My experiments with volcanoes

I have spent sixty years in qualitative experiments in geology. I began with old volcanoes and geysers in the Yellowstone and the far west, and ended with experiments on the active Hawaiian volcano, Kilauea. Based on these experiments, I have written books about evolution of craters, and about distinct peculiarities of explosive eruptions from underground water.

The accusation that I am not orthodox in professional geology is false. Professional geology is largely continental because its field work has been on continents. My work has been oceanic; my field, seventy percent of the earth’s surface, extending over a thick crust down to the earth core. The earth core is fluid and massive and hot, as all geology agrees. Isostasy, which postulates a thin flexible shell, is violated by the ocean deeps and the volcanic ridges. Volcanic rift echelons like the Cordillera and the Hawaiian ridge are too long to be generated as the fracture of a crust fifty miles deep. The circularity and graduated size in linear stretches of the Pacific arcs are functions of a fractured thick-shell sphere. Similar gradation of arcs is on the lunar surface. Arguments, based on the knowledge of meteors, for an iron core and for large lunar craters are without analogy. Substratum theories, from Stübel to Daly, do not agree with oceanic volcanism. Gravitational crust balance applies better to a primitive thick fault block crust than to a thin shell. Earth lavas, as natural experimental models, imitate lunar features on small and large scales. Both make consistent history for two similar globes. Volcanology has to stand as global and ancient, and any geologist may accept the reasonings here enumerated without being unorthodox.

The unquestioned certainties of modern seismology, the transmission of elastic waves through the globe to sensitive recording pendulums, are that the crust is 1,800 miles thick, that the core is a heavy ball of white hot fluid, and that its temperature at crustal contact has been estimated by Verhoogen at 2200° Centigrade. The deep crust is less dense than the core, and is commonly conceded to be basic heavy rock not unlike stony meteorites. The outside shell under oceans, and over three-quarters of the earth, is covered by basaltic lava, and wherever igneous rock has been formed by volcanic action, intrusive or extrusive black basic lava recurs as dikes and outflows.

On the page opposite is a diagram of a hypothetical globe section near the equator, showing oceans and continents in true surface ratio; fault block segments of rigid crust isostatically supported on a liquid core; sixteen volcanic partitions, oceanic and continental; and Stübel’s “armorplate” from pristine volcanic eruption. Possibly the profile is tetrahedral. My argument for this globe section is based on the following:

The twenty-eight percent of earth surface which lies above the sea in continents is made up of siliceous sediments of shallow water basins, with quartz as the dominant mineral, their strata wrinkled, and eroded into mountain ranges. Desert and lake or river bottoms make up most of the remainder. This material, when ancient, was changed by heat and infiltration into what are called gneisses, schists, and granites; and the process of granitization is among the metamorphic processes. It is a process of deep burial, heat, gases, and water which has always been a puzzle, and may affect ancient volcanic lavas wherever they have covered the land. It is a process of solution of silica, and its deposition is by steam and other vapors.

In the same way volcanic action by the outpouring of lava through cracks is a process of solution of the deeper crust of the earth by hot gases, largely burning hydrogen. Lavas emerging from Etna or Mauna Loa are melted earth crust, dissolved and brought up by this same hydrogen and by other gases from the walls of profound cracks leading down to the earth core. Volcanism and metamorphism are thus the same process, namely the action of gases up cracks through deep earth crust. But metamorphism acts on continental sediments, whereas modern volcano eruption acts through sea bottom and sea shore faulting, very ancient features of the earth and distinct from continents. In Hawaii no metamorphic rock fragments have been found.

Such primitive oceanic fault fissures extend under continents remnant from the time of evolution of continents. They bring up the metamorphic hot gases, which in siliceous sediments, make granites and gneisses and schists with the aid of groundwater. Geology has no knowledge whatever of whether this metamorphic process affects the hard rock under the oceanic muds, because geology has never collected a piece of that rock. Geology however knows inclusions and explosive fragments from oceanic volcanoes, and it does not find there granite and gneiss and schist. However, generalization does not apply to continental volcanoes like those of Italy and Africa.

The beginning of fossils on continents is commonly considered to have been 500 million years ago, and this may be extended another 1,500 million years for the most ancient identifiable continental rocks, and an estimated total thickness of 120,000 feet to the bottom of the most ancient sediments on earth. We know nothing of thickness of most ancient volcanic deposits under the oceanic mud.

This brings us to the great German explorer Stübel, who mapped volcanoes of the Andes, founded a museum of his work in Leipzig, and published monographs on the Andes. He wrote a final book, including material on Mount Pelée, on the “genetic differences of volcanic mountains.” But such modern continentalists as Daly and Bucher in America have disregarded Stübel. Daly is the authority on a shallow earth shell and substratum of basalt, and Bucher of Columbia University is a specialist on continental sediments and granitization.

The point is that Stübel made a profound generalization which nobody has proved wrong. The earth is at least 3,000 million years old, and when oceanic fault blocks sank and received condensing atmospheric water and continental fault blocks remained high and became eroded, there was already a thick shell of volcanic lavas. For volcanism was the most ancient process on the earth’s surface. It had always brought gases up cracks from the core, making atmosphere, water, and extrusions. Stübel, called the extrusive shell on the outside of the primitive crust the globe’s armorplate. The primal gas escape, whatever the ancestral turbulence inside, had to come up cracks and make volcanic deposits. It is commonly presumed that the very thick inside crust formed rapidly by cooling and solidifying from outside the core inward, and from inside the atmosphere outward. The latter surface was eventually under water cooling over most of the earth and under air cooling over the small continental area, a marked difference of temperature and pressure for the two areas.

Seismometry teaches that most of the crust is of fairly uniform density. Therefore, presumably, a thick crust was arrived at early. There was obviously a time of conflict between the weighting of the crust by its heavier accumulations next to the core, by its lighter accumulations exteriorly under water and air, and finally by its external armor plate of unknown comparative weight, made of volcanic lava. For all we know, this might have been volcanic pumice. Rapidity of crust thickening is speculative.

Right here there is an element of mystery in speculation as to which has to accommodate comparison with the moon, the merging of atmospheric condensation with volcanism, and the merging of suboceanic condensation of lava with pristine eruption. This is too hard a nut to crack, in our current ignorance of rock under sea bottom muds. But Stübel’s insistence on a coating of lava armor plate over both continents and sea bottoms as the earlier volcanism, and an external veneer on the earth, is unavoidable. If it were all basalt like the present oceanic volcanoes, we should find basalt in continents underneath the granites. We do not do so. If it were all light weight granitizing by segregation of silica, we should find commonly granite and obsidian fragments within oceanic lavas. We do not do so. We have to conclude then that our sections, topographic and geologic, do not go deep enough. And as for the ocean bottoms, we have no sections at all. But Stübel was right. An unknown volcanic eruption period had to precede geologic volcanoes.

The question of ancient greenstones in Africa, Scandinavia, and Canada is much discussed, for there were old volcanic lavas in many places; mixed with gneisses, schists, and granites. They were not a deep layer, but presumed to be ancient remnants of interspersed lavas among sediments. They are one more evidence that volcanic eruption goes back to the time of the most ancient rocks on continents and that its lavas were affected by metamorphism. But no continuous deep stratum of greenstones is known. At depths of fifty miles, under continents only, is the Mohorovicic change to denser rock. This is an echo surface in earthquake waves, but it is absent over the whole Pacific. It may be the top of the armor plate.

Justice Holmes wrote that the Constitution of the United States was an experiment. That all law of the nation works salvation by prophecy based on experiment. The experiments were extended to the Bill of Rights and all the amendments to the Constitution. I feel that geology—in view of its extreme ignorance of submarine rocks, ores, metals, oils, spring waters, temperatures, magnetism, gravity, and gases for most of the earth—needs a bill of rights and numerous amendments to its constitution. Its salvation by prophecy needs to be based on experiments with instruments, drill rigs, and anchored laboratories in this vast area. These experiments, superficially, have been conducted by oceanographic sampling of bottom materials, by gravity pendulums operated in submarines, by cameras on sea bottoms, and collections of bottom waters, by tests of radioactivity of bottom materials, by echo sounding to determine thickness of muds, by volcanology on oceanic islands, by topographic surveying of the bottom, and by all the excellent work of the oceanographic and geologic stations and their seismographs, with some studies of marine chemistry, physics, and biology. The conclusions in this book amount to only one small prophecy based on experiments with volcanoes. But the rock under deep ocean mud is still uncollected.

My volcano experiments are not influenced by any consensus of text books. I was educated on textbook opinions and found geologic science deficient in experimental measurement of the field progress of erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption. I expended most of my teaching in a plea for field observatories of time measurement of these four processes. The plea has done some good, and in this century we have seen grow up the International Geophysical Union. Experiment stations have multiplied, to make geophysics and geochemistry pure quantitative sciences. But they are generally commercial and have not extended to deep boring under oceans.

While working from volcano observatories for the extension of geology in Alaska, Japan, Hawaii, Tonga, the Caribbean and Italy, and on the mainland of California, Central America, and New Zealand, I have found myself on the outskirts of vast oceans, engaged in a science almost as unsatisfactory as the textbook science of historical and continental geology. It is always a compromise, for we are up against a crying need for maps of the bedrock under the muds of the vast oceans. Volcanism cries out for a knowledge of the globe, and it is helped by such work as that of Gutenberg and Richter. These men compiled critical maps of earthquakes, measured by elastic theory the world over. Their work necessarily made many contacts with volcanoes. The same may be said of the geophysical summaries of gravity, magnetism, climatology, hydrology, and oceanography. But all our sciences stop at the immense sea bottoms, and need salvation through experiment.

Science is not doing all it can. Finances and engineering are competent to contact sea bottom directly with expensive machines not yet invented and to create oceanic rock science. Offshore boring for oil is not enough. Pure science needs an example by financiers like Carnegie and Rockefeller who are not seeking profit. Engineering advice positively can reach under the few hundred feet of mud, find the rock, and bore into it in 2,000 fathoms. The first man who does it will open a new frontier. All honor to Shepard, Ewing, Piggot, Pettersson, and Kullenberg, men who have barely broken ground in this science. The whole of volcanology depends on collecting the crustal rock under the mud.

Hoyle’s book “The Nature of the Universe” takes us one step farther. It shows that all science is essentially cosmology, and science deals with the origin and progress of all nature. I would go farther than the universe. I would include the science of life and of our brains. We need an imaginative picture starting with the outer universe. We end on the earth with volcanoes and the birth of life.

Hoyle and Lyttleton of Cambridge have presented a condensation of current astrophysics, which includes earth, moon, and planets; sun and stars; origin and future of stars; and origin of solar systems. A most gratifying conclusion is that the background material of space creates hydrogen. This is proved by precise mathematical equations. This accounts for the expanding universe under the pressure of such creation. The outermost nebulae continually pass beyond the speed of light. The galaxies move out into infinite space endlessly. They are renovated endlessly by gravitation from hydrogen eternally created.

The sun, by knowledge built up from the days of Jeans and Eddington, contains more than ninety percent of hydrogen, and the small remainder is helium, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and iron. It maintains its surface temperature by nuclear reactions from within outward, at a rate suitable to make helium out of hydrogen, so as to compensate for the energy which the sun radiates.

This dominance of hydrogen inside the solar star makes it impossible that the earth should be solar. Rather, it was a product of a companion star, a supernova which exploded and, with excessive heat, created elements atomically. The sun was a binary pair of stars, and the companion occupied the place of the four greater planets. The remnant body, after explosion, moved away.

A gaseous ring formed around the sun condensing from many molecules to rotating superplanets. These broke up many hundred million years ago into Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Small blobs escaped to become the inner planets including the earth. The earth captured small solids and acquired the moon as a satellite. It got radioactive matter exteriorly, plus nitrogen, water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.

There is a hundred times more hydrogen per unit of mass in the sun than in the planets. Its supply will last for 50,000 million years. The solar system is tunneling through variable interstellar gas. It picks up more or less material, and so changes climates occasionally. This makes such episodes as the ice ages on earth. Lyttleton estimates that the dust clouds encountered form bundles of particles captured by the sun to make comets.

The mathematics of the interior of the sun, applied by Bethe to the use of carbon and nitrogen as catalysts and changing hydrogen to helium, is a model of experimentation. It should be imitated to explain Hawaiian basalt. The core of the earth produces gas reactions up cracks. The gases act on deep crust. The surface product is olivine basalt. What are the reactions between gas and crust to make Mauna Loa foam fountains? This problem has not been tackled. Geologists have clung to a theory of shallow reservoirs.

The astronomers of Cambridge, successors of the American experimenter George Ellery Hale and of Eddington and Jeans, are not the final word in cosmology. There will be a final word. The picture created from background material to gas, from gas to galaxies, and from galaxies to solar systems ends for us in our planet with a white hot liquid core. Nuclear reactions created this from the superheat of an exploding supernova. Our erupting volcanoes are the end product. We can sit beside erupting lava fountains and watch hydrogen flames, the same gas that was made of the background material in the universe.

All this is outcome of gravitation. It extends from the first eddies of hydrogen in outer space to the final rotation of the earth. The final hydrogen, with carbon, made life on the earth. The five elements of volcanic gas are identical with the five elements of organic chemistry. Dr. Hoyle mistakenly concludes that we have no clue to our own fate. But he points out that the universe is continuous creation. Our picture is one instant of time in an everlasting now. Mind is an everlasting unit beyond which we cannot go.

It is illogical to pay any attention to existence after death unless we pay equal attention to existence before birth. All is continuous creation. The making of hydrogen is just as true within the creation of life as within the universe. Life is under gravitation. Gravitation controls the instantaneous moving picture, even the emergence of life from volcanic gases under enormous water pressure at sea bottom. It is just as much subject to experiment as the outer boundary of the universe.

Life is an end product; and it thinks, worships, and experiments. Treating life and volcanoes as end products of Hoyle’s universe makes science fundamentally cosmology.

One final comment, after looking at sea bottom eruptions through all the ages. Continental life came out of the sea, and original life comes continually from the earth core. This gives new dignity to the future search for global action on the sea bottom.

The “emergent evolution” of Lloyd Morgan makes much of mutation as accounting for progress from unconscious life to consciousness, consciousness to memory, memory to reasoning, and reasoning to spirituality. Each one of these is a new mutation, in the same sense as a new fruit by Burbank. The first unconscious life may be considered a mutation from the inorganic of the globe. The totally unknown pressure-temperature conditions of volcanic eruption through the cracking earth of ocean bottom, and the ground waters under the ocean, lend a final dignity to exploration of that frontier.

Hoyle writes that the ultimate goal of the New Cosmology is continuous creation in outer space. The ultimate goal of the New Volcanology is continuous creation in oceanic depths.