PREFACE
This, my latest book, is another experiment. After sixty years of volcanoes I have learned reversal of preconceived notions. Gradually I have learned a totally different approach.
Shaler of Harvard was my inspirer, worker in the wonders of swamp and ice and sea beaches. He set me to work and turned me loose; among books and storm waves and men; especially among men, young men, ever reaping something new. When I chose volcanoes for my field Shaler said, “You have certainly selected the hardest.” It was a missionary field, for in it people were being killed. But the products of internal earth fluids, lava sea bottom, and vast Canadian ancient meltings, seemed to promise real natural history. Volcanoes squirt up the very ancient stuff of the solar system. Therein, I knew, must be something for future discovery. The investigation of it was a clear field, if action was the goal.
My field education in geology was by Hague, the friend of Archibald Geikie. By Emmons, skilled in ore deposits, and like Hague, trained by Clarence King. By Bailey Willis, son of a poet, a superlative draftsman and field man, and a brilliant experimenter. I went into the American West with these men.
But this story of a volcano experimenter’s life would have reached nowhere without Frank Alvord Perret, whom I first met on the slope of Vesuvius in 1906. I knew at once that he was the world’s greatest volcanologist. His skill was taking pictures. Mine was making experiments. We agreed that these two skills in action would accomplish what theories never could approach.
Perret was an inventor. He was an artist. He was a poet. He was a lover of little children, and a worshiper of the music of the stars. Always in delicate health, he circled the world. I was with him on Sakurajima, on Kilauea, and on Montserrat. We did not agree. He had a vast love of the romantic and bizarre. I was always a sceptic. But I thank Heaven that his posthumous and nobly illustrated book reached magnificent publication. His other books set a standard for all time for what the field science of volcanoes shall be.
Perret and his camera were my models. He gave me all of his pictures to use as I chose, and he and Tempest Anderson taught me volcano photography. The latter, a Yorkshireman, was a British geographer and we met on many volcanoes.
The purpose of this book is to tell what one man saw. I was actuated by the will to learn. I wanted to copy ripplemarks on the bottom of the sea, to understand what force pushed up Harney Peak as coarse granite in the Black Hills, and to imitate Yellowstone geysers spouting rhythmically. I wanted to know how cracks made the Cascade Mountains pile up in a line.
Finally, I studied the San Francisco earthquake rift, sliding open parallel to the shore for hundreds of miles. How thick was the crust of the globe? Then I was called to Hawaii, islands on a ridge 1,700 miles long with volcanoes at one end, coral atolls at the other. And I started a volcano experiment station at a very lucky time. Volcanoes proved surprisingly amenable to experiment.
Forty years of this lead far away from Lyell’s geology—the geology of uniform processes past and present—and from brachiopods and trilobites. It lead to the ancestor of volcanoes. It lead to ancestral gas. It lead back 10 billion years. A lava splash might be a live souvenir of that age. More than anything else, this belief pointed our instruments down, to the inside of the globe.
Six decades of a man’s life. Decades of geology, exploration, foundation, outspreading, prediction, and fruition. The fact of fruition makes the telling worth while. Geological education was unbelief. Fruition was belief, verified by growth of unified science. Culmination was not geology but science. Uniformity, evolution, and symmetry are in nature. Value and number are human. I have been called geologist and seismologist, volcanologist and geophysicist. I am none of these. I am interested in the evolution of what Hoyle calls “This quite incredible universe.” I am just as interested in Bergson’s “Creative evolution” as in Hoyle and Lyttleton’s “New cosmology.” And more interested in life than in either. The elements of fruition are a thick earth crust, a comparable pattern for earth and moon, and a mechanism for earth core. This is the story of sixty years of volcaneering.
My Experiments With
Volcanoes