms and must be rebuilt with pile drivers every spring.
Thus a by product of cannery activities, and a godsend for trappers,
fishermen, Aleuts, and campers is the pine lumber distributed all along
the beaches from the annual wreckage of salmon traps. It is the only
firewood and construction material of the country to be found anywhere
west of Kodiak, for the land has no forests.
Our contribution to the boating problem was the exhibition of what an
amphibian landing truck will do on Alaskan beaches and its usefulness
along those beaches where a boat may be in difficulties from stormy
weather.
I returned to my Hawaii headquarters in the fall of 1928. The year 1929
was marked by an earthquake crisis which began in mid-September with an
unusual number of shocks in the vicinity of Hualalai Volcano, a place
hitherto notably free from earthquakes. This was of interest because
events on Mauna Loa had shown higher and higher lava sources and quake
centers for the south rift. The 1926 outflow had begun by splitting
northward across the summit crater, and there making a considerable
flow eastward toward Wood Valley while Wingate and his topographic
party were in camp close to the summit. Therefore, when the 1929 quakes
began near Puuwaawaa, it looked as though Mauna Loa eruptions might
begin again at the northwest.
A very strong quake of September 25 was felt all over the island, and
in our seismograph cellar was a peculiar swaying movement that set
all the instruments jiggling, dismantled recording pens, and produced
a queer feeling that the building was floating like a boat in a
whirlpool. Immediately came word that North Kona had suffered heavily,
particularly at Puuwaawaa Ranch near the cone of that name, where the
1859 Mauna Loa flow had swept past.
I motored at once with Mrs. Jaggar to Puuwaawaa, where we were
hospitably entertained by the family of Mrs. Robert Hind. The damage
all about was fantastic, with houses pulled apart, stone walls flung
down in a seaward direction, redwood water tanks wrecked, and shops
on the lower side of the highway moved toward the sea leaving a chasm
between them and the road. Resting in our bedroom, we could hear the
window frames ticking like clocks for long periods of time, then coming
to a sudden wrench which felt as though a lifting wave had passed
through the mountain under us.
I returned to the Observatory to get a shock recorder for use at the
ranch porch to count these strong motion shocks. Meanwhile residents in
Kona jotted down times of the shocks, which were coming by hundreds. On
October 5 at about 6 P.M., as I was returning through North
Kona in my car, I noticed a little unexplained excitement among people
by the roadside. I stopped at the residence of Frank Greenwell, whose
wife was a faithful counter of quakes, to find Mrs. Greenwell and her
daughter on the veranda in tears. They had just been through fearful
earthquakes, which in a moving car I had not felt. Flower vases were
overturned, furniture was disarranged, dishes were flung off the dining
room table, and kitchen utensils and milk were in a jumble. It was hard
to believe that anything so terrific could have happened without my
feeling it.
I found even more dire catastrophe at Puuwaawaa. The stone chimney was
overturned, breakage of china and of glass in the preserve closet in
the basement was severe, a stone bench was flung down and broken on
the lawn, and one side of the cellar was caved in. We took to living
in automobiles, for there had been land slips on the mountain. This
earthquake had been worse than that of September 25. Even hillside
cottages were split apart.
I set up the shock recorder, which registered about 3,000 earthquakes
during the next three months, until mid-December. The intensity and
frequency of these quakes declined, as is usual with aftershocks of
a big earthquake, recalling 1868 and the south end of the island. At
that time both Mauna Loa and Kilauea had had rift outflows, and as the
seismographic center of the new earthquakes was close to the 1800 and
1859 flows from Hualalai and Mauna Loa, everybody expected a lava flow;
but none came. Armine von Tempski who was a visitor during this period
was inspired to write “Lava.” She added a Hualalai lava flow using
material that I gave her to describe it. Her description is magnificent
although she, herself, had never seen a lava flow.
The October 5 shock was bad on the west flank of Mauna Kea, where
water tanks were overturned and the high wireless station was damaged,
and at Kamuela, where plumbing pipes were fractured. Parker Ranch was
damaged, and the constant racking along the entire length of the Kona
settlements caused land slips and broken masonry in many places, always
damaging north-south stone fences more than those at right angles to
the seashore.
This three months of northwest earthquakes, a condition unknown since
1801, the year when Hualalai lava flowed into the sea, indicated that
lava was coming north of Mauna Loa. This had not happened since 1899,
for the flows on the southwest rift, always beginning near the summit
crater, had been during 1903, 1907, 1914, 1916, 1919, and 1926.
Belief was that the southwestern rift of the mountain was filling
progressively higher with solidified redhot cement, not brittle enough
to fracture open easily, whereas the northern rifts--such as the
sources of 1859, 1881, and 1899--were now hard and brittle and ready
for fracture. The fracturing took the form of northwest cracking and
this was lava wedging, confirmed by the summit and northern outflows
which were to come in 1933 and 1935.
July of 1929 produced a new influx of lava into Halemaumau, nineteen
degrees north of the equator. And a curiously simultaneous event
occurred on nearly the same date 2,000 miles away at Tin Can Island
(Niuafoou) in Tonga where the influx broke into basaltic eruption
fifteen degrees south of the equator. Apparently a stress lagging
behind the solstice time had acted on the equatorial protuberance to
release the wedging open of lava fractures on both sides of the equator.
I was pleased when the U.S. Naval Observatory invited me to go to
Niuafoou in 1930 as the geologist on an expedition going to study
the total eclipse of the sun. The expedition, under Captain C. H.
C. Keppler, used the Naval Station at Samoa as a base. Mrs. Jaggar
accompanied me as far as Pago Pago and made trips to Western Samoa,
Fiji, and the Tonga Islands. With other wives of expedition members,
she was allowed to make a short visit to Tin Can Island at the time of
the eclipse in October. Spending some time in Samoa, she listened to
the Congressional hearings under Senator Hiram Bingham, which were to
investigate civil versus naval government. We were delighted to find
our old friend Captain Lincoln, of Tokyo earthquake relief, in command
of the Navy at Samoa, and I also renewed acquaintance with the pilot of
my companion plane in the Molokai forced landing of 1924, Lieutenant
Bill Sinton, and his family, whom we were to meet again in Honolulu.
Prominent on Captain Keppler’s staff was Lieutenant-Commander Kellers,
physician and naturalist, whose enterprise on the Niuafoou expedition,
like mine, dealt with sciences other than astronomy.
From the sea, Niuafoou looks like a hat in shape. It is about five
miles in diameter with eleven villages, mostly along the eastern
shores, and at that time had a population of about a thousand people.
In the center is a circular lake, bordered by cliffs, and much like
Crater Lake in Oregon. Standing about seventy feet above sea level
and 250 feet deep, it has slightly brackish water. The naval camp was
established at Angaha on the north side of the island, and here a new
village housed the refugees from Futu to the northwest, destroyed in
1929 by an aa lava flow. This flow came from erupting cracks trending
north and south, along the west side of the ring ridge around the
crater lake. These lava flows had been liquid pahoehoe at the source;
had poured into the sea in many places; and had made striking tree
molds around coconut palms, which were left as stone trees when the
wood burned and the liquid lava lowered. The western source crack
extends to the south end of the island and has accounted for most of
the earlier eruptions known to history. Futu had been the only western
settlement left.
Angaha came nearest to being a harbor, but was really on an open
roadstead, with a rocky boat landing and copra chute below the village
which stood on a cliff above.
Copra, the only commercial product, is bought and warehoused by two
Australian firms. The two grown sons of the manager of one assisted
me in tramping and photographing all over the island. The landing
at Angaha brought about the name Tin Can Island, for the visiting
steamers stopped a mile off shore and incoming mail, soldered into
large biscuit tins by the steamship engineer, was lowered into the
sea, tied together. The tins were towed in by the village policeman.
Outgoing mail was carried out in paper packages tied on top of sticks
and held aloft by hardy swimmers with hau wood poles, which they held
under their arms as floats. A short time after our trip a shark got a
swimmer, and canoes were adopted.
Thanks to the infrequent visits of vessels, the natives were unspoiled,
splendid specimens of the Polynesian race. The laws of Tonga required
every youth to cultivate an area of coconut trees and vegetables, and
the island was traversed by lovely trails. The houses and churches were
exquisite arched structures with thatched roofs, the beams tied with
coconut-fiber cords. There were native ministers, and the choirs were
superb. Services often started at 4 A.M.
My jobs were to take photographs with three cameras and make a
geological map. Northeast of the crater lake is a cluster of sand
hills, relics of an unusual explosive eruption in 1878, another
Hawaiian eruption date. This eruption was confined to one side of
the crater and came up the wall crack, between the encircling cliff
and the top of the lava plug under the lake. Its description is very
reminiscent of the Kilauea steamblasts of 1924.
We found a remarkable inhabitant of the sand in the malau bird, a small
partridge with big feet, with which it dug a deep hole in the sand for
its large egg which was then covered up. The sun’s heat did the rest,
with the warm sand acting as incubator. The young bird scratched its
way to freedom and flight without aid from its mother. Another item of
Dr. Kellers’ natural history was the flying fox, a giant bat with a
high singing note and odoriferous rookeries in the tops of trees. It
had a heavy flight like an eagle’s. A third item was the tiny black
crab, the size of a ten-cent piece, which lived in the midst of limey
flats at one side of the lake, where there were crusts that suggested
calcareous algae. The little black crabs, which lived by thousands in
the midst of the crust, resembled compact spiders.
An artificial feature of great convenience was a trail following the
top of the ring ridge, all around the crater. The Quensell boys had
a rowboat on the lake, and Dr. Kellers and I were guided by them to
all parts of the island, making the acquaintance of the people in the
villages along the eastern trade-wind shore. Just as in Hawaii, the
trade wind is a controlling feature; and the surf erodes cliffs on
the east, whereas beaches are more common along the lava flows of the
western strand line. These are sheltered from wind but are remote from
habitations. The entire island is made of lava and ash deposits, and is
evidently the top of a volcano cone extending far below sea level. The
lava activity, as shown by the arrangement of the old and new source
cracks, depends on concentric cracking around the caldera, which makes
concentric rifts, rather than the long radial ones found in Hawaii. The
crack along the west side--which had vented the succession of flows
from south to north, ending with the Futu flow of 1929--indicated that
the next flow might threaten Angaha. This is just what happened during
the next decade, forcing the island population to be evacuated.
My geology photographs and pictures of people, ships, and dwellings
were developed in a darkroom tent, which I set up in a copra shed, so
as to keep the development of negatives abreast of the exposures. Copra
bugs crawling over me in the dark and getting into developer added
excitement, and the eternal smell of copra began to tinge my dreams.
The routine of our work was broken by two good fights, a fist fight
between a Filipino steward and a sailor, and a knock-down and drag-out
between two native women of Angaha. The real fun was the row between
the two women. A younger woman who was a loose, shrill character,
disliked by the villagers and the sailors, attempted to attack an
older woman who was a big husky dame. There was screaming and hair
pulling and fisticuffs, while the Navy men stood around and cheered
them on. The younger woman made most of the noise, while the older
woman laughed and ripped off the other’s clothes. Finally the young
woman, in tears and with clothing in tatters, retreated and disappeared.
But to get back to the eclipse, telescope lenses were mounted on high
scaffolds, the ladies arrived in October, and the total eclipse of the
sun happened and was photographed at the time anticipated.
When the time came for us to return to Samoa, some of us were fortunate
enough to get a place on the Flood Brothers’ copra ship _Carisso_,
out of San Francisco. Along with the family of a Navy officer, we went
ashore at Niuatoputapu (Keppel Island) after climbing down a rope
ladder to a bobbing whale boat. We found beautiful mats, which are the
wealth of the people throughout Tonga. The village men and women who
had mats to sell were not so much interested in coins or trinkets and
merchandise as they were in the clothing we wore. I literally divested
myself of a shirt and a suit for a beautiful fringed mat ornamented
with clusters of shells, made to be given to Queen Charlotte on her
next visit. We were fortunate in reaching Samoa in good weather, but
a big storm after we got there wrought havoc with the _Tanager_
carrying astronomical photo plates and bundles of Polynesian mats which
were much damaged by sea water.
CHAPTER VI
Prophecy and Hope
“_For we know in part, and we prophesy in part._”
The fifth decade of my sixty years of geology, 1931 through 1940, was
a time of culmination at Kilauea; the ending of an eleven-year cycle
on Mauna Loa; and the introduction, in 1940, of a new Mauna Loa cycle.
This new cycle resembled strikingly the one which followed 1843 because
of the similarity of places--notably the north side of Mauna Loa toward
Humuula, followed by the northeast side toward Hilo--and the intervals
of eruption. Kilauea behaved differently in the nineteenth century,
because in 1840 it rent open the east flank to make a flood of lava
into the ocean, though afterwards it restored its lava to Halemaumau.
In 1934, on the other hand, Halemaumau went to sleep, after adding one
more extra thick filling in the bottom of Halemaumau pit in September,
when it gushed up behind wall slabs 300 feet high, cascading down the
talus in twenty-five ribbons of lava. This proved that effervescence in
a small crack can rise far above the level of the lava lake in the pit.
It made a marvelous display in early morning darkness, and the new lava
lake rose rapidly within the flatly funneling talus. This lay at thirty
degrees, so that the outward spread enlarged the lake and reached
beyond the foot of the talus.
The slide-rock slope that was conspicuous had been fed by avalanches,
and it rested against the half-circle of wall slab, behind which had
risen the cascades. This source migrated around the slab to the north
and developed the biggest fountaining jets there. By the outward and
upward spread of the new lake these jets became lake fountains, while
the cascading ribbons at the slope stopped. The lake rose and crusted
over. The northern fountains became a small oval pond and center of
accumulation and upward doming, while pahoehoe lava radiated down a
slope to the edges of the floor heap, south and east. Surveys at this
time placed the northern lava pond definitely at the top of an inner
heap. The fountains in the pond changed to conelets with their own
craterlets. These, after a month, developed gas explosions, flinging up
lava shreds to 800 feet and sometimes higher than the edge of the pit.
This started a slumping of the exploding cones. The explosions were
a symptom of increasing viscosity of lava under the bottom heap, and
the viscosity was revealed in stiff lava welling up around the edges
of the floor. This filled up the wall valley, and so compensated the
slump that the bottom became level. Then the activity ceased. It all
demonstrated how an inner dome in Halemaumau could become filled with
an intrusive lens, which by welling out around the edges, could restore
the dome to horizontality. It was like the “laccoliths” of the Black
Hills. After the 1934 eruption, Kilauea simply went out of business for
eighteen years. Halemaumau lava returned in 1952.
Mauna Loa activity was renewed meanwhile, with summit crater inflows in
1933 and with intense seismic activity under the northeast rift. Depths
of seismic centers were at first seventeen miles down, and thereafter
five miles down, as reported by seismologist Hugh Waesche. He worked
with the formulae of distance, direction, and depth established
by Austin Jones, using preliminary tremor, comparative excursions
of lines, and a model of the island. These had become precise by
mathematical triangulation of the island of Hawaii, with seismograph
records from Kilauea, Hilo, and Kona stations. The distance from each
station was interpreted from the duration of the preliminary tremor;
and the meeting point of the several distances within the island model
located the seismic focus inside Mauna Loa Mountain where the lava was
splitting it open. The epicenter, or point over the focus, when the
lava in Mauna Loa’s summit crater was stiffening, lay on the northeast
rift in 1933. Therefore the eruption was expected at an old cone,
whence had come the first outbreak of 1843. This came to pass in 1935.
E. G. Wingate, who had become superintendent of Hawaii National Park,
agreed with my dictum, made on the basis of seismograms and history,
that the next outflow would come at the north within two years and
would endanger Hilo. This I discussed at a public meeting of the Hilo
Chamber of Commerce in January 1934, and the report was published under
the title “The coming lava flow.” The prediction was fulfilled in
December 1935, when the flow came as it had in 1843. The eruption broke
out on top and traveled down to Humuula, the saddle between Mauna
Loa and Mauna Kea, then pooled in the saddle and turned toward Hilo.
[Illustration: _25. Jaggar in office of Observatory in “Tin
House,” 1937_]
[Illustration: _26. Bomb bursting on lava flow, December 27,
1935. Photo by Eleventh Photo Section, A.C., Wheeler Field,
T.H._]
The 1843 flow had reached the saddle and turned toward Kona, and the
solid remnant of that lava bank deflected the 1935 puddle to the east.
It was traveling toward Hilo at the rate of a mile a day. This was
the signal to try stopping it by bombing from airplanes, a procedure
which had been proposed from experience with flows in tunnels of their
own crust, where a person on the Kilauea floor could look through a
caved-in hole in the roof and see the glowing river inside. Thurston
and I had discussed blasting such a roof to cool off the lava and pile
it up, thus forcing it to a new outlet and stopping the frontal flow.
It was Guido Giacometti of Olaa who suggested bombing rather than
dynamiting. I called on the Army Air Force, and a conference was held
in Hilo. With Colonel Delos C. Emmons, Wing Commander, I flew over
the source tunnel. This was at 9,000 feet on the north side of Mauna
Loa, where a gleaming silvery ribbon of pahoehoe emerged from a hole
in the north slope. This was a crusted lava river, and the fliers were
instructed to smash it with 600-pound demolition bombs of TNT.
The forenoon of December 27 was fixed for the bombing; and by
invitation of Herbert Shipman, Mrs. Jaggar and I went to Puu Oo Ranch
on Mauna Kea to watch what happened. The day was clear, and I saw one
explosion send up a column of incandescent liquid lava hundreds of feet
high, looking like a geyser of blood. In the foreground was the front
of the flow, which we watched as it moved toward Hilo. At the same
time we were receiving reports from cowboys on its rapidly diminishing
speed. For about a week the liquid lava remaining in the tunnels kept
spilling forward, and then it stopped. The front was in the headwaters
of the Wailuku River, Hilo’s water supply.
We afterwards visited the bomb craters in the source region, to find
that there had been numerous hits on the lava tunnel and that the
cooling off had solidified the source lava back into the mountain
rift. The remainder of the eruption expended itself with internal
fountaining in the summit wells at the top end of the flank rift. From
the coincidence of the times of bombing and the slowing down of frontal
flow, there appeared no question that the smashing of the source tunnel
was effective and had saved Hilo. We had not anticipated that active
fountaining would be forced back to the summit well from the 9,000-foot
craterlet, but summit smoke continuing for two months verified that
this had happened. This showed the physical chemistry of bubbling slag
to be in delicate adjustment and a lava eruption once started to be
more sensitive to shock than anyone had dreamed. This conclusion was
reconfirmed by the bombing of the 1942 flow.
During this period, changes in Observatory personnel led to new
researches. Wingate, who succeeded Wilson as engineer, set up
triangulation monuments in Puna to test further motion on the Kapoho
rift of 1924. He also devised and set up three tilt instruments in
three cellars which were blasted out of the lava around Halemaumau
pit. Howard Powers came from Harvard as petrologist and collected and
mapped many rock specimens in Kona, on Hualalai, and in Olaa. He also
made curves of the tilt records for the first twenty years of the
Observatory. Hugh Waesche was transferred from the Park Service to the
position of geologist at the Observatory. A skilled radio amateur, he
took over seismological work. In 1938 he dealt with an important group
of earthquakes along the Chain of Craters east of Kilauea. These were
accompanied by faulting, which made cracks, chasms, and humps in the
road, and some new hot places. This indicated a reaction underground,
back toward Halemaumau from the submarine outflow of April 1924.
Finch from his headquarters at Lassen reported regularly in the
_Volcano Letter_, on hot spring temperatures and earthquakes.
He conducted two expeditions to Alaska, inspecting the seismographs
and making volcano explorations and maps on Akutan Island. Another
expedition was to Shishaldin Volcano, at the west end of the big
Aleutian island of Unimak during one of its eruptive spells.
Throughout this time and earlier H. T. Stearns represented the
Geological Survey and the Territory of Hawaii in publications on
geology and water supply on all the islands. The island of Hawaii was
made the subject of a splendid geological map in color by Stearns and
Gordon Macdonald, petrographer, with a book on the geological history
of Hawaii, profusely illustrated with photographs and diagrams. Their
book is practically a modern textbook on the geology of active lava
volcanoes.
Richmond Hodges, sent by the Geological Survey from Washington, was
trained in the technique of government filing and relieved me of work
with correspondence and routine. He also took over the editing of the
_Volcano Letter_ and assisted Mr. Wilson with the writing of
articles when I was away in Alaska. My secretaries after Hodges were
Ruth Baker and Sutejiro Sato, and Miss Baker’s work extended into the
1940’s.
Tilt studies made at the three cellars around the rim of Halemaumau
did not produce the anticipated results, but they answered our
questions. The three cellars were placed at 120 degrees to each other,
with reference to a meridian crossing the pit, one at the north, one
east-southeast and one west-southwest.
It was thought, when these tiltoscopes were set up, that the Kilauea
floor would swell or shrink as an inner dome, with the pit at its
center. But nothing of the kind was revealed. The tilting was found to
be more or less at right angles to the long western wall of Kilauea
Crater, itself an extension from the southwestern rift of Kilauea
Mountain. The rift extends under Halemaumau pit, as was proved in
1920, when the Kau Desert outflows from the rift cracks kept pace
with the lowering of Halemaumau lava. This means that the ring of
Halemaumau’s rock wall is in two pieces, divided by the rift dikes
trending northeast-southwest, and that the tilting over upward pressure
from below is not radial but is northwest and southeast. Wilson’s
leveling results that showed the whole mountain swelling up were based
on isolated benchmarks relative to sea level, and this swelling was
probably unsymmetrical, just as the southwest rift and the eastern rift
of the Chain of Craters make a bend in plan and are unsymmetrical. The
mountain is not a uniform elliptical dome.
I have said that the decade of the 1930’s was a time of culmination
for Kilauea. It was also a period of financial depression and stress
for all of us. The Volcano House burned down, the new hotel was placed
on the Observatory site, and the Observatory administration barely
survived. The Hawaiian Volcano Research Association did much to keep
the Observatory alive, but one year we all went on half pay. By dint
of this half-pay episode and because everybody insisted that volcano
records must not be permitted to lapse, the Secretary of the Interior
transferred the Observatory in 1935 to the better financed National
Park Service.
With Wingate as superintendent of Hawaii National Park, we were assured
of loyal support and were able to combine scientific aims with National
Park activities. Thus, the Volcano Observatory regained its status.
We were also assisted by the publication of the economic success of
the Mauna Loa bombing, in face of the threat to Hilo which involved
some 51 million dollars of buildings and harbor. This threat Wingate
and I studied carefully in the light of history, and we succeeded in
getting $10,000 from Congress for an investigation by U.S. Engineers
of the possibility of a construction to protect Hilo from a disastrous
lava flow. Colonel Bermel appointed civil engineer Belcher to Hilo,
and Belcher worked for a year in 1938 on my design of a lava diversion
channel and earthworks, to extend for seven miles from the Wailuku
River gorge above Hilo to the airport.
This was to take care of another such lava flow as that of 1881 by
deflecting it with the natural valleys southward from the congested
district. A critical design was made of the channel, the height of the
obstruction, and the openings needed for waterways and public roads.
The plan was not to block the passage of lava, but merely to deflect it
by means of an artificial barrier to channel it downhill. This would
send it along the natural grades, diagonally forcing a lava stream away
from the business district, the harbor, the factories, and the airport.
The design was approved by a reviewing board in Washington as effective
for the purpose intended. However, with this project went a redesign
of Hilo breakwater and a plan for dredging the harbor which took into
consideration the possibility of a severe tidal wave. Unfortunately the
appropriation estimate was considered too large and was turned down in
Washington. When the great tidal wave came in 1946 it proved that such
an extended breakwater attached to the northern shore of Hilo harbor
would have lessened the terrible destruction and loss of life.
A diversion in the lives of Mrs. Jaggar and myself was an invitation in
1936 from the Royal Society of London, to go to Montserrat in the West
Indies where for three years they had been having bad earthquakes. Sir
Gerald Lenox-Conyngham, whom we had met at the Japan congress, wrote
me asking for my help because Montserrat’s dormant hot volcano was
making excessive hydrogen sulfide gas at its two solfataras. The smell
sickened and alarmed the inhabitants of the port of Plymouth, and the
gas was blackening the paint of white steamships. The earthquakes had
come in spasms culminating in big damage to masonry from 1934 onward.
Perret had flown over from Martinique and tried to help by applying
sound theories to prediction of seasonal tidal controls of the volcano,
but he was scoffed at as a voodoo soothsayer by a British Navy captain.
The scientific commission appointed was Dr. C. F. Powell of Bristol,
now Nobel Prize physicist, and Dr. A. G. MacGregor of the Geological
Survey, besides Dr. Lenox-Conyngham, formerly Director of the Geodetic
Survey of India. Dr. Powell used adaptations of my shock recorder, both
horizontal and vertical, built by the Kew Observatory. Designs had been
obtained from instruments I sent to Dr. Marsden in New Zealand, after
the Napier earthquake.
When I received the invitation to go to Montserrat, I packed up such
instruments as I could find, and telephoned Mrs. Jaggar in Honolulu
to be ready to go with me to Los Angeles the following Saturday. She
was always ready to act as secretary on a new adventure, and with much
bustle and scramble we packed her things. Later I joined her at the
steamer, a Danish freighter which was to take us through the Canal to
the Caribbean. Boarding as we did on such short notice, we were given
a steward’s room in the bowels of the ship; but we had the run of the
first cabin. It was a delightful trip through Panama and Jamaica, both
of which I was happy to see again, twenty-six years after my 1910
experience with the canal engineers. Great changes had been wrought,
and it was a thrill to see the ship pulled through step-up after
step-up of canal locks, by the “iron mules” of that marvelous machinery.
We left the delightful freighter people at Charlotte Amalie in the
Virgin Islands where we stayed at Blue Beard’s Castle. After a wait of
some days, we got a small Dutch island freighter to go to Montserrat.
We stopped at St. Martin, an astonishing place, French at one end
and Dutch at the other, with practically no custom house to mark the
boundary, though the wines and the language changed in the middle of
the island.
Saba is a startling extinct volcano rising as a steep rocky cone
directly from the water, with no harbor but a stop opposite a gully
that leads up to the crater. After landing in small boats, we climbed
up the gulch to the settlement, a picturesque place, with masonry
houses and many flowers, where the government is Dutch but all talk
English, and its history goes back to the buccaneers. The village is on
a flat in the lowest part of a cup crater, the top of our climb, but
the name of the settlement is The Bottoms.
Our little ship joined the main line of the leeward volcanoes at
St. Kitts, where we made connections for Antigua and Montserrat.
In Montserrat we stayed with Miss Gillie at the Rainbow House and
joined the Englishman Powell and the Scot MacGregor. I met Perret at
Antigua, and we compared notes on the similarity of the earthquakes
and the rotten-egg smell (sulfuretted hydrogen) at Montserrat to the
eruptions of Pelée in Martinique, where these phenomena were followed
by explosions and lava. The Montserrat authorities justly feared what
was coming.
Perret had for two years kept track of events at Montserrat in relation
to equinox and solstice. He had built a hut there at the dangerous
solfatara near town, had made an instrument shelter with a thermograph,
and on a pedestal close to a nearby residence had set up an ingenious
earthquake accumulator, which had recorded at the end of twenty-four
hours the total expenditure of seismic energy in each direction. As
there were hundreds of strong shocks, the instruments recorded total
seismic energy per day and its dominant direction.
I found that Powell had set up my shock recorders among volunteers on
the island, and a seismograph at the agricultural station. A new form
of the Jaggar shock recorder had the weight attached to horizontal flat
springs so as to oscillate up and down. I was especially pleased with
the earthquake records kept by a Mr. English living in the countryside.
Assisted by his wife, he had carefully listed the times and intensities
of hundreds of shocks, with notes on important events.
Much help was furnished by the Agricultural Experiment Station, which
provided an assistant to take us to many geologic places and to the
second solfatara, consisting of hot springs and sulfur in a southern
valley of the volcano. The volcano of Montserrat is at the south end of
the island, while the northern part consists of older hills. The summit
crater is a remote and inaccessible forested area among peaks. The
volcano is much like Pelée in size and appearance.
We were allowed to take a steamer to St. Vincent and Barbados, stopping
at Dominica. There the Governor kindly entertained us for a few hours,
sending the government launch and driving us up the valley on a fête
day when the negro women were all in picturesque costume. We saw
his summer place with lovely gardens. We had tea with his wife, and
I discussed with him the earthquake problem. On the drive we saw a
remarkable cliff of hexagonal columns, some of them curved like a fan,
representing the old lavas of Dominica.
The administrative problems of the British islands involved not only
hurricanes and earthquakes, but tactful handling of the dominant negro,
Carib Indian, and mulatto population, which is very ticklish, for there
have been riots and labor troubles. I was astonished in several of
the islands to learn that distinguished Englishmen in government and
planter classes were partly colored. In the society club of Montserrat
we met a leading lawyer who was coal black, and we saw London-educated
negroes dancing with English girls. We found the same customs in St.
Vincent, and to a much lesser extent, in Barbados.
In St. Vincent Mr. Abbot, MacDonald’s secretary, took us to see my
old friend T. M. MacDonald the planter, at Chateau Belair on the west
side of Soufrière, where Hovey, Curtis, and I had climbed in 1902. We
traveled up the west coast by automobile, and saw one of the primitive
sugar mills, where the juice is boiled down to a syrup to be shipped
to lumber mills in Canada. Nothing could be in greater contrast to
the modern sugar factories in Hawaii, and the negro labor gives the
industry an entirely different aspect. To get to Chateau Belair we had
to motor up a canyon far into the interior, around hairpin turns over
vertical cliffs and along a narrow ridge, and then return to shore
on the other side of the valley. We rode along the beach under the
volcano, and saw the rehabilitated Richmond plantation, with the west
flank of Soufrière Volcano under heavy clouds. Owing to torrents of
rain, we had to make part of the return to Kingstown in a rowboat.
Later we drove over an excellent road up the east shore to Georgetown,
and beyond that on the foot of the volcano slope, where a group of
plantations had been purchased after the eruption of 1902 by Mr.
Barnard, who with his charming wife, entertained us. Hundreds of acres
of coconut trees, arrowroot, and sugar cane had replaced the utter
devastation of 1902. Barnard showed us a modern still for making rum
from sugar cane, and I was astonished to see that the product is just
as clear as alcohol, the rum color being artificial. We rode horseback
most of the way to the crater of Soufrière, over a trail through
forests and across streams, very different from hiking in horrible
desolation and fog up bare ridges covered with volcanic bombs, such as
Hovey and Curtis and I had encountered on this same slope at the time
of the eruptions.
The trail still followed knife-edge divides with perilous slopes on
both sides of the path, but now concealed with mountain growth. We rode
nearly to the edge of the crater, now a very different picture, with
a large lake only a few hundred feet below, as it had been before the
eruption of 1902. Two sturdy native women coming from Chateau Belair
appeared with baskets of fruit on their heads, tramping a 3,000 foot
height to deliver their goods to Georgetown on the east side of the
island. This is an old story for these straight-backed natives, and
these treks across mountains were equally characteristic of the creoles
in Martinique and the northern islands. These people would spend the
night near their market on the opposite side of the islands.
In Kingstown we were shown the elaborate process by which arrowroot is
made into edible starch, the powdery product being critically graded by
delicate shades of color. This corm, which makes inconspicuous fields
of low growing pointed _Canna_ leaves and small white flowers, is
quite different from the cassava, or manioc, which I had known on my
first visits to the West Indies. Arrowroot has been developed by the
agricultural experiment stations of the British, who for many years
searched for a new commercial product. The St. Vincent arrowroot is
now a major industry which has spread to the other islands and is
cultivated by small planters.
In the volcano islands I interviewed government people to call
attention to the crisis in Montserrat, using it as an illustration
of the need at the numerous vents for the development of observatory
methods, particularly in geology, chemistry, oceanography, and
seismology, including measurements of ground surface movements and
tilt. I had recommended this for Martinique and St. Vincent in 1902;
and Perret, with some support by the French government, had gone to
live in St. Pierre and make a museum, stimulated by the Pelée outbreak
of 1929. So far as geophysics is concerned, the governments of St.
Vincent and Jamaica have gone to sleep since the volcano disaster of
1902 and the earthquake building reforms of 1907. It is discouraging
to a scientist to know that the science of economic geophysics and
geography in such a magnificent field as the West Indian volcanoes has
to be awakened by such disasters as were now occurring in Montserrat,
with no forecasting at all. The whole Montserrat episode was like our
unforeseen Hualalai earthquakes of 1929, and in both places my shock
recorder was called in to help.
We went on to Barbados, a flat non-seismic land, where in 1902 I had
interviewed the _Roraima_ victims. We returned by way of St.
Lucia, where we drove to the solfatara, which as usual is in a valley
with sulfur and hot springs, near sea level, and not in a crater.
We returned to Montserrat, where the earthquakes and bad gases
had died down after 1936. The investigations of the Commission
(Lenox-Conyngham made his visit after I left), came to publication in
Powell and MacGregor’s reports on the seismic analysis and the geology.
I sent in a report with photographs and charts on the whole chain of
volcanoes, in relation to the Montserrat crisis, by comparison with
other volcanoes. Lenox-Conyngham wrote an article for _Nature_.
MacGregor later published a critical analysis of modern data on the
probabilities of eruption in all of the West Indian volcanoes. Perret
published a large monograph on Montserrat, illustrated with his
beautiful photographs.
We passed Martinique by sea, and I saw the huge pile of lava the 1929
eruption had added, to make an entirely new summit to Mount Pelée.
Vegetation and habitation had reappeared at St. Pierre, but the
mountain was bare.
We returned to Hawaii by way of Bermuda, Boston, and Washington, where
the temperature was hotter than we had felt in the tropics. Reviewing
the journey, I was encouraged to perceive that geology had changed a
great deal since the struggle that Hovey and I, after our experience at
Mount Pelée, had had to make geological societies realize that changes
in the field must be constantly measured. The real obstacles to getting
field measurements permanently manned as pure science are lack of money
and the fashions of education. Perret and I have been two isolated
enthusiasts crying in the wilderness.
Any young scientist with photographic skill who will give his life
to living with and reporting upon a single volcano group can make a
great contribution to science. He must have suitable financial backers
and a publication agency and instruments not dependent upon frequent
eruptions. What volcano science needs most is permanent dwellers, using
all the resources of sensitive geophysics and chemistry and dwelling
close to craters or solfataras. Such lands as the Taupo District of
New Zealand are ideal, but not when observed at a distance. Wairaki is
now under investigation for commercial power. Hilo is being critically
examined for a lava diversion scheme. But these projects are not what
I mean, and are not pure science. The personal devotion of a lifetime,
as in the cases of Pasteur or Schweitzer, is what produces the emergent
evolution of true science.
I have called this chapter Prophecy and Hope because of six fruitful
prognostications and hope for the future of volcanology. Of the
prognostications, one was the threat to Hilo which came true in 1934.
Two, the forecast to the effect that bombing would stop a lava flow
came true. Three, the belief that a volcano observatory would be
productive of instruments came true. Four, the prediction of danger
to Hilo produced definite defensive plans by U.S. Engineers. Five,
predictions of time and place of Mauna Loa outbreaks, seismically and
historically proved practical. Six, the prediction of Kilauea sinking
lava, based on sinking at Mauna Loa, had repeatedly been fulfilled.
When my government service as Volcanologist ended in 1940 and R. H.
Finch had been appointed my successor, substantial recognition of
the Observatory had come from Washington, New Zealand, and Great
Britain. Great help had come from Presidents Arthur L. Dean and
David L. Crawford of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and new
assistance came from President Gregg M. Sinclair. This was to lead to
my employment by the University as Research Associate in 1940. Thus
I was to continue, during the next decade, the publishing of Volcano
Observatory results.
Over and over again Hawaiian volcanology demonstrated the need of
advertisement, occasionally reaching such men as Everett Morss, M.I.T.
trustee in Boston; Lorin Thurston, business leader in Honolulu;
Henderson, Washington financier, for our borings; and Cramton, leader
of Congress. The Volcano Research Association in Honolulu is a devoted
group of businessmen keeping up a small fund of $6,000 per annum,
trivial compared to the big laboratories of commerce and astronomy. A
pure science of volcanology, with world-wide laboratories is now needed
to catch the eye and ear of imaginative men of business. Friedlaender
in Naples, Perret on Mount Pelée, and Omori in Tokyo almost created
enough imaginative stimulus to real exploration of volcanoes and of the
inner earth. They were battered down by natural catastrophe and by wars.
The 1940’s were enriched by three good friends Vern Hinkley, Stanley
Porteus, and Frank Rieber; respectively journalist, psychologist, and
physicist-inventor. They all took a keen interest in my writing and
mechanical inventions, and Hinkley assisted in the Observatory work
during the explosive eruption and wrote “that was the top experience of
my newspaper career.”
Hinkley, who had edited the _Hilo Tribune Herald_, became managing
editor of the _Honolulu Star-Bulletin_ and published a series
of my radio addresses on Kilauea. He also sent his photographer to
photograph our laboratories, thereby keeping the public informed about
volcano study. And he worked up a history of my navy monographs and
hardness testing instruments. He was a lovable fellow whose publicity
instinct was a great asset to volcano science. He did not think of a
volcano as something sensational, but remained moderate about it and
informed his public accurately. Through him, the Volcano Observatory
reports came to be accepted as desirable routine, and he was elected
a director of the Volcano Research Association. His many friends were
desolated by his early and sudden death.
Porteus is an Australian man of science who conducted expeditions
among the Australian blacks and the primitive Africans of Kalihari and
specialized in the mental outlook of primitive peoples. He devised a
famous maze for intelligence tests. He has published numerous books
about Hawaii and several novels, including “Restless voyage,” the life
of Archibald Campbell, who lived with Kamehameha the great and survived
amputation of both legs.
With Guido Giacometti, who suggested airplane bombing of the volcano
lava flows, Porteus and I foregathered at the crater frequently to
discuss the constitution of earth interior. Porteus differed with
my belief on the evolution of mind as a mutation of evolution. Like
Hinkley he became a member of the Board of Directors of our Research
Association. He is a judge of the juvenile court, skilled in curing
delinquency. Porteus is a world thinker, who agrees with me in thinking
of altruism as a form of energy. Porteus invented the title of this
present book.
Rieber started from the University of California where he became
interested in making an echo from underground strata to locate oil. He
moved to Los Angeles, where his father was a professor of classical
languages and a college dean. Frank invented a complex recording
seismograph carried on a motor truck, wherewith he set off explosive
bombs and registered echo earthquakes from every important underground
layer. These layers identified oil-bearing strata, so that the marks
on a revolving drum practically mapped a section underground for
a guide to oil drilling. He moved to New York and established war
inventions, among them phonograph disks for repeating whole conferences
of many talkers. He founded Geovision Ltd., a company which greatly
abbreviated the scanning of echoes for subterranean mapping. Then he
died suddenly, like Hinkley, in the full flower of a brilliant mind.
Rieber and I corresponded for years on invention gadgets, comparing
notes by letters, and meeting all too rarely. To me he was one of
our most productive physicists, always inspiring. He was convinced
that discovery of petroleum will endlessly increase and will become
automatic. He and I looked downward into the shell of the globe.
This decade I devoted primarily to writing and publication, some of
the writing voluminous and still unpublished. In 1941 I moved into an
office in Hawaii Hall of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. My paper
work consisted primarily in completing, revising, and illustrating a
memoir on “Origin and development of craters,” in cooperation with the
Geological Society of America. The censor chosen by the Society was Dr.
Howel Williams of the University of California, who cordially endorsed
the book.
The Society subscribed $350 from its Penrose Fund to assist with
drafting and clerical work on the substantial results of our
observations of Hawaiian craters in the twentieth century. The
groundwork had long been laid, for beginning under Alexander Agassiz at
the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge and during my visit to
Vesuvius in 1906, I planned a book on volcanology. Later, in 1910 after
careful study of the work of Dana, Hitchcock, and Brigham on Hawaiian
volcanoes, I started analysis of Kilauea Volcano in the nineteenth
century. Thus this one large volume with photogravures, maps, and
diagrams covers the history of observations and conclusions from
Hawaiian Volcano Observatory work for thirty years.
My thesis is that there must be some order in time and space for what
is obviously 1,700 miles of submarine volcanic upbuilding in the
Hawaiian chain. Active volcanoes are hot and erupting in Hawaii; sunken
ones are covered with coral at Midway Island; and intermediate ones,
half coral and half lava, are in the middle of the chain. Disregarding
the ocean water, all of these are gigantic mountains below sea level.
On the island of Hawaii I found symmetry, which I called “The cross of
Hawaii” in an address to the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce in 1912. I
noted that Mauna Kea forms the top of a cross on the map; the upright
extends along the southwest rift of Mauna Loa, and two symmetrical
curved arms extend to Hualalai summit and Kilauea summit. The lava
flows from Mauna Loa north and south arrange themselves symmetrically
about this design, with every evidence that Mauna Loa dome was piled
up in a spoon underlaid by Hualalai, Mauna Kea, and Kilauea. It is
obvious on the map that Mauna Loa upbuilding was obstructed by grandpa
Mauna Kea and that it has been forced off to the southwest by the two
daughters, to build the elongate point of the island. Kilauea is old on
the Haleakala, Kohala, Kea line; and Hualalai is old on a right angle
line at Kea.
From my training in physiography under W. M. Davis of Harvard, I was
convinced when I first saw Hawaii and studied the books about it that
downward faulting toward the sea bottom, of sliding island blocks, is
conspicuous. It shows in the V-shaped fracture of Haleakala Crater,
a broken sector, and in the straight fracture of the north half of
Molokai volcano, leaving the mighty cliffs there. It shows in the
eastern half of Kohala volcano leaving the fault facets and hanging
valleys of Waimanu, and in the Mohokea embayment of the southeast
end of Mauna Loa. The embayment shows evidence of the breakdown of
an ancient crater as described by Hitchcock. Moreover, Kilauea, Wood
Valley, Mohokea, and Waiohinu amphitheater are four old calderas of
faulting in a line. This seemed to me confirmed by the down-faulted
steps of the southeast side of Kilauea Mountain, and the observed
down-breaking there of the shoreline during earthquakes. This, in 1868,
drowned coconut trees below the sea and caused big earthquakes on a
submerged fault in 1868 and 1952.
Such action was further confirmed by our experience of a down-faulted
block during earthquakes at Kapoho in April 1924, before Halemaumau
exploded, confirming the view that the active volcanoes break downward
in slices along shorelines, even when they swell upward around craters.
Harold Stearns always combatted the idea of faulting and made Mohokea,
Haleakala, and Waipio erosion forms; but this I cannot accept.
The logic to the effect that in the long and large the old volcanoes
from Hawaii to Midway have been on slices of the earth’s crust faulted
downward below sea level through the ages seems incontrovertible. The
fault planes are diagonals across the main volcanic rift trend and make
the channels between the islands at an angle in plan to the trend of
the island chain. These channels are very deep. All of this philosophy
developed in my mind before I came to Hawaii.
Also I thought that the origin of life might have been from volcanic
gas, owing to the prominence of carbon dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen,
sulfur, and nitrogen, all ingredients of both protein and volcanoes.
I put this up to R. T. Jackson, who taught me phylogeny when I was
studying fossils and he was studying genetics. Knowing the sulfurous
quality of an egg yolk, I asked him if it wasn’t possible that as
evolution goes back behind the embryo, we should find volcanic traces
chemically. Phylogeny means that the history of the embryo reenacts the
history of the race, and I merely extended this back to the inorganic.
I was laughed at for carrying biological origin back to gases of
volcanoes; but Shepherd and I collected gases from flaming Kilauea
lava, and found the five elemental constituents: carbon, oxygen,
nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. These also make up the aminoacids
of protein, so my philosophy of origin still seemed to me to be
reasonable. Volcanoes erupted through the ocean, and life came out of
the unexplored deeps of the sea.
Thus in 1910 I began a book on craters which came to fruition in a
Memoir of the Geological Society. This was not published until 1947,
but I was working on it, drawing the diagrams, dictating the typescript
to Sato, and selecting for illustration the best of our photographs
during the thirties.
One of the diagrams shows eleven-year cycles, beginning with 1790
and ending with 1935. I adopted this after finding in Hitchcock a
tabulation for Halemaumau, indicating big lowerings of lava in 1790,
1823, 1855, and 1891, to which we added 1924 from our own experience.
These were approximately thirty-three years apart, as I found when I
plotted the data on a curve of Hitchcock’s table. Taking other major
sinkings as punctuation points--such as the outflows and collapse
of Halemaumau in 1832, 1840, 1868, and 1931--there developed a
correspondence in the subsidence times treated as repose periods, with
the years having the least numbers of sunspots at average intervals of
11.1 years. The intervening times of maxima of sunspots all occurred in
the intermediate times of rising lava.
The curve as a whole from 1823 to 1924 shows a notable crest from
1855 to 1890, and a crest of the greatest volume of Mauna Loa gushing
occurred between 1855 and 1877. Stearns and Macdonald object to this
diagram as not showing all the little intermediate events, but what I
have taken are the actual peaks and depressions above sea level and
those which correspond to the sunspot interval of 11.1 years. This is
an average even for sunspots, which had long intervals at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, a time when no reports were made for Kilauea.
I have guessed a drop of Kilauea lava as dating from about A. D. 1800,
corresponding to the notable expulsion of Mauna Loa lava through
Hualalai, and an imaginary unreported lowering eleven years thereafter,
as it is improbable the island was wholly dead in the first twenty
years of the century. The explosive eruptions of 1790 certainly
produced a big collapse at Kilauea.
My faith in this diagram is based on the fact that our own eruption
sinkings at eleven year intervals (1902, 1913, 1924, and 1935) agree
so well with an eleven-year theory that we are justified in looking
backward for eleven year averages. Perret has found intervals of about
a decade for Vesuvius. All my experience of Hawaiian lava leads to the
belief, shown by our lava tides and several short-term diagrams, that
rhythmic periods of a volcanic system are related to gravitational
control of the sun and moon. There are rhythmic controls of the globe
by the gravitational control of the sun and moon. There are rhythmic
controls of the globe by the sun, and rhythmic controls of very deep
volcanic cracks by the globe, and rhythmic controls of individual
groups of volcanoes by the long volcanic chains over cracks. Our
experimental data are limited by the little groups of volcanoes, and so
the big rhythmic movements seem inaccessible to science, mostly because
we have no record of relationships of single volcanoes 500 miles apart
in such a place as Alaska.
We raise no question about night and day or about the oceanic tides or
about the moon’s phases. We know there is a rock tide in the earth,
that there is a hot earth core of about 2200° Centigrade which appears
to seismology to be a very massive liquid 1,800 miles down. Gravitation
is the controlling force of the solar system, the galaxy and the
universe, and it works by rhythms, from the orbits of the planets in
years, to the outermost spiral nebulae in millions of centuries. We
are ourselves controlled by it in locomotion and in the circulation of
the blood. Therefore to think of volcanoes as anything but periodic
and gravitational in their relation to the globe would, to me, make
the science of volcanoes entirely uninteresting. All science lives on
rhythmic action.
A second manuscript entitled “Steamblast eruptions,” was based on
Mount Pelée in Martinique and a comparison with the 1924 steamblast of
Kilauea. This last had conclusively shown outflow under the sea, and
inflow of groundwater, to change lava surging to blasts from a steam
boiler. A paper published in 1940 was a study of the gas collections
from flaming basalt on Kilauea and Mauna Loa, made by E. S. Shepherd
and me. In this I plotted curves of relative excellence of collection
in relation to the amount of the volcanic gases, in contrast to the
non-volcanic aqueous and oceanic gases. These latter, notably water
vapor, decreased in proportion to the manipulative excellence of the
handling of vacuum tubes; and the volcanic gases increased, notably
hydrogen and the carbon gases. This convinced me that the deep gas of
volcanoes is hydrogen, associated with carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
In this decade, too, war brought new demands on my time and experience
and had its effect on the Kilauea Observatory. Major James Snedeker of
the Marine Corps, legal officer for the Commanding General in Honolulu,
having heard of our experience with motorcar amphibians, told me that
the Pacific Ocean war would depend on amphibian landing craft. And a
letter from Admiral Bloch urged me to send to the Navy details of our
experience with amphibians. As this involved geology of beaches around
the Pacific Ocean, I set to work on twelve monographs for the Navy
dealing with the mechanism of amphibians and the problems they posed on
beaches in Hawaii, Puget Sound, and Alaska. Other subjects about which
I supplied information were the inflammability of Japanese buildings
in the Tokyo earthquake, the handling of earthquake and volcano
catastrophes and our material from journals on many places of volcanic
danger in the Pacific.
Then W. H. Hammond, physicist in charge of a testing laboratory at
Pearl Harbor, suggested that I revive my 1897–1908 testing of steel for
abrasion hardness, later continued by Boynton, for his laboratory of
the Navy. Thus I started hardness testing at the University and carried
it on for ten years. I used diamond and other abrasives in instruments
to show directly on a dial the rate of wear of metals or minerals under
standardized conditions, with a constant and reproducible motor tool.
Abrasion hardness turned out to be as tricky a problem as my range
finders and shock recorders. This activity brought together in the
University laboratory and in the laboratory at Hawaii National Park
many records, manuscripts, and specimens. Ruth Baker, who succeeded
Sato as secretary, did valiant work sorting out materials from many
expeditions which had been dumped in disorder because of war and fire
at the Kilauea Observatory. Though the Park had built a new house for
naturalists, and for the seismographs, shops, and records, it was
taken over by the Commanding General on Hawaii, imposing considerable
hardship on Finch and his assistants. One assistant was Burton
Loucks, instrument maker, who married Miss Baker. Another, Austin
Jones the seismologist, was transferred to care for seismographs
set up to measure faulting and tilt around Boulder Dam. Dr. Howard
Powers, after work for the Geological Survey and the Territory on the
island of Maui, joined Jones eventually to enter into a new section
of volcanology, established in Denver under the Geological Survey,
especially to assist the Army and Navy studies of Aleutian volcanic
eruptions, wherefrom harbors and airfields were sometimes endangered.
[Illustration: _27. Fountain in Halemaumau lava lake, May 23,
1917_]
[Illustration: _28. Rare dome fountain during eruption of
Kilauea Crater, March 20, 1921_]
[Illustration: _29. Lava stream issuing from a spatter cone
near rim of Halemaumau, February 9, 1921_]
Three events of volcanic and seismic importance to Hawaii during the
1940’s were the eruptions of Mauna Loa in 1940 and 1942 and the 1946
tidal wave caused by a submarine earthquake south of Unalaska. The
wave engulfed the wharves and shorefronts of Hilo and eastern Maui and
caused considerable damage elsewhere.
We were familiar with the recording by our seismographs of earthquake
centers under the sea of Alaska and Japan, and with the interval of
hours that followed before dangerous water waves reached Hawaiian
shores. We had also had a bad tidal wave in Kona, originating off
Japan; and two or three such waves which damaged Kahului and Hilo had
originated in big submarine earthquakes off the Alaskan Peninsula. The
Japanese fishermen, from our published warnings, always took their
sampans to deep water, and the Navy had instructed me to let them know
right away if the seismographs recorded a distant earthquake capable of
making a tidal wave.
I earlier had had one unhappy experience with warning the Navy, when
we registered a seismogram of a big earthquake in Alaska, which if
submarine, would send us a tidal wave. I notified Pearl Harbor of the
probable time of arrival of the wave, should the quake be submarine. It
happened a big Army and Navy dinner party at Waikiki was set for just
that time, but orders went out calling officers back to their posts and
the party was disrupted. No tidal wave came, as the earthquake proved
to be on the mainland of Alaska. The newspapers unmercifully jeered at
me, but the Commanding Admiral told me not to change my policy.
The 1946 wave was very large and the water rose in pulsations until it
swept away the railroad bridge and washed out the whole waterfront of
Hilo. The earthquake seismogram came at 2 A.M. when no one
was watching, and the water wave at 8 A.M. came just when the
Observatory workers went on duty. When the flood of ocean destroyed the
Hilo breakwater and leaped over it to damage the principal wharves,
many people were drowned. Considerable damage was done on Oahu and
Maui. The disaster came when Dr. F. P. Shepard, oceanographer of La
Jolla, was occupying a summer cottage on the north shore of Oahu; and
he was delighted to experience a big tidal wave. Collaborating with
geologists in Hawaii, Shepard compiled a most thorough report on height
of waves in all bays of the Territory. Seismographs and tide gauges got
to work all around the Pacific Ocean, the place on the sea bottom which
had jolted was exactly located, and the Coast Survey and Navy started
far-reaching precautions for predicting against future combinations of
earthquake and water. This included seismographs that ring alarm bells
at night. The object of science is always prediction and assisting
humanity; and the need is always for more men.
Another significant event of 1947 was the visit of Hans Pettersson of
the Oceanographic Institute of Sweden who was conducting an expedition
which followed the path of the _Challenger_. The object of the
project was to study the oceanography of the sea bottom around the
equator. Thus Pettersson was enthusiastic about my paper in _Natural
History_ and its emphasis on studying sea bottoms. With him was
inventor Kullenberg who had made a device for boring into the mud of
the sea bottom and taking longer cores than had been dug previously.
His apparatus consisted of a core barrel, tripped with valves close
to the sea bottom under a heavy weight, which would allow it to sink
sixty feet in suitable bottom ooze while the core rose inside the pipe
without being compressed.
Pettersson had a skilled staff consisting of biologist, physicist,
chemist, and geologist; and they had laboratories on board the
_Albatross_ for study of the collected bottom materials. They
also took echo data of explosions near sea bottom, giving depths of
soft materials over hard rock. This place of transition was found to
be shallower under the Pacific Ocean than under the Atlantic. They
discovered hard lava flows in many places between Tahiti and Hawaii
and under the Indian Ocean, indicating extensive submarine volcanic
eruption. An attempt was made to measure the temperature of a core,
and this suggested that the bottom of the boring was warmer than the
top, meaning a thermal gradient of sea bottom. A core of volcanic
agglomerate was obtained in the deep trench opposite the East Indies.
It was during this period that President Gregg Sinclair of the
University of Hawaii urged a plan for geophysics of the Pacific, and
Professor R. W. Hiatt of that institution succeeded in advancing
interest in organic oceanography. I wrote an appeal, based on such work
as that of Pettersson, Perret, and others urging the Regents of the
University to plan a large geophysical institute in Hawaii, to make a
science of the rock bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Thousands of soundings made in the Gulf of Alaska and in the central
Pacific had shown seamounts, or guyots, shaped like high volcanoes on
the sea floor, some of them with flat tops, but having characteristics
of ancient isolated volcanoes. New soundings revealed mountain
ranges on the sea floor, probably volcanic, one of them right across
the middle of the Hawaiian chain. No one had yet discovered fiery
eruption in deep water, but oceanographers were beginning to use
boring machines, cameras, electric lights, and devices for determining
radioactivity of the muds. As sea bottom occupies three-quarters of the
globe, it is inconceivable, when compared with the continents, that
it has no hot solfataras, hot springs, and hot volcanoes. In fact,
we know some of the latter in shallow water. It is only a question
of scientific organization to locate the sources of Pettersson’s
submarine lava flows. President Sinclair took to the chiefs of the
Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations a proposal for a five million
dollar Geophysical Institute at the University of Hawaii, to utilize
the advantages of its central Pacific position.
As for my own experiments, my Department of Volcanology at the
University was moved into a concrete basement room a thousand square
feet in area in the Home Economics building, and the expense was shared
with the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. Here I had office and
shop and collections of the Research Association, and the assistance
of a secretary and a junior researcher who is an instrument maker.
Thus were assembled in a fire resistant location my petrographic and
mineral collections from Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and
the Pacific lands, together with manuscripts from my days of Harvard
and Massachusetts Tech to the middle of the century and classified
accumulations of my Navy monographs, lantern slides, negatives,
photographs, maps, drawings, correspondence, and instruments, including
material obtained by the Research Association for experiments still
continuing on the hardness of minerals.
One objective of this hardness measurement was an instrument for
machine shops which would give in half a minute the length of a
standard scratch made by a standard dental disk of silicon carbide.
I called this the “Jaggar Scratch Tester” and Mr. Paul Rushforth, a
Honolulu optician, made improved models of the instrument. When a
book was published on the experiments with some three hundred woods,
minerals, metals, and plastics, Dr. Grodzinski of the commercial
diamond establishments in London became interested and reproduced
the paper in a review dealing with industrial diamonds, which have
become of great importance in the world of grinding machinery. This
made a new contact with England, similar to that made by Boynton with
my microsclerometer in 1908, when he applied it to the microscopic
constituents of steel under the British Iron and Steel Institute. I
sent a copy of my new report to the Pearl Harbor industrial laboratory,
along with one of the instruments. Endorsers of this report were Mr. W.
H. Hammond and Dr. Earl Ingerson, director of the mineral laboratories
of the U.S. Geological Survey.
A result of the experiments on hardness is the knowledge that the
important quality is softness, or abradability, and speed of removal
of material in any uniform mechanical cutting process. It was formerly
thought that the big intervals in values were between the hard
substances. It turns out that the biggest gaps in value are in soft
substances like coals and clays and plasters. Hardness is purely a
negative quality of resistance, and measurements are of yielding, not
of resisting.
Other experiments on which I worked dealt with location of the Zenith
in the sky for quick determination of latitude and longitude from stars
and telescopic studies of the moon, an old hobby of my master, Shaler.
I have long been convinced that Kilauea lava resembles moon lava in
the craters it builds, and my special interest is that Mauna Loa and
Kilauea build structures of basalt, small and large, which are earth
experiments imitating the moon on a smaller scale. The astronomers
say their field is the stars, the geologists must explain the moon.
As a matter of fact, one geologist has made a start. My classmate
J. E. Spurr, who after retirement to Florida from work as U.S.
Geological Survey geologist among the faults and lavas of the far West,
published books on the comparison of the moon with geology. In view
of increasing attempts to explain moon craters by impact (Baldwin), I
feel that experienced volcanologists should also take a hand in moon
science. Larger arcs of circles on the globe, the Aleutian Islands for
instance, resemble moon features and are deeply volcanic. Furthermore,
magnificent detailed photographs of the moon from modern telescopes
are available to volcanology.
I spent my summers at Hawaii National Park, becoming consulting
geophysicist. Dr. Chester K. Wentworth of the Board of Water Supply
became geologist. The laboratories were extended to a seismograph
station seven miles up the northeast flank of Mauna Loa, but operation
of the original cellar adjacent to the Volcano House was continued.
A basement under the Natural History building of the Park held
seismographs, Finch’s office and library, and Loucks’ shop.
In 1948 Observatory work was returned to the administration of the
Geological Survey, and a volcanologic branch in Denver took over Dr.
Powers to make airplane studies of the Aleutian Islands. This was under
Mr. Walter Frederick Hunt, in charge of geology, U.S. Geological Survey.
When Hawaii National Park was reorganized, Frank Oberhansley,
superintendent, the Natural History building was adopted as Park
Headquarters, and the Uwekahuna buildings, with their magnificent
view in all directions, were reconstructed as the Hawaiian Volcano
Observatory. A new seismograph cellar was dug, away from disturbances
of Uwekahuna cliff, and modern instruments were installed. Mr. John
Forbes became assistant machinist; and on Mr. Finch’s retirement in
1951, Dr. Gordon Macdonald became volcanologist in charge. C. K.
Wentworth moved from Honolulu to the National Park region and took
charge of magnetic measurement, which had been established at numerous
stations by physicists of the Geological Survey. During past decades
physicists and chemists had visited the Observatory, among them
Dr. Stanley Ballard, who equipped the laboratories with a Gaertner
spectrograph; Dr. Harvey White of Berkeley, who found no radioactivity
in Hawaiian lavas; and Dr. J. J. Naughton, who found a critical isotope
of carbon in the emanations of Sulphur Bank. Modern chemistry was
beginning to be applied to volcanology in the field, and this was what
Hovey, Perret, and I hoped for fifty years ago. So much for dry facts
of organization.
In 1949 the summit crater of Mauna Loa erupted, with fracture and
outflow of its south end toward Kona. This was followed in 1950 by
lengthy rupture of the southwest rift with the most voluminous and
rapid outflows of history, three of them going into the ocean and
wreaking destruction in South Kona.
The sequence of these outflows was from high sources first, with others
opening farther south, and the most conspicuous flows following the
steep Kona slope into the ocean, beginning at Hookena. Macdonald and
National Park naturalists photographed and recorded everything. The old
Hookena post office on the upper road at the home of the veteran Mr.
Lincoln was carried away, and this occasioned much drama, for the old
man didn’t wish to leave his home. The next house destroyed, an old
landmark, was the Magoon Ranch. The third was the attractive and modern
Ohia Lodge, a resort built of native logs in the wilderness.
A separate large flow forked away from the rift, to the eastern side
of the mountain, reaching the lowest landward elevation in the forest
of Kahuku, and short flows spilled over the southwest rift on the east
side.
Several persons approached the flows in South Kona from the ocean.
The early photographs of the first flows, where the hard sprouts and
boulders of stiff aa partially cooled entered the ocean, showed big
columns of vapor from contact with sea water. Not so with the third
flow farthest south, explored from a canoe by Jack Matsumoto and a
companion, equipped with motion picture cameras. The pictures were good
color photographs, and the torrent of lava flowed down a steep bank
of its own substance, hemmed in by hardened ridges at the sides, the
stream intensely liquid and flowing directly into the ocean.
The result was most remarkable. The yellow liquid lava went into the
salt water without making any column of steam at all; the sea bottom
simply received it with its rush downward, the water boiling superhot,
and the lava taking the water vapor into itself. The phenomenon was not
due to the rising of dry steam, for there was no condensation cloud
above. Scientists explained it by assuming a shell of lava making a
tunnel under the ocean, with the crust ending just at sea level.
Such a submarine arch was definitely not present, for the waves surged
back and forth and, Matsumoto states, there was no sign of a submerged
reef. The motion picture bears this out. What was probably going on
is what happens to slag in a patented process of the steel mills,
where the glow liquid is flowed over a perforated surface emitting
hundreds of water jets, and the melt at 1300° Centigrade absorbs the
water without making visible steam. The slag turns into a myriad of
microscopic glassy spheres, becoming a kind of pumice. A peculiarity
of this substance is that if it is cooled at 700° Centigrade it will
pass a critical point and give up the absorbed water with explosive
effects. It seems likely that Matsumoto’s golden torrent sweeping
into the ocean was so excessively hot that it took up the water and
continued to flow down the sea bottom as a water-charged product. The
snapping and crackling effects, and the submarine earthquakes, making
localized tidal waves such as those noted in 1919 when such a torrent
entered the sea, may be due to the explosive cooling when the slag
gives up its water.
The use of color motion pictures is one of the many improvements
owed to modern science, and the mapping of lava flows by airplane
photography. This gave Macdonald a new weapon for surveying the volume
accumulation at the time of the 1950 outflows, for from air photographs
he got exact outlines of the flows. These, checked against calculated
thicknesses, gave him volumes which could be compared with volumes of
older flows proportionate to areas. These calculations showed that
nothing since 1868 has yielded such large volumes of lava, per days of
outflow.
Mrs. Jaggar and I were returning to Hawaii from a trip to Nova Scotia,
and the Matson steamer _Lurline_ took us to the Kona coast toward
the end of the 1950 eruption, for inspection of the glowing flows late
at night. They looked like hot coals extending far up the mountainside
under the clouds, with occasional bright flares where trees burst into
flame. Visible motion there was none, as we were too late for the
rapid flowing and too far away to see detailed motion. This eruption
resembled the voluminous flow of Mauna Loa in 1868, from a low vent
at the south end of the mountain, and lasted only a short time after
preliminary summit outbursts. The similarity was a big earthquake
series, and this was to happen again in Kona in 1951. The cataclysmal
opening of the southwest rift in the nineteenth century eruption
followed a quarter century of northern outflows, those from 1843 to
1859. Next came those from 1929 to 1952 in the twentieth century. The
1929 earthquakes subterraneously began the northern series.
The same argument applies to the twenty-six years of summit and
southern outflows, from 1903 to 1929, which followed a quarter century
of alternations north and south. None of this takes account of all the
summit crater outbreaks, the hinge line between the jostlings of the
north and south rift sectors. Roughly the whole argument centers about
a supposed rocking of the Mauna Loa mountain sectors, northward and
southward from the crater. The two rifts become stiff and seal up for
twenty-five years, and then break open for a new period of looseness.
The summit well is somehow full always.
A remarkable event, namely repose of Kilauea for eighteen years
after 1934, may be another reaction. The previous excitement was
the buildup, collapse, and recovery of the mountain for the quarter
century preceding 1934, with its culmination the steam blast in 1924 of
underground water, the dormancy of Kilauea beginning ten years later.
Kilauea in 1790 had a bigger explosive eruption, and was in repose for
eighteen years beginning ten years thereafter, namely in 1800. Thus
it seems likely that Kilauea executes quarter centuries of crisis in
its own right. These times are not exact, but are approximations of
scientific search for order in a big machine, the Hawaiian volcanic
system, where rhythmic pulsations exist wherever gravity operates. A
third of a century may prove more exact than the estimate of a quarter
century.
The end of this 1940 decade completes a half century of my experience
of volcanoes and earthquakes, dwelling with a single crater, and
learning that volcanoes and earthquakes are tied together. They appear
tied to deep ruptures 2,000 miles long, in the thick shell of the earth
over a white hot liquid core.
I have recently started an experiment with a thick globe of cement,
made with a shell, proportional in thickness to the earth’s crust,
which is 1,800 miles deep, as all seismologists agree. Striking this
shell with a sledge hammer, I find it breaks in straight lines at
right angles to each other. Theory is bound to be influenced by the
observational answers derived from watching lava emerging from the
mountain rifts, at the end of the long straight belt of rifts of the
whole Hawaiian chain.
I continually review my own geological muddles, the controversies over
steam, flames, volcano swelling, explosion craters, layers in the
crust, weighting and underflowing, continental uplift, the globe’s
armor plate, contraction wrinkling of basins of sediment, submarine
volcanoes, linear chains of volcanoes, siliceous shell, blocks lifted
or sunk, planets solar or from the sun’s binary twin, original heat or
radioactive heat, thick crust or thin shell, lava reservoirs or lava
core, pregeology ancestors of volcanoes, and craters on the moon. The
only way to calculate from observations on Hawaiian volcanoes is to
copy the mathematicians; namely, to guess at the answers.
CHAPTER VII
Envoi
“_Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll round us
Each with different powers and other forms of life than ours._”
I have spent sixty years in qualitative experiments in geology. I began
with old volcanoes and geysers in the Yellowstone and the far west,
and ended with experiments on the active Hawaiian volcano, Kilauea.
Based on these experiments, I have written books about evolution of
craters, and about distinct peculiarities of explosive eruptions from
underground water.
The accusation that I am not orthodox in professional geology is false.
Professional geology is largely continental because its field work has
been on continents. My work has been oceanic; my field, seventy percent
of the earth’s surface, extending over a thick crust down to the earth
core. The earth core is fluid and massive and hot, as all geology
agrees. Isostasy, which postulates a thin flexible shell, is violated
by the ocean deeps and the volcanic ridges. Volcanic rift echelons like
the Cordillera and the Hawaiian ridge are too long to be generated as
the fracture of a crust fifty miles deep. The circularity and graduated
size in linear stretches of the Pacific arcs are functions of a
fractured thick-shell sphere. Similar gradation of arcs is on the lunar
surface. Arguments, based on the knowledge of meteors, for an iron core
and for large lunar craters are without analogy. Substratum theories,
from Stübel to Daly, do not agree with oceanic volcanism. Gravitational
crust balance applies better to a primitive thick fault block crust
than to a thin shell. Earth lavas, as natural experimental models,
imitate lunar features on small and large scales. Both make consistent
history for two similar globes. Volcanology has to stand as global and
ancient, and any geologist may accept the reasonings here enumerated
without being unorthodox.
The unquestioned certainties of modern seismology, the transmission of
elastic waves through the globe to sensitive recording pendulums,
are that the crust is 1,800 miles thick, that the core is a heavy ball
of white hot fluid, and that its temperature at crustal contact has
been estimated by Verhoogen at 2200° Centigrade. The deep crust is less
dense than the core, and is commonly conceded to be basic heavy rock
not unlike stony meteorites. The outside shell under oceans, and over
three-quarters of the earth, is covered by basaltic lava, and wherever
igneous rock has been formed by volcanic action, intrusive or extrusive
black basic lava recurs as dikes and outflows.
[Illustration:
ARMOR PLATE AT OCEANS
ARMOR PLATE AT CONTINENTS
EXTERIOR OF FUNDAMENTAL GLOBE TO WHICH ADJUSTMENT
TENDS
CORE LIMIT TO WHICH ADJUSTMENT TENDS
VOLC. OCEAN CHAINS OF OCEAN VOLCANOES
VOLC. CONT. CHAINS OF CONTINENTAL BORDER VOLCANOES
ON THE PAGE OPPOSITE _is a diagram of a hypothetical
globe section near the equator, showing oceans and continents
in true surface ratio; fault block segments of rigid crust
isostatically supported on a liquid core; sixteen volcanic
partitions, oceanic and continental; and Stübel’s “armorplate”
from pristine volcanic eruption. Possibly the profile is
tetrahedral. My argument for this globe section is based on the
following_:
A globe of core, siliceous shell, and armorplate was formed by
primitive volcanic eruptions.
The shell resulted from external aggregation of solids and gases
and internal segregation about a molten core.
The fault blocks came from shrinkage of the shell over a liquid
core, adjusted by luni-solar gravitation and rotation through
the pre-geologic ages.
The continental and oceanic boundaries of the fault blocks were
determined by elevated and sunken blocks with core volcanism of
escaping gas melting walls and laying down an exterior siliceous
armorplate on the earliest solidified globe. This in continents
is the seismologists’ lighter exterior layer underlaid by denser
rock at the armorplate bottom.
Continental volcanism (VOLC.-CONT.) became differentiated from
oceanic volcanism, by light atmospheric pressure over the raised
blocks and much greater water pressure over three-quarters of
the earth, the sunken blocks.
The subdivision is represented in the diagrammatic section on
the globe by three-quarters of the section being ocean, namely
twelve-sixteenths.
The section shows twelve-sixteenths as sunken blocks,
four-sixteenths as raised blocks. The four sixteenths by the
tetrahedral hypothesis of Lowthian Green and Michel-Lévy make
the four continental protuberances.
Twelve-sixteenths of the surface is broken by fundamental rifts
of irregular shapes, some of them north-south, controlled by
centrifugal stresses and corresponding to the north-south deeps
and heaps and known rifts. These have persisted since the first
volcanism of primitive time.
Circum-continental volcanism is represented on the diagram by
VOLC.-CONT., oceanic volcanism is represented by VOLC.-OCEAN.
Both are shown as interblock rifts, adjusted through the
ages (exaggerated on the drawing) and always tensional over
expansional core pressure, with exothermal heating agencies.
The sixteen fundamental block boundaries correspond
approximately to sixteen fundamental volcanic fault blocks known
vaguely on the globe. Something similar is known on the moon.
The rifts are the boundaries of sixteen blocks, some polyhedral,
some elongate. Some are oceanic like New Zealand-Tonga, some
are ancient and continental like Arabia. The imperfectly
mapped ocean deeps are boundary lines. The rifts of Africa and
Chile-Patagonia are boundary lines. The great arcs of Himalaya,
Java-Sumatra, and Aleutian ridges are boundary lines of circular
blocks. Possibly they were circular calderas of engulfment on
the primitive spheroid. The edge of Mare Imbrium on the moon
shows fault rifts. The straight alignment of lunar calderas
hints at moon rifts under an unmapped mosaic. The blocks of the
theory of continental drift, are guesses at a mosaic of crust
blocks. But the possibility drift theory omitted is that the
blocks are deep. Except for the Lowthian Green, Wegener, Holmes,
and Daly speculations, based on thin crust blocks of continents,
no mapping of the shell mosaic exists. It is not feasible until
we map the detail of ocean bottoms. Primitive blocks require
acceptance of a thick crust and justify new speculation. The
cracks between blocks are the volcanic partitions of the earth,
which I call ignisepts.
There are many points for speculation, some of them subject
to mathematical inquiry. Does surface water penetrate the
partitions? Is it high pressure and saline under oceans? How
do deep earthquakes stem from friction 300 miles down under
the Cordillera and the west Pacific? Do earth and moon spheres
as rounded tetrahedra crack similarly? Because of rotation
are north-south cracks dominant? Are the core fluids changing
volcanism through the ages?]
The twenty-eight percent of earth surface which lies above the sea in
continents is made up of siliceous sediments of shallow water basins,
with quartz as the dominant mineral, their strata wrinkled, and eroded
into mountain ranges. Desert and lake or river bottoms make up most of
the remainder. This material, when ancient, was changed by heat and
infiltration into what are called gneisses, schists, and granites; and
the process of granitization is among the metamorphic processes. It
is a process of deep burial, heat, gases, and water which has always
been a puzzle, and may affect ancient volcanic lavas wherever they
have covered the land. It is a process of solution of silica, and its
deposition is by steam and other vapors.
In the same way volcanic action by the outpouring of lava through
cracks is a process of solution of the deeper crust of the earth by hot
gases, largely burning hydrogen. Lavas emerging from Etna or Mauna Loa
are melted earth crust, dissolved and brought up by this same hydrogen
and by other gases from the walls of profound cracks leading down to
the earth core. Volcanism and metamorphism are thus the same process,
namely the action of gases up cracks through deep earth crust. But
metamorphism acts on continental sediments, whereas modern volcano
eruption acts through sea bottom and sea shore faulting, very ancient
features of the earth and distinct from continents. In Hawaii no
metamorphic rock fragments have been found.
Such primitive oceanic fault fissures extend under continents remnant
from the time of evolution of continents. They bring up the metamorphic
hot gases, which in siliceous sediments, make granites and gneisses and
schists with the aid of groundwater. Geology has no knowledge whatever
of whether this metamorphic process affects the hard rock under the
oceanic muds, because geology has never collected a piece of that rock.
Geology however knows inclusions and explosive fragments from oceanic
volcanoes, and it does not find there granite and gneiss and schist.
However, generalization does not apply to continental volcanoes like
those of Italy and Africa.
The beginning of fossils on continents is commonly considered to have
been 500 million years ago, and this may be extended another 1,500
million years for the most ancient identifiable continental rocks,
and an estimated total thickness of 120,000 feet to the bottom of the
most ancient sediments on earth. We know nothing of thickness of most
ancient volcanic deposits under the oceanic mud.
This brings us to the great German explorer Stübel, who mapped
volcanoes of the Andes, founded a museum of his work in Leipzig, and
published monographs on the Andes. He wrote a final book, including
material on Mount Pelée, on the “genetic differences of volcanic
mountains.” But such modern continentalists as Daly and Bucher in
America have disregarded Stübel. Daly is the authority on a shallow
earth shell and substratum of basalt, and Bucher of Columbia University
is a specialist on continental sediments and granitization.
The point is that Stübel made a profound generalization which nobody
has proved wrong. The earth is at least 3,000 million years old, and
when oceanic fault blocks sank and received condensing atmospheric
water and continental fault blocks remained high and became eroded,
there was already a thick shell of volcanic lavas. For volcanism
was the most ancient process on the earth’s surface. It had always
brought gases up cracks from the core, making atmosphere, water, and
extrusions. Stübel, called the extrusive shell on the outside of the
primitive crust the globe’s armorplate. The primal gas escape, whatever
the ancestral turbulence inside, had to come up cracks and make
volcanic deposits. It is commonly presumed that the very thick inside
crust formed rapidly by cooling and solidifying from outside the core
inward, and from inside the atmosphere outward. The latter surface
was eventually under water cooling over most of the earth and under
air cooling over the small continental area, a marked difference of
temperature and pressure for the two areas.
Seismometry teaches that most of the crust is of fairly uniform
density. Therefore, presumably, a thick crust was arrived at early.
There was obviously a time of conflict between the weighting of the
crust by its heavier accumulations next to the core, by its lighter
accumulations exteriorly under water and air, and finally by its
external armor plate of unknown comparative weight, made of volcanic
lava. For all we know, this might have been volcanic pumice. Rapidity
of crust thickening is speculative.
Right here there is an element of mystery in speculation as to which
has to accommodate comparison with the moon, the merging of atmospheric
condensation with volcanism, and the merging of suboceanic condensation
of lava with pristine eruption. This is too hard a nut to crack, in
our current ignorance of rock under sea bottom muds. But Stübel’s
insistence on a coating of lava armor plate over both continents and
sea bottoms as the earlier volcanism, and an external veneer on the
earth, is unavoidable. If it were all basalt like the present oceanic
volcanoes, we should find basalt in continents underneath the granites.
We do not do so. If it were all light weight granitizing by segregation
of silica, we should find commonly granite and obsidian fragments
within oceanic lavas. We do not do so. We have to conclude then that
our sections, topographic and geologic, do not go deep enough. And
as for the ocean bottoms, we have no sections at all. But Stübel was
right. An unknown volcanic eruption period had to precede geologic
volcanoes.
The question of ancient greenstones in Africa, Scandinavia, and Canada
is much discussed, for there were old volcanic lavas in many places;
mixed with gneisses, schists, and granites. They were not a deep
layer, but presumed to be ancient remnants of interspersed lavas among
sediments. They are one more evidence that volcanic eruption goes
back to the time of the most ancient rocks on continents and that its
lavas were affected by metamorphism. But no continuous deep stratum of
greenstones is known. At depths of fifty miles, under continents only,
is the Mohorovicic change to denser rock. This is an echo surface in
earthquake waves, but it is absent over the whole Pacific. It may be
the top of the armor plate.
Justice Holmes wrote that the Constitution of the United States
was an experiment. That all law of the nation works salvation by
prophecy based on experiment. The experiments were extended to the
Bill of Rights and all the amendments to the Constitution. I feel
that geology--in view of its extreme ignorance of submarine rocks,
ores, metals, oils, spring waters, temperatures, magnetism, gravity,
and gases for most of the earth--needs a bill of rights and numerous
amendments to its constitution. Its salvation by prophecy needs to
be based on experiments with instruments, drill rigs, and anchored
laboratories in this vast area. These experiments, superficially,
have been conducted by oceanographic sampling of bottom materials, by
gravity pendulums operated in submarines, by cameras on sea bottoms,
and collections of bottom waters, by tests of radioactivity of
bottom materials, by echo sounding to determine thickness of muds,
by volcanology on oceanic islands, by topographic surveying of the
bottom, and by all the excellent work of the oceanographic and geologic
stations and their seismographs, with some studies of marine chemistry,
physics, and biology. The conclusions in this book amount to only one
small prophecy based on experiments with volcanoes. But the rock under
deep ocean mud is still uncollected.
My volcano experiments are not influenced by any consensus of text
books. I was educated on textbook opinions and found geologic science
deficient in experimental measurement of the field progress of
erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption. I expended most of
my teaching in a plea for field observatories of time measurement of
these four processes. The plea has done some good, and in this century
we have seen grow up the International Geophysical Union. Experiment
stations have multiplied, to make geophysics and geochemistry pure
quantitative sciences. But they are generally commercial and have not
extended to deep boring under oceans.
While working from volcano observatories for the extension of geology
in Alaska, Japan, Hawaii, Tonga, the Caribbean and Italy, and on the
mainland of California, Central America, and New Zealand, I have found
myself on the outskirts of vast oceans, engaged in a science almost as
unsatisfactory as the textbook science of historical and continental
geology. It is always a compromise, for we are up against a crying need
for maps of the bedrock under the muds of the vast oceans. Volcanism
cries out for a knowledge of the globe, and it is helped by such work
as that of Gutenberg and Richter. These men compiled critical maps of
earthquakes, measured by elastic theory the world over. Their work
necessarily made many contacts with volcanoes. The same may be said
of the geophysical summaries of gravity, magnetism, climatology,
hydrology, and oceanography. But all our sciences stop at the immense
sea bottoms, and need salvation through experiment.
Science is not doing all it can. Finances and engineering are competent
to contact sea bottom directly with expensive machines not yet invented
and to create oceanic rock science. Offshore boring for oil is not
enough. Pure science needs an example by financiers like Carnegie and
Rockefeller who are not seeking profit. Engineering advice positively
can reach under the few hundred feet of mud, find the rock, and bore
into it in 2,000 fathoms. The first man who does it will open a
new frontier. All honor to Shepard, Ewing, Piggot, Pettersson, and
Kullenberg, men who have barely broken ground in this science. The
whole of volcanology depends on collecting the crustal rock under the
mud.
Hoyle’s book “The Nature of the Universe” takes us one step farther.
It shows that all science is essentially cosmology, and science deals
with the origin and progress of all nature. I would go farther than the
universe. I would include the science of life and of our brains. We
need an imaginative picture starting with the outer universe. We end on
the earth with volcanoes and the birth of life.
Hoyle and Lyttleton of Cambridge have presented a condensation of
current astrophysics, which includes earth, moon, and planets; sun
and stars; origin and future of stars; and origin of solar systems. A
most gratifying conclusion is that the background material of space
creates hydrogen. This is proved by precise mathematical equations.
This accounts for the expanding universe under the pressure of such
creation. The outermost nebulae continually pass beyond the speed of
light. The galaxies move out into infinite space endlessly. They are
renovated endlessly by gravitation from hydrogen eternally created.
The sun, by knowledge built up from the days of Jeans and Eddington,
contains more than ninety percent of hydrogen, and the small remainder
is helium, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and iron. It maintains its surface
temperature by nuclear reactions from within outward, at a rate
suitable to make helium out of hydrogen, so as to compensate for the
energy which the sun radiates.
This dominance of hydrogen inside the solar star makes it impossible
that the earth should be solar. Rather, it was a product of a companion
star, a supernova which exploded and, with excessive heat, created
elements atomically. The sun was a binary pair of stars, and the
companion occupied the place of the four greater planets. The remnant
body, after explosion, moved away.
A gaseous ring formed around the sun condensing from many molecules
to rotating superplanets. These broke up many hundred million years
ago into Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Small blobs escaped to
become the inner planets including the earth. The earth captured small
solids and acquired the moon as a satellite. It got radioactive matter
exteriorly, plus nitrogen, water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
There is a hundred times more hydrogen per unit of mass in the sun than
in the planets. Its supply will last for 50,000 million years. The
solar system is tunneling through variable interstellar gas. It picks
up more or less material, and so changes climates occasionally. This
makes such episodes as the ice ages on earth. Lyttleton estimates that
the dust clouds encountered form bundles of particles captured by the
sun to make comets.
The mathematics of the interior of the sun, applied by Bethe to the use
of carbon and nitrogen as catalysts and changing hydrogen to helium, is
a model of experimentation. It should be imitated to explain Hawaiian
basalt. The core of the earth produces gas reactions up cracks. The
gases act on deep crust. The surface product is olivine basalt.
What are the reactions between gas and crust to make Mauna Loa foam
fountains? This problem has not been tackled. Geologists have clung to
a theory of shallow reservoirs.
The astronomers of Cambridge, successors of the American experimenter
George Ellery Hale and of Eddington and Jeans, are not the final word
in cosmology. There will be a final word. The picture created from
background material to gas, from gas to galaxies, and from galaxies to
solar systems ends for us in our planet with a white hot liquid core.
Nuclear reactions created this from the superheat of an exploding
supernova. Our erupting volcanoes are the end product. We can sit
beside erupting lava fountains and watch hydrogen flames, the same gas
that was made of the background material in the universe.
All this is outcome of gravitation. It extends from the first eddies of
hydrogen in outer space to the final rotation of the earth. The final
hydrogen, with carbon, made life on the earth. The five elements of
volcanic gas are identical with the five elements of organic chemistry.
Dr. Hoyle mistakenly concludes that we have no clue to our own fate.
But he points out that the universe is continuous creation. Our picture
is one instant of time in an everlasting now. Mind is an everlasting
unit beyond which we cannot go.
It is illogical to pay any attention to existence after death unless
we pay equal attention to existence before birth. All is continuous
creation. The making of hydrogen is just as true within the creation
of life as within the universe. Life is under gravitation. Gravitation
controls the instantaneous moving picture, even the emergence of life
from volcanic gases under enormous water pressure at sea bottom. It
is just as much subject to experiment as the outer boundary of the
universe.
Life is an end product; and it thinks, worships, and experiments.
Treating life and volcanoes as end products of Hoyle’s universe makes
science fundamentally cosmology.
One final comment, after looking at sea bottom eruptions through all
the ages. Continental life came out of the sea, and original life comes
continually from the earth core. This gives new dignity to the future
search for global action on the sea bottom.
The “emergent evolution” of Lloyd Morgan makes much of mutation as
accounting for progress from unconscious life to consciousness,
consciousness to memory, memory to reasoning, and reasoning to
spirituality. Each one of these is a new mutation, in the same sense as
a new fruit by Burbank. The first unconscious life may be considered
a mutation from the inorganic of the globe. The totally unknown
pressure-temperature conditions of volcanic eruption through the
cracking earth of ocean bottom, and the ground waters under the ocean,
lend a final dignity to exploration of that frontier.
Hoyle writes that the ultimate goal of the New Cosmology is continuous
creation in outer space. The ultimate goal of the New Volcanology is
continuous creation in oceanic depths.
INDEX
A
=aa=, 54, 67, 78, 104, 121, 124, 125, 129, 148, 174
Abbot, 159
Absaroka Range, 8
Adak Harbor, 141
Adams, C. E., 110
Africa, 181, 182
Agassiz, Alexander, 20, 25, 55, 65, 72, 164
Agassiz Museum, 17, 19
Aghileen Pinnacles, 140
Agricultural Experiment Station, Kodiak, 138
Agua cone, 81
Akutan Island, 154
Alaska, 30–31, 55, 72–75, 81, 82, 84, 110, 114, 117, 127, 137–145,
154, 169, 172, 173, 183
-- expeditions to, 55, 72–75, 84, 138
Alaska Commercial Company, 141
Albatross (ship), 170
Aleutian arc, 82
Aleutian eruptions, 169
Aleutian Geographical Observatory, 142
Aleutian Islands, 55, 75, 84, 110, 114, 127, 137–145, 154, 172, 173
-- expeditions to, 55, 72–75, 84, 138
Aleutian trench, 31
Alfaro, Anastasio, 79
Algonkian, 28
Allen, E. H., 12, 112, 115, 129
Alps, the, 103, 116
Alyea, Hubert, 5
Amazon River, 82
Amchitka Island, 141
Amerada Company, 112
American Journal of Science, 113
American Museum, 56
American Relief Committee, 63
amphibian vehicles, 74, 138, 142–143, 168
Anderson, C. A., 137
Anderson, J., 111
Anderson, Tempest, xii, 65, 71, 76, 84
Anderson, the cook, 8
Andes, the, 78, 82, 116, 181
Andrews, E. C., 112
Angaha, 147–149
Antigua, 157
Appalachian basin, 50, 52
Appalachian Mountains, 18, 46–49, 51–52, 116
Archean granites, 8
Arizona, 25–28
arrowroot, 160
Asama Volcano, 78, 107–108
Asama-Bandai system, 108
Ascutney Mountain, 7, 40, 53
Asia, mountain ranges of, 117
Aso Volcano, 108
astronomy, 6, 30, 147–150, 172–173, 184–185
Atka, 72, 75
Atlantic Ocean, 53, 170
-- deeps of, 53
Attu, 140–141
Auckland, 109–110
Audubon, J. J., 3, 4
Australia, 132, 163
-- science congress in, 132
B
Bad Lands of South Dakota, 23, 24, 37–38
Baker, Ruth, 155, 168, 169
Baker Island, 135–136
Baldwin, R. G., 172
Ballard, Stanley S., 173
Ballou, Howard M., 91
Bandai Volcano, 42–43, 45, 106–108, 110
Barbados, 61–62, 158, 160
Barnard, Mr. and Mrs., 159
Barrios, 81
Barton, G., 18
Bartrum, J. A., 110
Barus, Carl, 54
bat, giant, 149
Bay of Plenty, 110
bear hunts, 72, 139–140, 143
Beecher, C., 19
Belcher, ...., 156
Belize, 79
Bellingham, Wash., 143–144
Bergen, 12
Bergson, H., xii
Bering Sea, 74, 140
Berkshire Hills, 46
Bermel, Colonel, 156
Bermuda, 161
Bernhardt, Sarah, 5
Berry, Robert, 56
Bethe, H. A., 185
Big Horn expedition, 8
Bingham, Hiram, 147
Bird, Isabella, 91
birds, 135, 141, 148–149
-- gannets, 135
-- goonies, 135
-- malau, 148–149
-- man-of-war, 135
-- murres, 141
-- terns, 135
Birdseye, Claude H., 89, 111, 129–130
Bishop Estate, 89
Bishop Museum, 135
Black Forest, 14
Black Growler, 10
Black Hills, xii, 21, 22, 23–25, 28, 46–47, 78
-- surveys of (1898, 1899), 23–25
Bloch, C. C., 168
Blue Beard’s Castle, 157
Blue Hill, Mass., 77
Bluff, the, 134
Bogoslof, 74, 75, 78, 110, 140–141
-- eruption of 1907, 75, 141
Bohemia, 14
Boiling Lake, 11
boiling lake, 80
boiling springs, 40, 42
bombing of Mauna Loa, 153–154, 161
Bonin Islands, 109
Boscotrecase, 65–68
Boshu Peninsula, 133
Boston, 16–17, 19, 37, 43, 56, 77, 85, 91, 161
-- mapping of, 16–17
Bottoms, the, 157
Boulder Dam, 169
Boutwell, John Mason, 21–22, 24
Bowie, William, 112
Boynton, H. C., 19, 168, 172
Boyrie, W., 142
Bradford, Alex, 138, 142
Bradshaw Mountains, 25–28
Brazil, 40
Brigg, J. J., 65
Brigham, W. T., 91, 164
Bright Angel fault, 30
Bristol Bay, 140
Brock, R. W., 14
Brontotherium, 24
Brooklyn, 56
Brooks, Alfred, 18
Brown, E. W., 100
Brown, William Garrott, 20
Brun, Albert, 88, 92
Brush, G. J., 21
Bucher, W., 181
Bund, Yokohama, 132
Burkland, Albert, 89, 111, 129
C
Cache Creek, 11
California, 39, 89, 103, 110, 111–113, 114–116, 136–137, 154
-- University of, 89, 137
-- volcanoes, 136
California Institute of Technology, 111
Calumet and Hecla, copper company, 72
Camiquin Island, 76
Cambrian, 6, 9, 22, 23, 28
-- fossils, 22
-- shales and limestones, 23
Cambridge, Mass., 164
Campbell, Archibald, 163
Canada, 6, 136, 182
Canadian Rockies, 23
Canary Islands, 131
Canna (arrowroot), 160
Canoe Bay, 142
Cape Nome, 141
Carib cones, 71
Caribbean Sea, 79, 117, 157, 183
-- expeditions to, 55
-- islands of, 55–65, 67, 76, 108
Carribee line, 66
Carisso (ship), 150
Carnegie, Andrew, 184
Carnegie Institution, 78, 86, 90, 111, 112
-- Geophysical Laboratory of, 76, 86, 111
Carnegie Palace, Costa Rica, 79
Cartago earthquake of 1910, 78–84
Cartago expedition, 84
Cartwright, Bruce, 135
Cascade Mountains, xii, 82, 136
catastrophes, 55–84, 103–106, 132–134, 156
Catskills, 43
Central America, 55, 78–84
-- expedition to, 55
Chadron Formation, 22
Chain of Craters, 118, 125, 154–155
Challenger (ship), 170
Charleston, 43, 45, 103
-- earthquake, 43, 45
Charlotte Amalie, 157
Chateau Belair, W. I., 59, 61, 159
Chernofski village, 141
Cherry Island, 103
Chicago, 72
Chicago Natural History Museum, 24
Chilean coastal plain, 82
Chilton, C., 112
China, rivers of, 41
Chourré, ...., 122
Christchurch College, 110
Christiansand, Norway, 12
Christophersen, Erling, 135
Chugul, 141
Church, Dr., 57
Cincinnati, 53
Cincinnati arch, 50
clams, 135
Clark, W. O., 111
Clive, ...., 11
Coal Measures, 28
Coan, Titus, 91
Coast Survey, 137, 170
-- station at Sitka, 137
Cody, Frank, 73, 123
Colby, F. T., 72–73
Collins, George, 135
Colorado, 28, 169, 173
Colorado River, 26, 38
Comstock Lode, 18
Congresses, 12, 112, 132, 134
-- Australia Science, 132
-- Hawaii, 112
-- Japan, 134
-- London Geography, 12
-- Pacific Science, 112, 134
-- Zurich Geological, 12
Connecticut River, 7
Constitution, U. S., 182
continental divide, 36
continental mediterranean sea, 22, 53
continental volcanoes, 181
Cook Channel, 109
Cook Strait, 110
Cooke, C. Montague, 135
Cooke, Joshiah, 5
copra, 148–149
coral islets, 135
Cordillera, 21, 49, 67, 78–84, 137, 177
Cosequina, 80
cosmology, 185–186
Costa Rica, 55, 79, 80, 108
-- earthquake, 55
-- rocky mountains of, 55
Costa Rica-Mexico line, 108
Cotton, C. A., 110
crabs, 149
Cramton, Louis C., 114, 136, 162
Crandall Creek mining claim, 8
crater lake, 80
Crawford, David L., 162
Croney, J. E., 63
Crooks Canyon, 26
Crooks Complex, 26–27
Crosby, W. O., 18, 72
cross-country cars, 131–132, 138
Crusoe, Robinson, 120
Culebra Cut, 82
Curtis, G. C., 56, 59, 159
Curzon, G. N., 12
Custer, G. A., 8
D
Daly, R. A., 7, 9, 18, 92, 177–181
Dana, Edward, 113
Dana, James D., 21, 91, 113, 116, 164
Darton, N. H., 21, 22
Darwin, C. R., 6
Darwin, George, 4, 32
Daubrée, A., 16, 30
Davis, W. M., 7, 16, 40, 165
Day, A. L., 12, 86, 92, 112, 115, 124
De Candolle, C., 4, 35
de Vis-Norton, L. W., 111
Deadwood, 23–25
Dean, Arthur L., 162
Death Gulch, 11–12
deformation, 32, 76
deltas, leaf, 43
Denmark, 12
Denver, 169, 173
Devil’s Tower, 23, 25
Diamond Head, 122
Dillingham, Walter F., 114
disasters, 55–84, 103–106, 111, 132–134, 156
Dixie (ship), 56–59
Dodge, Francis, 90
Doelter, C., 16, 53
Dominica, 11, 66, 158
Dominion Museum, 109
Dorsey, E. W., 43
Dranga, Ted, 135–136
Drexel Institute, 73
Dunedin, 109–110
Dutch Harbor, 72, 74, 141, 144
Dutton, C. E., 7, 29–30, 48, 116
E
Eakle, A. S., 72–74
Earhart, Amelia, 125
earth core, 185
earth crust theory, 115–117
earthquake centers, 169
earthquake frequency, 131
earthquakes, 30–31, 45, 55–84, 92, 103–106, 111, 114, 132–134, 137,
145–147, 154–165, 168–169
-- Cartago, 80
-- Charleston, 43, 45
-- Costa Rica, 55
-- Hawaii, 145–147
-- Kapoho, 154, 165
-- Kingston, 83–84
-- Messina, 55, 71
-- Montserrat, 156–161
-- Napier, 45, 111
-- Sakurajima, 103–106
-- San Francisco, xii, 45, 55, 134, 137
-- Tokyo, 103, 114, 132–134, 168
-- Valparaiso, 55
-- Yakutat Bay, 30–31, 37, 45
East Indies, 170
Eastman Kodak Company, 91
eclipse of sun, 147–150
Ecuador, 78
Eddington, A. A., 5, 184–185
Eddy, Johnny, 62
Eggleston, Julius W., 17
Einstein, Albert, 5
“elevation craters”, 131
Eliot, C. W., 18, 55, 63
Emden (ship), 140
Emerson, Oliver, 54, 100, 123, 129
Emmons, Delos C., 153
Emmons, Samuel Franklin, xi, 21, 22
English, T. S., 158
English Channel, 34
English strata, 21
Eocene Tertiary, 46
erosion, 10, 30, 32, 38, 43, 48, 76
-- model, 43
eruption cycles, 166–167
eruption index, 77
eruptions, 32, 45, 55–84, 120–125, 130–131, 169, 173–176
-- Alaska, 75, 141, 169
-- Halemaumau, 120–124, 130–131
-- Irazu, 79–80
-- Mauna Loa, 125, 173–176
-- Lassen, 136
-- Pelée, 45, 56–65, 71
-- Tarumai, 77–78
-- Vesuvius, 65–72
Europe, mountain ranges of, 117
Europe, study in, 12–16
evolution, 6, 116, 186
-- theory of, 6
Ewing, M., 184
expeditions, 55–84, 103–111, 114, 132–150, 154–161
-- Alaska, 55, 72–75, 84, 114, 138, 143, 154
-- Cartago, 84
-- Howland and Baker, 135–136
-- Japan, 55, 77–78, 84, 104–109, 114, 132–134
-- Kilauea-Tarumai, 84
-- Martinique, 55–65, 156–161
-- Montserrat, 161
-- New Zealand, 103, 109–111
-- Niuafoou, 114, 147–150
-- Pelée-Soufrière, 55–65, 84, 156–161
-- Tokyo, 114
-- Vesuvius, 55, 65–72, 84
experiments, 4–5, 17, 32–54, 76, 78, 85–113, 125–132, 138, 142–143,
154–156, 168, 171–173, 176–177, 182–186
-- field, 76, 85–113
-- laboratory, 4–5, 32–54, 168, 171–172
F
Falcon Island, 110
Faraday, M., 16, 29
faulting, 28–29
Ficus, 60
field experiments, 76, 85–113
field work, 7–12, 21–31, 55–84, 138, 142–143, 177
Fiji, 147
Finch, R. H., 99, 120–121, 132, 136–137, 144, 154, 162, 168, 173
Firehole River, 39
Flett, J. S., 76
“floating islands”, 92, 96
flying fox, 149
Foerster, Captain, 140
folding, model of, 50–52
foot prints in lava, 120
Forbes, John, 173
Fort de France, 56
Fortieth Parallel Survey, 8, 22, 25
fossa magna, 109
fossils, 181
Fouqué, F., 16, 53
Frank Landslip, the, 45
Franklin, Benjamin, 71
Frear, Walter F., 89
Freiberg, 14
Friedlaender, I., 76, 103, 162
Fujiyama, 81, 109, 134–135
fumaroles, 11–12, 62, 65, 68, 80, 108, 129, 156, 158, 160
Futu, 147, 149
G
gannets, 135
Gardner, John, 139–142
gas-heat theory, 59
Geikie, Archibald, xi, 12, 116
Geodetic Survey of India, 157
Geological Congress, Zurich, 12
Geological Society of America, 76, 164, 166
Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, 12
Geological Survey, U. S., 17–22, 50, 54–56, 64, 89–90, 111–114,
129–131, 136–138, 142, 154, 157, 169, 172–173
Geophysical Laboratory, Wash. D. C., 112
Georgetown, W. I., 159–160
Geovision Ltd., 163
Germany, 12–16
geyser basins, 10
geysers, 9, 39–40, 42, 48
-- as eroders, 39–40
geyser-spring experiments, 41
Geyserville, 112, 137
Giacometti, Guido, 153, 163
giant bat, 149
Giant’s Causeway, 23
Gilbert, Grove Karl, 7, 64
Gillie, Miss, ...., 157
glacial periods, 6, 10, 45
glaciers, 44, 48
Glass Mountain, 136
Goethals, General, 82
Goldschmidt, Victor M., 14, 16
Goodrich, ...., 18
goonies, 135
Gordon-Cumming, C., 91
Göteborg, 13
Grabau, Amadeus, 17
Grand Canyon, 24, 26, 28–30, 37
-- model of, 30, 38
Grand Hotel, Japan, 132–133
Grange, L. I., 111
granitization, 181
Grant, Willie, 3
gravitation, 185–186
Great Britain, 12, 162
-- Geological Survey of, 12
Great Lakes, 25, 45
Great Plains, 10, 22
Green, W. L., 91
Green River, 30
greenstones, 182
Greenwell, Mr. and Mrs. Frank, 146
Gregory, H. E., 112, 135
Grodzinski, P., 172
Grosvenor, Gilbert, 142–143
Groth, P. G., 13
Guadeloupe, 66
guano diggings, 135–136
Guatemala, 55, 80–82
Gulf of Alaska, 138, 171
Gulf of Mexico, 10, 36
Gummeré, Harry, 12, 33, 72–73
Gutenberg, B., 183
H
Hague, Arnold, xi, 8
Hakamagoshi, 105
Hakone, 134
Hale, George Ellery, 185
Haleakala, 164, 165
Haleakala, Kohala, Kea line, 165
Halemaumau, 77, 86, 89, 92–93, 95, 112, 115, 117–119, 120–124, 127,
128, 131, 147, 151–155, 166
-- eruption, 117–124, 130–131
Hammond, W. H., 168, 172
Hannon, Arthur, 112
hardness tests, 168, 171–172
Harney Peak, xii
Hart, F. R., 79
Harvard, xi, 3–7, 16–19, 32–56, 72, 89, 92, 101
-- laboratory experiments, 32–54
-- study at, 3, 32–54
-- teaching at, 55–56, 72
Hawaii, island of, v, 28, 77, 78, 112, 142, 143, 154, 164, 165
Hawaii Channel, 123
Hawaii earthquake crisis (1929), 145–147
Hawaii Geological Survey, 30, 111–112
Hawaii National Park, 86, 89, 113–114, 128, 152, 155, 168, 173
Hawaii tidal wave (1946), 156
Hawaii, University of, 101
Hawaiian Is., 55, 69, 77–78, 112, 117, 164, 171, 177, 183
-- journey to, 55
Hawaiian Ridge, 49
Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, 112
Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, v, 54, 75, 78, 84–103, 111–112,
114–130, 135, 137, 142, 151–156, 162–164, 168, 173
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association, v, 71, 78, 91, 103, 111,
113–114, 155, 171
Hawaiian volcanoes, 42, 85–113, 145–147, 151–176
Hayden, F. V., 7, 17
Haystack Basin, 39
Heidelberg, 12
Heilprin, A., 76
Henderson, John Brooks, 127, 162
Hermann, A., 5
Herschel, Arthur, 83
Hiatt, R. W., 171
High Plateaus of Utah, 67
Hill, R. T., 56
Hilo, 130, 143, 151–153, 155, 161, 162, 169
-- merchants of, 89
Hilo Tribune Herald, 162–163
Hilo Wharf, 123
Himalayas, 48, 116
Hind, Mrs. Robert, 145
Hinkley, Vern, 162
Hitchcock, C. H., 91, 164–166
Hobart, A. H., 128
Hodges, Richmond, 154
Hokkaido, 77
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell, 182
Honduras, 80
Honjo district, 133
Honolulu, 77, 78, 85, 91
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 162
Honshu, 107
Honukai, the, 142–143
Hookena, 174
Hoopuloa village, 125
Hosmer, Ralph, 78
hot springs, 9, 39, 42, 137
Houston, David F., 112
Hovey, E. O., 56, 59, 76, 112, 159, 173
Howe, Ernest, 17
Howland Island, 135–136
Hoyle, Fred, xii, 5, 184, 186
Hualalai Volcano, 145, 146, 154, 164–165, 167
Hubble, E. P., 5
Hudson River, 42, 43
Humuula, 151, 153
Hunt, Walter Frederick, 173
Huntington, Ellsworth, 17
Huntington, Oliver, 5
Hyatt, A., 19
I
ice ages, 43, 185
Iceland, 39, 103
Imperial Hotel, Japan, 133
Indian Ocean, 170
index of eruption, 77
index volcanoes, 75, 79, 80
industrial diamonds, 172
Ingalls, Albert, 126
Ingerson, Earl, 172
injections, lava, 46–48
International Geophysical Union, 183
intrusions, 53
inventions, 19–20, 125–132, 157–158, 160, 162, 172
Irazu Volcano, 79
Ireland, 12, 23
-- Geological Survey of, 12
Irving, John Duer, 21, 25
Ischia, 66
isostasy, 116–117, 131, 177
Italy, 55, 65–72, 78, 103, 110, 117, 127, 181, 183
Ivanpah, 27
Izalco Volcano, 80
J
Jack, R. L., 110
Jackson, R. T., 5, 19, 165
Jaggar, Isabel, v, 100, 101, 109, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 140,
142, 145, 147, 153, 156, 157, 175
Jaggar, Rev. Thomas Augustus, 3
Jaggar inventions, 19–20, 158, 160, 172
Jamaica, 83–84, 157, 160
Japan, 42, 45, 55, 65–68, 77–78, 81, 84, 102, 103–106, 109, 110,
117, 132–134, 169, 183
Japanese earthquakes, 103–106, 114, 132–134, 168
Japanese engineers, 131
Java, 11
Jeans, J. H., 5, 184–185
jeep, forerunner of, 131–132, 138
Jim, Samuel, 62
Jimenez, President of Costa Rica, 79–80
Johanssen, Captain, 138, 140
Johnson, Douglas, 18
Johnston, F., 25
Jones, Austin E., 142, 144, 152, 169
Jordalsknut, the, 12
Jupiter, 184
K
Kagoshima, 103–106
Kahuku, 174
Kahului, 169
Kailua, Hawaii, 143
Kaimon, 108
Kaiser Wilhelm, 13–14
Kamakura, 134
Kamchatka arc, 82
Kamuela, 146
Kansas, 40
Kapoho, 118, 125, 154, 164
-- earthquake (1924), 154, 165
Karuizawa, 107–108
Katmai, 140
Kau Desert, 93, 115, 117, 120, 124, 125, 130, 132, 155
Kaunakakai, 123
Kawaihae, 143
Keewatin, 6
Kellar, H., 5
Kellers, H., 147, 149
Kelvin, W. T., 6
Keoua’s army, 120
Keppel Island, 150
Keppler, C. H. J., 147
Kew Observatory, 157
Kiholo, 143
Kilauea, v, xi, 59, 62, 68, 71, 76, 77, 86–103, 111–115, 117–125,
127–128, 130–132, 142–147, 151–155, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172,
176, 177
Kilauea Iki, 124
Kilauea Military Camp, 97, 113
Kilauea Mountain, 99, 118, 121
King, Clara, 62–64
King, Clarence, xi, 6, 7, 8, 17, 21, 22, 25, 32
King, F. P., 11
King, Samuel W., 135
King Cove, 138, 139, 140, 144
Kingston, Jamaica, 83–84, 159, 160
Kirishima, 108
Kobandai, 106–108
Kodiak, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144
Kohala, 165
Kona, 92, 93, 125, 142, 145–146, 152–154, 169, 173–174
-- North, 145
-- South, 92, 93, 125, 173
Korovinski Volcano, 75
Koto, B., 106
kou trees, 136
Kullenberg, B., 170, 184
Kumamoto, 109
Kyushu, 103, 108, 109
L
laboratories, 17, 32–54, 76, 78
-- Carnegie Institution geophysical, 76, 86, 111
-- Harvard, 32–54
-- Hawaii Volcano Observatory, 78
-- Naples, 76
-- Rockefeller, 29
Labrador, 3
Lacroix, Alfred, 16, 76, 134
La Forge, Laurence, 17
Lahaina, 123
Lake Superior, 6
Lake Taupo, 110
Lake Toya, 106
Lamar River, 36
Lancaster, Alex, 86, 90, 97, 118
Lane A., 18
Laramie, 46
Lassen National Park, 112, 114, 136–137, 154
-- survey of, 137
Lassen Peak, 136
lava injection model, 46–48
lava tides, 166–167
lava, analyses of, 129
lava, constituents of, 166
lava, moon, 172
Laudat, 11
Lehigh, 22
Leipzig, 181
Lenox-Conyingham, Gerald, 156, 157
Lewis Lake, 36
Lewis River, 36
Limon, 79
Lincoln, Gatesford, 132, 147
Lincoln, Joseph, 174
Lingula, 6, 7
Lipari, 66
Lisbon, 103
London, 12
Long Island Sound, 43
Los Angeles, 103
Loucks, Burton, 168, 173
Lower Silurian, 7
Lurline (ship), 175
Lycurgus, Demosthenes, 89, 111
Lycurgus, George, 111
Lydia (ship), 72, 74
Lyell, Charles, xii, 45
Lynn, 3
Lyttleton, ...., xii, 184, 185
M
Maclaurin, R., 55, 85
Macdonald, Gordon A., 111, 154, 166, 173–175
MacDonald, T. M., 59, 61, 159
MacGregor, A. G., 157, 161
MacMillan-Brown, J., 110
Madison limestone, 8
Maine, 3
Makalawena, 143
Makaopuhi, 118, 121
Makushin, 75
malau bird, 148–149
Mammoth Hot Springs, 9, 12, 42
man-of-war bird, 135
Mansfield, G. R., 18
Maoris, 110
Marlowe, Julia, 5
Marsden, Ernest, 110
Marsters, V. F., 17, 53
Martinique, 11, 55–66, 71, 76, 84, 129, 134, 156, 158, 160, 161,
167
-- expedition to, 55–65, 156–161
-- museum and observatory, 71
Marvin, Charles F., 111, 112, 137
Massachusetts, 18, 44, 71
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 7, 55–56, 72, 77–79, 85, 90,
91, 113, 129
-- teaching at, 55–56, 72, 78
Mato Tepee, 23
Matson, a guide, 11
Matsumoto, Jack, 174–175
Matteucci, R. V., 15, 67, 71
Matthes, Francois, 18
Maui, 122–123, 169, 170
Mauna Kea (ship), 123
Mauna Kea, 115, 146, 153, 164–165
Mauna Loa, 59, 62, 64, 67–69, 92–95, 99, 102, 112–115, 125,
145–146, 151–154, 162, 164–166, 169–170, 172, 173–176, 180, 185
-- bombing of, 153–154, 161
-- eruption of, 124, 173–176
Mauna Loa Mountain, 99
McCord, Jack, 140, 141
McKinley, C. P., 143
measurements, 129–131
medaños, 34
Mediterranean Sea, 45, 70, 116
“Mediterranean Sea” of North America, 22, 53
Mees, C. E. K., 91
Meinzer, O., 111
Mendenhall, W. C., 18, 112, 138
Mercalli, G., 76, 131
Messina, 55, 71, 77, 81, 103
-- earthquake of, 1908, 55, 71
metamorphism, 180
Meunier, Stanilas, 16
Mexico, 80, 82, 108
Michel-Lévy, A., 16, 53
Michelson, A. A., 99
microsclerometer, 19–20, 172
Midway Island, 99, 103, 164, 165
Mihara Volcano, 133–134
Mineral, Calif., 136, 137
Miocene, 46, 49
Mississippi delta, 41
Mississippi River, 8, 10, 36
models, 30, 38, 41–42, 43, 46–48, 50–52
-- erosion, 43
-- folding, 50–52
-- Grand Canyon, 30, 38
-- lava injection, 46–48
-- Old Faithful, 41–42
Mohokea, 165
Molokai, 122–123
Molokai Channel, 122
Molokai volcano, 165
Monte Somma, 66
Montserrat, xii, 66, 71, 126, 129, 156–161
-- earthquake (1933), 71
Moody, William H., 55–57
Moody, William Vaughn, 20
moon, 182
moon craters, 93–94, 172, 176
moon lava, 172
Morgan, Lloyd, 186
Morozewicz, J., 16
Morss, Everett, 162
motorcar amphibians, 168
Mount Baker, 136
Mount Dana, 143
Mount Etna, 66, 68, 71, 77, 81, 103, 180
Mount Hibokhibok, 76
Mount Lamington, 76
Mount Makushin, 73
Mount Misery, 62, 66
Mount Monadnock, 40
Mount Pelée, 56–65, 76, 134, 158, 161, 167
Mount St. Elias, 31
Mount St. Helena, 137
Mount Shasta, 18, 137
Mount Washburn, 36
Mount Wrangell, 138
Munro, George, 135
murres, 141
museum, Kilauea Crater, 114–115
Museum of Comparative Zoology, 164
mutation, 186
Myers, D. B., 72, 74
Mystic River, 37
N
Nagasaki, 103, 109
Nahant, 3
Nakamura, D., 115
Naknek Lake, 140
Napau Crater, 118, 121
Napier earthquake, 45, 111
Naples, 65, 71, 76
National Geographic Society, 55–56, 142, 143
-- expedition (Alaska), 143
Natural History magazine, 170
Nature magazine, 161
Naughton, J. J., 173
Naumann, E., 109
Navaho (ship), 123
Neckar, the, 14
Nelson, Sven, 20
Neptune, 184
Nevada, 26–30
New Crater, 10
New England, 7, 28, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46
New Haven, 46
New Jersey, 43
New Orleans, 79
New York, 42, 43, 56, 72, 121
-- New York City, 42, 72
-- Wall Street, 72
New Zealand, 39, 75, 103, 109–111, 114, 117, 126, 161, 162, 183
-- expedition to, 103, 109–111
--Geological Survey, 110
New Zealand-Tonga volcanic chain, 114
New Zealand, University of, 110
Ngauruhoe Volcano, 110
Nicaragua, 80
Nicaragua-Salvador line, 80
Nikolski, 141
Niles, W., 72
Niuafoou, 110, 147–150
Niuatoputapu, 150
No Man’s Land, 132
Nobel Prize, 157
Norris Geyser Basin, 10
North Island, N. Z., 109
North Kona, 145
Norway, 12, 13
Nova Scotia, 3, 175
O
Oahu, 170
Oberhansley, F. R., 173
Oberwald, the, 14
Observatories, 76, 86, 114–130, 135–137, 142, 144, 155, 162, 163,
168, 173
-- Alaska, 136, 137, 142, 144
-- California, 136, 137
-- Hawaii, 76, 114–130, 135, 137, 142, 155, 162, 168, 173
-- Kew, 157
-- Vesuvius, 76, 86
Ocean Island, 99
oceanic volcanoes, 182
Oceanographic Institute of Sweden, 170
oceanographic sampling, 183
Ogasawara Islands, 109
Ohia Lodge, Hawaii, 174
Ohiki, the, 142–143
Okinawa, 103
Olaa, 154
Old Faithful, 10
-- model of, 41–42
“Old Faithful,” Hawaii, 86–87, 90
Oldham, R. D., 116
Oligocene, 24
Omori, F., 77, 84, 102, 104–106, 109, 112, 115, 131, 132, 162
Oregon, 82
Osaka, 134
Osann, A., 14, 15
Oshima, 103, 109, 133, 134
Osumi Strait, 104
Otago University, 110
Ottajano, 65, 66, 68
P
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 77, 86
Pacific Commercial Company, 143
Pacific journey, 77–78
Pacific Ocean, 36, 53, 82, 170, 171
-- arc, 82
--deeps of, 53
Pacific oceanography, 170–171
Pacific Science Congresses, 112, 134
Pago Pago, 147
pahoehoe, 67, 97, 120, 124, 125, 129, 135, 148, 151, 153
Palache, C., 14, 15
Palisades, Hudson River, 42
Palmieri, P., 76
Panama, 80, 82, 83, 157
Panama Canal, 82, 157
Papua, 76
Parker Ranch, Hawaii, 143, 146
Pasadena, 111
Pasteur, Louis, 16, 161
Patagonia, 81
Pavlof, 139, 142–143
Pearl Harbor, 122, 123, 168, 169, 172
Pelée, 11, 45, 56–65, 67, 68, 78, 103, 104
-- eruption, 45, 56–65, 71
Pelican (ship), 123
Pennsylvania, 37, 53
Perkins, Commander, ...., 140
Perret, Frank Alvord, xi, 32, 68, 71, 84, 86–89, 92, 96, 101, 103,
156, 157, 160, 162, 167, 171, 173
Peru, 34
Pettersson, Hans, 170, 171, 184
Philadelphia, 53
Philippine Islands, 72, 76
Phoenix, Arizona, 25
Piggot, C. S., 184
Planck, M., 5
Pliocene, 43
Plug Ugly (ship), 139
Plymouth, W. I., 156
Poas Crater, 80
Pohoiki, 118
Polynesian rats, 136
Ponte, S. C., 68
Porteus, Stanley, 162
Postal Card Crack, 77, 127, 128
Potomac (ship), 56–58
Powell, C. F., 156, 157, 161
Powell, George, 143
Powell, J. W., 7, 17, 22
Powers, Howard, 142, 154, 169, 173
Powers, Sidney, 112
Pozzuoli, 66
pre-Cambrian, 47
Prescott, Arizona, 25
Pribilof Island, 144
Prince of Wales, 110
Princeton University, 5
Pritchett, H. S., 55, 72
Puako, 143
Puget Sound, 143, 144
Puna, 130, 154
Purington, C., 133
Puu Oo Ranch, 153
Puuwaawaa, 145, 146
Q
quakeproof engineering, 132
Quartette Gold Mine, 27
Queen Charlotte, 150
Quensell boys, 149
R
range finders, 125–127
rats, Polynesian, 136
Red Beds, 8, 47
Redlands, 103
Reyer, H., 16
rhythmic periods, 166–167
Richmond plantation, W. I., 159
Richter, C. F., 183
Rieber, Frank, 162–164
ripplemarks, 3–4, 32–54
Roberts, Sumner, 100
Rockefeller, John D., 184
Rockefeller laboratory and observatory, 29
Rocky Mountains, 7, 10, 18, 23, 46, 47, 48
Romberg, Arnold, 101–102
Rome, 103
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 17
Roraima (ship), 62, 160
Roseau, 11
Rosenbusch, H., 12–16
Rotorua, 109, 111
Royal Society of London, 72, 156
Ruapehu Volcano, 110
Rushforth, Paul, 171–172
Russell, I. C., 56
Rutherford, E., 110
Ryukyu Archipelago, 103, 106, 109
Ryukyu-Sakurajima line, 108
S
Saba, 157
Sagami Bay, 133–134
St. Helena, 103
St. Kitts, 62, 157
St. Lucia, 160
St. Martin, 157
St. Pierre, 55–65, 71, 160, 161
St. Vincent, 56–66, 68, 158–160
Sakurajima, xi, 71, 81, 103–106
-- earthquake (1914), 103–106
Salvador, 80
Samoa, 147, 150
San Andreas rift, 137
San Francisco earthquake (1906), xii, 45, 55, 134, 137
San Jose, Costa Rica, 79
San Sebastiano, destruction of, 69
Santa Ana, 80
Santa Maria peak, 81
Sarana Bay, 141
Saratoga Springs, 18
Sato, Sutejiro, 155, 166, 168
Saturn, 184
Saxony, 14
Scandinavia, 12–13, 182
Schneeberg granite, 14
Schrader, F., 18
Schweitzer, A., 161
Scientific American, 126
scratch tester, 172
sea level, 130
sea lions, 141
seals, 144
Searchlight, Nevada, 26–30
Seattle, 72, 138, 142
Secretary of the Interior, 155
Section of Volcanology created, 136
sedimentation, 32, 38, 76, 181
Seeley, George, 72, 74
seismic recorders, 125–126, 143, 144
Shaler, Nathaniel S., xi, 3, 5, 19, 28, 172
Shepard, F. P., 170
Shepherd, E. S., 86–89, 92, 112, 115, 166, 167, 184
Shimonoseki Strait, 109
Shipman, Herbert, 153
Shishaldin Volcano, 154
shock recorder, 126, 158, 160
Shumagin Islands, 143
Sierra Nevada, 28, 116, 136
Sinclair, Gregg M., 162, 170, 171
Sinton, Bill, 122, 147
Smith, George Otis, 112, 137
Smith Philip Sidney, 18, 21, 22
Smith, William, 21
Smithsonian Institution, 112
Snake River, 36
Snedeker, James, 168
Solfatara, Italy, 127
solfataras, 11–12, 62, 65, 68, 80, 108, 129, 156, 158, 160
Soufrière, 56–55, 72, 159
South Dakota, 21–25, 28, 37, 38, 46, 47, 55, 78
South Island, N. Z., 109
South Kona, 92, 93, 125, 173
Spalding, Walter, 95
Spearfish, Arizona, 23
Speight, R., 110
Spofford, Charles, 79, 84, 129
Springfield, Mass., 71
Spurr, J. E., 18, 172
Stalheim, 12
Stanford students, 26
Stanley, Henry M., 12
Starr (ship), 138, 140
State Street, 72
Stearns, Harold T., 111, 154, 165, 166
Stewart, Richard, 143
Stinking Water mine, 8
Stockholm, 13
Stokes, Mrs., 63
Stokes, Rita, 62–64
Stone, Ralph, 17, 37, 43
Stromboli, 68, 71
Stübel, A., 67, 76, 177, 181, 182
Suess, E., 116
sugar mills, 159
Sulphur Bank, 112, 115, 127–129, 173
Sunlight mine, 8
sunspots, 65, 68, 166
-- intervals of, 68
surveys, 7–12, 23–25, 30, 76, 137, 138, 142–143
-- Alaskan, 142–143
-- Black Hills, 23–25
-- Fortieth Parallel, 25
-- Hawaii Geological, 30, 76
-- Lassen National Park, 137
-- New Zealand Geological, 110
-- Yellowstone, 7–12
Suwanose Island, 108
Sweden, 13, 170
Sweeney, H. P., 72, 74
swelling and slumping, 131
swelling mountain, 129–131
Switzerland, 43
T
Tanager (ship), 150
Tanegashima, 106
Tarawera, 109
Tarawera Mountain, 110
Tarumai Volcano, 77–78
Taupo Belt, 109
Taupo District, 161
Taylor, Griffith, 112
teaching, 55–56, 72, 78
-- at Harvard, 55–56, 72
-- at Massachusetts Tech, 55–56, 72, 78
Technology Expedition, 72, 138
Technology Review, 74
Teddy, the dog, 123
temperature wells, 127–129
Teneriffe, 71
Tennessee, 37
terns, 135
Tertiary, 8–10, 15
Tetons, 36
theater, the, 5
Thomson, Allan, 109
Thomson, William, 109
Thorndike, Charles, 100
Thurston, Lorrin A., 77, 86, 89, 111, 122, 142, 153, 162
tidal system (volcanic), 70
tidal waves, 134, 156, 169–170
-- Hawaii (1946), 156, 169, 170
-- Japan (Tokyo), 134
tide gauge readings, 130
Tin Can Island, 110, 147–150
Tokyo, 81, 102, 103, 106, 109, 114, 132–134, 168
-- earthquakes, 103, 114, 132–134, 168
Tonga, 109, 110, 114, 181, 147–150
Tonga Deep, 109
Tonopah, 29
Tonto fault, 30
Triassic lavas, 47
Tridacna, 35, 135
Trinidad, 61
Trondhjem, 12, 13
Tufts College, 17
Tuscarora Deep, 109
Twigg-Smith, William, 112
U
Unita Mountains, 30
Umnak Island, 75, 138, 141
Unalga (ship), 140
Unalaska, 75, 137, 140, 141
Unimak, 154
Union Pacific, 25
United Fruit Company, 79
U. S. Army, 113, 169
U. S. Army Air Force, 153
U. S. Army Engineers, 82, 156
U. S. Biological Survey, 144
U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 130
U. S. Coast Guard, 135, 140, 144
U. S. Congress, 156, 162
U. S. Consulate (Japan), 132
U. S. Eclipse Expedition, 110, 147–150
U. S. Geological Survey, 17–18, 19, 21, 22, 50, 54–56, 64, 89–90,
111–114, 129–131, 136–138, 142, 154, 157, 169, 172–173
U. S. Marines, 132, 133, 168
U. S. Navy, 55–57, 122–123, 131, 132, 147, 168, 170
U. S. Naval Observatory, 110, 147–150
U. S. Weather Bureau, 111–114, 137
University Club, Boston, 85
University of California, Berkeley, 89, 137, 163
University of Hawaii, 101, 162, 164, 168, 170, 171
University of New Zealand, 110
Uranus, 184
Usu Volcano, 106
Utah, 18, 22, 67
Uwekahuna, 173
V
Valparaiso earthquake, 55
Vandyke, E. C., 72, 73
Vaughan, T. W., 112
Verhoogen, J., 180
Vermont, 7, 9, 53
Vesuvius, xi, 55, 65–72, 76, 88, 104, 115, 131, 167
-- eruptions, 65–72
-- expedition to, 65–72, 84
-- observatory, 76
Vesuvius-Stromboli-Etna system, 70
Virgin Islands, 157
volcanic explosions, 32, 45, 55–84, 120–125, 130–131, 173–176
Volcano Bay, 139–140
Volcano House, 77, 86, 111, 113, 155, 173
Volcano Letter, 154
volcano models, 45–47
Volcano Research Association, 85, 162, 163
volcanology predictions, 161–162
von Buch, Leopold, 131
von Tempski, Armine, 146
von Zittel, Karl A., 13
Vosges Mountains, 14
W
Wada, T., 107
Waesche, Hugh, 152, 154
Wailuku River, 153, 156
Waimanu, Hawaii, 165
Waimea, Hawaii, 143
Waiohinu, 165
Waipio, 165
Wairaki, 161
Walcott, Charles D., 19, 22, 30, 111, 112
Wall Street, 72
Wallibu River, 60
Ward, R., 19
Washington, D. C., 76, 86, 111, 137, 161, 162
-- Geophysical Laboratory, 76
Washington, H. S., 112
Watchung Ridge, 43
water theory, 115–117, 167
Weed, W. H., 11
Wellesley, 72
Wellington, N. Z., 109, 110
Wells Fargo and Co., 27
Wentworth, Chester K., 173
Werner, A. G., 16
West Indies, 11, 56–66, 78, 83–84, 156–161
-- disaster in, 55–65
-- volcanoes of, 156–161
Western Samoa, 147
Wheeler, G. M., 7
Whippoorwill (ship), 135–136
White, Harvey, 173
White Island, 75, 110
Whitney Foundation, 85, 89
Wiechert, E., 116
Williams, Howel, 137, 164
Williamson, H., 82–83
Willis, Bailey, xi, 21, 22, 50–51, 116
Wilson, R. M., 111, 129, 130, 137, 144, 154
Wingate, E. G., 145, 152, 155–156
Wolff, John Eliot, 5, 19
Wood, H. O., 89, 100, 111, 115
Wood-Anderson seismograph, 111
Wood-Jones, Frederick, 112
Wood Valley, 145, 165
World War I, 132
World War II, 141, 142, 168
Wylie, ...., 11
Wyoming, 43
Y
Yakutat earthquake (1899), 30–31, 37, 45
Yale University, 17, 19, 22, 91, 100
Yatchmenoff, Peter, 139–140
Yeld, G., 65
yellow fever, 82
Yellowstone Lake, 36
Yellowstone National Park, xii, 7–12, 18, 23, 28, 36, 39, 42, 67,
78, 112, 117
Yellowstone River, 36
Yokohama, 132–134
Young, John Mason, 114
Yukon, 140
Z
Zeitschrift für Vulkanologie, 76
Zirkel, Ferdinand, 14
Zurich, 12
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Hyphenation has been rationalised. Inconsistent spelling (including
accents) has been retained.
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