My experiments with volcanoes

“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.

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.

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.