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.