My experiments with volcanoes

“There shall be famines and earthquakes in divers places.”

The decade from 1921 through 1930 was a period of tremendous events and of experimentation at Kilauea and Mauna Loa. It was also an expansion decade for the Observatory, and for me. Additional funds made possible new buildings and equipment on Hawaii; observatory activity was established at Lassen Volcano in California; and expeditionary work included a study of the 1923 Tokyo earthquakes, explorations on Alaska volcanoes in 1927, and a visit to Niuafoou in Tonga, part of the great New Zealand-Tonga volcanic chain.

Increased government aid was largely due to the help of the Honorable Louis C. Cramton of Michigan, Republican floor leader of Congress, who took great interest in extending activities within national parks. After we moved from Weather Bureau control to Geological Survey in 1924, Cramton visited our Observatory, concluded that it was an orphan child of the government, and asked me what I wanted. I told him that I needed men and machines, and I suggested expanding our studies to California and the Aleutians.

Meantime, the Research Association was persuaded that we needed a fire-resistant iron building to house library accumulation, record books, and photographic negatives, as well as seismograms and lava specimens. These were precious relics of the very active overflows and experiments of the 1912–1921 period. With the advice of Walter F. Dillingham and Engineer John Mason Young of the University of Hawaii, I built a sheet-iron house with concrete floor and wire-glass skylights, and installed steel furniture. This became an invaluable office, drafting room, and workroom, as well as a place for files.

The Volcano Research Association, in cooperation with Hawaii National Park, built a trail side museum and lecture hall atop the high western bluff of Kilauea Crater. Later, when the drive was extended completely around the greater crater, the museum was on the road to Halemaumau. This museum had a plate glass front, concrete floor, skylight illumination, and an esplanade looking down on the caldera and across the vast panorama of Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and the Kau Desert. The building protected the lookout platform from the trade winds.

We housed in the museum a gleaming, nickel-plated seismograph from Japan, suitable photographs, and the best of our specimens for visitors to see. This combined with the magnificent views to instruct the public in volcanology as nothing else could have done. At the same time, I equipped machine shops and added a first class mechanic to the staff.

It was during this decade and after my New Zealand trip that such persons as Omori and Nakamura, in Japan, and geologists in Seattle, Berkeley, and Pasadena began to take an interest in the volcano problem as dominant in the study of earthquakes.

There were conflicting theories about the earth crust. Earlier, in Hawaii, Wood was a disciple of the tectonic or contracting theories of the earth, whereas I increasingly believed volcanism to be profound, crustal, oceanic, and ancient. It is more fundamental than the strata and mountain folds of continents.

This conflict extended to the water question in volcanology. I was inclined to believe the waters of eruption to be oxidized hydrogen, whereas such physical chemists as Day, Shepherd, and Allen believed water vapor, like carbon dioxide, to be fundamental in magma.

The whole question of the origin of oxygen—the most abundant element of the rocks, air, and water—is a matter of startling doubt in geology. Where oxides are known to exist in lava, flames of oxidation make the gaseous fires; and underground water full of oxygen plays a part in steamblast eruption. All the waters of glaciers and oceans are oxides, and prove that the volcanic oxidation of hydrogen was the most primitive of the volcanic processes. Dr. E. H. Allen found water vapor dominant in the Sulphur Bank gas at Kilauea, whereas Day and Shepherd, who opposed Brun, thought water dominant in the gases of live lava. Its great preponderance in geological theory for such eruptions as Vesuvius led Allen to review theories and publish a long paper designed to refute my notion that oxidizing hydrogen is the primary volcanic ingredient.

As to earthquakes and so-called tectonic faults, the whole of geology has its thinking so warped by continents, the dwelling place of mankind, and so diverted from the great linear trenches and the ridges of the ocean crowned with volcanoes parallel to the deeps, that I became incredulous, along with Willis and Oldham, about the textbook cause of earthquakes.

The fascination offered by fossils, by ages of shellfish and reptiles, and by mountains of folded strata like the Alps and the Himalaya makes the votaries of evolutionary science neglect the mud-covered rocks and oceanic mountain ranges of almost three-quarters of the surface of the globe. This seventy-two percent they have never seen, nor collected hard rock specimens from, nor even mapped topographically. They are not acquainted with it by exploration, and their theories about it are a blank, except that gravity pendulums indicate it to be basalt.

The so-called geosyncline, or continental basin of sediments, filled with shells and strata as is the Mediterranean, is at the heart of all the theories of continents and mountains; and geology expressly excludes the geosyncline and its strata from the probabilities of deep ocean valleys. The most interesting subjects of continental geology are simply banished from conjecture. Interest in deep-ocean geology is lacking because science has made no field effort to bore or blast into it, and so extend engineering science to the deep ocean bottoms.

Earthquakes made a theme wherein I instinctively distrusted the word “tectonic.” For generations the geological mind thought the earth losing heat, contracting internally, and wrinkling a crust in bumps, with vast overthrusts of broken strata, thus folding the Appalachians and the Andes. All sorts of accommodations to a thin crust thirty miles deep were invented; by Dana and Geikie, by Suess and Wiechert, and finally by one who should have been the foremost block faulting expert, Dutton. Hawaii convinced him that volcanoes are only skin deep and that the thin crust is so sensitive that a shift of the weight of river muds and sands is enough to push down the great valley of California, while an underflow pushes up the Sierra Nevada. This is the doctrine of “isostasy.” It agrees with the Stübel idea of shallow remnant reservoirs for the lava of volcanoes.

Isostasy was devised by Dutton and pounced upon by the mathematicians, until they had gravity proving the whole world thin-crusted over an understratum of plastic lava. The seismologists on continents agreed, finding a density change, but with no evidence of fluidity. The world became, mathematically and petrologically, a sphere built of layers all the way down to the heavy fluid hot core, which was conveniently imagined to consist of iron and nickel, because some bolides of the solar system made of those metals occasionally fall on the earth.

All my experience of volcanoes and of deep oceans militated against a thin crust, a shallow underlayer of basalt to feed volcanoes, and a nickel iron core. The core is heavy, and sixty-two elements are heavier than iron. All reason seemed against the notion that the vast volcanic sea bottoms are a thin crust wrinkling under contraction. Reason found every evidence on both earth and moon for a thick peridotite or olivine crust, broken into ancient blocks, bounded by long lines of fracture, the blocks variously settling and scraping against each other from time immemorial, actuated by volcanic forces from the core. The whole of volcanology points toward sinking and down-faulted ocean basins, alongside the remnant upstanding continents which are the minor feature of the primitive earth surface. Water condensed and filled hollows. The processes of the core that made all this were volcanism—mother of air, ocean, seabottom, land, and life. The crust was thick enough to make cracks 2,000 miles long on a globe 8,000 miles in diameter. If there was a balancing of weights as in “isostasy,” it was between high silica in continental lava and low silica basalt that spread under the oceans. This is not static, but is a continuing process of a kinetic, or changing, earth.

This excursion into theory is intentional, so that in the middle of this book the geologically trained reader will understand that experience of volcanoes in Hawaii, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Alaska, Italy, and Japan had made me a rebel against conventional geology. The reason is that the great submerged mountain range of the long Hawaiian Archipelago is different from the mountain ranges of Europe and Asia and must be accounted for in global history. How would the three decades 1921 to 1950 confirm expectation that the deep ocean bottom is the most important and volcanic thing in geology, just as it is the biggest thing?

Routine observation and photography at Halemaumau pit reached a climax of recording brilliant fiery events in March 1921, and it changed to the recording of explosive steam in May 1924. The first of these fireworks, after lava flows from a rift in the Kau Desert, draining the pit and fluctuating with the ups and downs of the pit lava, occurred in 1919–1920. This was a return to Halemaumau of effervescence in frothy volumes, so that the pit was overflowing on five sides. On March 20, 1921, occurred the most intense display of brilliancy, culminating the gradual rising of the lava column to outflow following 1918.

Then came, in the later months of 1921, a sinking away and recovery of the lava. In 1922 came a sinking again, with the lava breaking out in the Chain of Craters of the eastern rift, as though it had been blocked by freezing in the southwest rift and was forced over to split open the old cracks of the mountain to the east. This was confirmed in 1923 by another outbreak in the forest adjacent to the sixth crater, Makaopuhi, which with Napau pit beyond, had been the scene of the 1922 outflows.

This action was all extended in April 1924 to the shoreline end of the eastern rift, thirty miles away from Halemaumau, when the Kapoho country cracked open with many earthquakes, and a block of the mountain settled beneath sea level. Coconut palms at the beach were left in a lagoon of sea water eight feet deep. Seventy-five earthquakes in a day frightened away Filipino plantation laborers; railway and roads were ruptured, with new cliffs forming nine feet high; and all of this followed a monumental sinking of Halemaumau bottom, from a vast sea of lava to a tumble of debris in two months.

It was evident that between 1920 and 1924 the fracture of the long curved rift athwart Kilauea cauldron from the Kau Desert to the east point of the island was draining the lava out under the ocean to the east. Forty miles from the shore, the submarine slope is covered by 18,000 feet of water.

What is the result? The whole of Kilauea Mountain is charged with groundwater, which trickles warm through the beach at Pohoiki and partly warms ponds near Kapoho. Obviously this groundwater of the southeastern lobe of the island mountain surrounds the shaft of Halemaumau at some undefined depth, and the rising and falling glassy lava in the shaft ordinarily glazes itself with a water-tight skin, and may be thought of as a crusted tube. About this tube the groundwater shows only as the lazy steam of the little vents of the pit margins. On May 10, 1924, came the collapse of the Halemaumau pit walls, introducing an explosive steam eruption such as had not been seen by five generations of Hawaiians.

The adventures of this period were glorious ones for the scientists. First should be mentioned the amazing subsidence which occurred suddenly at 2 A.M. November 28, 1919, just as Mrs. Jaggar looked across Kilauea Crater at the outline of crags and lava lakes making a glowing dome where Halemaumau pit should have been. We felt a lot of little earthquakes and saw the dome of lava heapings, with glowing lakes on top, sink slowly and majestically and leave the old familiar glowing pit. For almost the whole of 1919 this had been a dome, with overflows, now here, now there. At ten o’clock only the evening before, old Alec had conducted tourists to the top of the dome, where they looked down at the clover-leaf lakes. If it had started to go down while they were there—and any of us might have been there—it is awesome to think of the inevitable fiery engulfment.

After watching the sinking, which was followed by puffs of dust and smoke and some avalanche noise, we took a car to the pit at once. And when we got there in the early morning hours we found the pit enlarged to 2,000 feet across, with the pattern of the lava lakes still apparent at the bottom, indicating that the entire cylinder had lowered as a unit to a depth of about 700 feet. Red hot avalanches were tumbling inward with a roar, from the veneer of lava plastered on the wall. By the forenoon of that day the liquid lava started to pour up and inward as a ring of bubbling fountains all around the edges. What this ring represented was the wall crack between the subsided cylinder of semisolid lava, now pushing upward, and the funnel of rock wall outside. This V-shaped filling grew wider as the uprising progressed, and so the ring lake became wider, while the top of the harder column became a ring of crags and the space inside became a quiet lava puddle supplied by inflow from the ring lake. The whole column of ring crags with the lagoon inside and the brilliantly fountaining lake outside rose with unheard of rapidity during the next three weeks.

In mid-December, I took Mrs. Jaggar and a woman friend down to inspect this amazing corolla, or lily, of hard crags which had blossomed up in less than a month, so that the outer ring of boiling fluid was less than a hundred feet below us. We stood at the rift in the Kilauea floor which heads toward the southwest cliff, and suddenly we felt slight earthquakes and saw the face of that cliff crumbling in a visible tumble of rocks. The mountain was quietly breaking open athwart the Kilauea caldera floor, and while we watched we saw forty or fifty low lava fountains in a straight line burst up along a floor crack between us and the cliff.

Remember that this crack traversed the downslope between Halemaumau edge and Kilauea wall. Looking back at the ring lake, we saw it beginning to lower and leave a shoreline of black plastering spatter. When we looked into the rift crack at our feet, only one or two feet gaping open, the liquid lava showed about twenty feet down. We were standing on the side of the crack away from the motor car terminus, and floods of lava on the Kilauea floor were spreading right and left from the straight line of vents between us and Kilauea wall. We had to get away from there pronto, as no one could tell what ground might erupt between us and our car.

I carefully instructed our friend to be deliberate and step across the fissure; but the girl felt sure that crossing a red hot crack called for a leap. She stepped on a loose slab at the edge of the narrow chasm and slipped into the crack, where she was wedged until we pulled her out. We then stepped across the fissure, for the live lava was far below, and made our way back to the car without further trouble.

The lake lowered only apportionately to the slowing black outflow on the south floor, which was short-lived. This was the beginning of a splitting open of the main Kilauea Mountain flank southwest and outside the crater which continued for months.

Another adventure, and an important one, happened with the outflooding of lava in the Kau Desert, where terrace upon terrace of pahoehoe lava was building up. This finally became a hill over the rift, two miles long and 200 feet high, which we called Mauna Iki, or little Mauna Loa. The exploration, day after day, of the extending quiet lava outwelling along this rift made it necessary to find new trails from the Pahala roadway and across the desert to the lengthening hillock.

Following the new Mauna Iki trail, Mr. Finch noticed that the ancient ash beds, two or three feet thick, had surfaces as hard as Portland cement. And on one of these he, like Robinson Crusoe, found the print of a naked foot, made when the old ash was a mud. On the trail across these old surfaces many more hardened, ancient footprints were found, of men, women, children, and pigs headed both up and down the mountain.

These prints recalled the story of Keoua’s army when there was a big explosive eruption of Halemaumau in 1790 and the mud rains of the period were from ash which had been baked by the volcanic fires. If roasted and moistened, the chemical composition of powdered basalt is that of weak cement, and these surfaces were in hollows which had resisted erosion wash for 130 years. Part of the slopes closer to Halemaumau had been eroded bare, but they also showed footprints. Later the trail was followed up the mountain close to Kilauea Crater and down toward Pahala, and the ash of 1790 was found to be made up of pisolites, or fossil raindrops, in many places. Evidently the eruption had been accompanied by torrential thunder storms, and the natives had walked through the deposits of mud, which had in a century been dried by the sun into a resistant surface. These fossil footprints were to become one of the attractions of a tourist trail in the National Park.

One night in 1922, after some earthquakes of the evening, we were awakened by friends who told us that a glow like a forest fire could be seen from the high cliffs of Kilauea in the easterly direction of Makaopuhi. This big crater had a platform at one end and a pit at the other. We aroused Mr. Finch, then traveled by car as far as we could go on the truck trail, got lost, and with flashlights made our way on foot toward the glow and fume in a rugged wilderness, over cracked ground and old aa lava and obstructing vegetation. We were chilled by a cold drizzle and not at all sure where we would emerge.

Fortunately, the country is sufficiently open so that we could see the “pillar of fire by night.” It turned out that the new fire was in the deep end of Makaopuhi itself. From the western edge of Makaopuhi pit we looked down on ten or fifteen ribbons of lava, made by a line of spouting fountains at the top of the talus heap, and pouring from the top of the big slide-rock slope. We spent the night on the edge in much discomfort, and watched the puddle of accumulation in the bottom of the funnel and the glowing streaks which fed it. It was evident that the eastern rift of Kilauea Mountain had opened, and the lava outflow was found to extend to Napau Crater, a shallow saucer pit farther east. At the same time the lava in Halemaumau went down, enlarging the pit, and cauliflower dust clouds arose from much internal avalanching. This anticipated and resembled the avalanche steam blasts of 1924.

The adventures of the 1924 explosive eruption were too numerous and complicated to elaborate here. However, it was a tremendous event in the history of Hawaii and was totally unforeseeable on the basis of earlier experience. Mrs. Jaggar and I were in New York writing magazine articles and I was giving lectures, when word came from Finch and the newspapers that Halemaumau was caving in and throwing up rocks. We traveled with all haste to Honolulu, where the Navy agreed to send me by plane to Hilo, though they refused to take Mrs. Jaggar.

The Admiral’s car took us to Pearl Harbor, where a seaplane was ready and Mr. Thurston was waiting to see me off, accompanied by a motion picture cameraman. Then pilot Chourré took me into the sky over Diamond Head on my first flight. A companion plane was piloted by Lieutenant Sinton, who had radio communication with Pearl Harbor. Crossing high above the Molokai Channel, I looked down at the beautiful pattern of trade-wind formed whitecaps, and was surprised after a half hour to observe that the wave crests were farther apart. I was even more surprised to see Sinton’s plane far above us. The mechanic in the forward cockpit had been putting up his fingers repeatedly during our flight, to indicate, I later learned, how many cylinders were missing in the Liberty engine supported above us. Our plane was getting closer and closer to the waves and flying fish raced beside us. Finally we felt the bump of wave after wave on the bottoms of the pontoons, and the pilot brought the seaplane to a squelching stop, close to the surf of the Molokai reef.

We found ourselves in fifteen feet of water, the coral reef visible below. I was deputed to throw out an anchor and make the line fast to a cleat, while pilot and mechanic climbed up to the engine, which had been losing compression and could not keep up the requisite speed. Lieutenant Sinton’s pilot plane came down and circled above us until he saw we were safe, then went on to Maui. Meanwhile, I watched the water with great interest, for sharks. When our boys got the engine going with a roar, I pulled up the anchor and we took off against wind and wave, with the pontoons going bang, bang, bang, against the tops of the waves. But finally we were airborne and out above the blue water.

Then the engine gave out again and we came down. This time the men rigged a sea anchor made of buckets with a line attached to the bow, to hold the ship’s nose up to the wind, and battened the hatches with canvas covers. We clambered up on top of the upper wing to wait for rescue. The wind was blowing a gale, the whitecaps hissed by us, and we lay on our bellies. The aviators told me that this was the first forced landing they had had. The word landing seemed to me inapplicable.

We drifted for five hours, moving slowly down the wind, before a white motor boat appeared, coming from Molokai. At the same time smoke showed from two rescue vessels in the Pearl Harbor and Maui directions respectively. Sinton, who had radioed for help, flew back and circled above us, reminding me of the goonies soaring over a wounded bird on a fish line which I had seen in Alaskan waters. The Molokai boat reached us first, picked up our sea anchor and towed us into Kaunakakai. We pitched so and took such a pounding from the gigantic trade-wind waves that it didn’t seem possible that the mahogany hull and the two lateral pontoons could hold together. However, we made the harbor and tied up to the buoy.

I hoped and prayed that the commercial packet, the Mauna Kea, might take me to Hilo. But no, the navy tug Navaho came from Lahaina, and Captain Green put up his megaphone and announced that the Admiral’s instructions were that he was to take Dr. Jaggar to Hawaii. My heart sank because I knew what a seaway would be running against that little tub. The second rescue ship proved to be the Pelican equipped with a crane to swing the plane on board and take it back to Pearl Harbor.

On board the Navaho I was assigned a canvas camp cot in the lower, circular wheelhouse at the bow; and all night long waves broke over the bow and a foot of water sloshed back and forth under my cot. The pitching was so heavy and our speed so reduced that it took us all night to get across the Hawaii Channel, and we didn’t make Hilo until 2 P.M. the second day. After that wet and seasick night, I found wry humor in our reception at Hilo Wharf, where we were met by Frank Cody with his motion picture camera and a bunch of hula girls and leis. Instead of five hours, the journey took thirty and quite failed to make me air-minded. Furthermore, I arrived at Kilauea Volcano in time for only the final stages of the explosive eruption.

Finch had organized volunteers, including Oliver Emerson as photographer, and even our collie dog, Teddy, who could hear and feel an explosion coming before we had any other warning. All observers wrote notes and fondled the seismographs during the three weeks of steam blast and cavings in of the pit, which had enlarged itself by collapse 700 feet outward radially in all directions. When I got there it was 3,500 by 3,000 feet in diameters and 1,300 feet deep, the bottom a funnel of converging taluses, made of avalanches from the pit walls. The taluses were wet and steaming vigorously in vertical lines, and at night showed red hot avalanches from the north and west walls, where two intrusive bodies of hard rock were red hot inside. The talus below stayed hot, and slides occurred for only a few seconds. The incandescent matter was not flowing in any sense, but was, rather, the peeling of a rocky boss of reddish color at the west and a canoe-shaped ledge at the north about 600 feet below the rim.

This showed the cross section of old screes, revealed above it, and horizontal basalt flows overlapping above that. It was a beautiful section of an ancient pit, of the same quality as Halemaumau itself, and the incandescent canoe sill at the bottom appeared to be an intrusion of fine-grained gabbro, which had pushed its way in under an older talus funnel, similar to the present talus cup of Halemaumau, the bottom of which was 700 feet lower.

On the opposite wall of the pit the Kau Desert rift was displayed as a vertical cavern or arcade, merging into a group of dikes higher up and tapering to zero thinness at the top. These same dikes, less conspicuous, cut the canoe sill on the northeast wall, to indicate that the ring of the pit was fractured vertically from below. This fracture is the main deep rift of the mountain which crosses under Kilauea, bending in the direction of Kilauea Iki, and this it was which had opened as a curved chasm to let the lava down. Lava had gone down in a succession of flank outflows, with intervening rises, from the Kau Desert in 1920 to the final drainage under the sea at the east. This drainage had let in the groundwater, made a steam boiler, and so caused the explosive eruption and engulfment of Halemaumau walls as the mountain yawned open.

A. L. Day made one of his return excursions to Kilauea at this time and thus saw the extraordinary phenomenon of the hard basaltic intrusive bodies half way down the walls, caving to a red hot talus. The explosions, which started with two-hour intervals, gradually decreased, coming at four hours and eight hours; and on May 18 came the culminating cauliflower clouds with torrents downward of broken rock, some of it showing low red heat. At all times the motive power was steam jets 10 to 15 thousand feet high, which plastered the pahoehoe of the pit edge with broken wall rock fragments of every size.

There was no sign of pasty lava or glassy bombs in the ejecta, and the red incandescence seen at night in some of the explosions was the avalanche material of the western boss and the canoe sill.

It took the pit less than two months, to mid-July, to recover its liquid lava, which poured through the talus and made aa puddles, to form a new pattern of cone source and short-lived flows. Then everything came to rest, and lava activity was not resumed there until the summer of 1927. However, in 1926 Mauna Loa went into action on its southwestern rift, and sent an aa flow into the sea at South Kona, destroying the village of Hoopuloa.

Here was history in the island lava column of majestic decline and recovery from 1914 onward. Outflow in Mauna Loa crater at 13,000 feet in 1914 extended to outflow from the southwest rift in 1916 and 1919 at 8,000 feet. Next, in 1920, came outflow in the Kau Desert from Kilauea, at 3,000 feet. There were alternating spurts upward within Halemaumau pit, acting as a crater similar to Mauna Loa’s at the lower Kilauea level of 3,700 feet.

Then this whole progress downward moved over to the Chain of Craters at 2,500 feet, and finally to the ruptured earthquake rift of Kapoho on the east point of Hawaii and at beach level. Some miles farther east, on the same rift beneath the sea, the gigantic submarine mountain of Hawaii drained the last lava from Halemaumau pit and let in groundwater which caused steam explosions.

July 1924 saw the deep lava recovering in the crack and sealing off the water, so as to bubble up in the bottom debris of Halemaumau and push its way upward into the crevices of the island. It reached the top of Mauna Loa in 1926 and reactuated outflow at the center of the island. This migration of vents from top to bottom and back again took twelve years of fracturing, and it relieved from lava this big piece of the Hawaiian ridge. In reaching the groundwater and steamblast phase, it accomplished something which had not happened since 1790, making a supercycle of 134 years.

The decade after explosion at Halemaumau was marked by small lava gushes in the bottom of the pit, bringing the depth from 1,300 feet in 1924 to 750 feet in 1934. The layers were something less than 100 feet each, and they were fed by pahoehoe conelets at the slide-rock margin. As usual, the lava was gushing up the western wall crack along the margin of the bottom magma cylinder. There was no trace of recurrence of steam blasts.

Despite the excitement of actual events, experimentation continued; and I continued working on inventions for the experiments. Two approaches to our problems concerned seismic recorders which could be put in the hands of amateurs, and range finders for improving pit surveys. I had been convinced for many years that the three-component seismograph was too elaborate to be operated by volunteer school teachers or telephone operators who have other things to do. Such a seismograph records with photographic paper the north-south, east-west, and up-down motion of the ground, on a chronograph which keeps accurate time and registers a wavy line every second, so that the recording paper has to be changed and developed every day. Moreover, these instruments are for measuring distance to earthquake origins by physics of wave motion, and they have become hopelessly mathematical. Such mathematics makes for assumptions of uniformity about a rock crust which is not uniform. Qualitative science wants to know what happens at a specific rock location and wants the motion recorded by the simplest possible mechanical device. It also wants a value in number at each location, for size and direction of the first motion. This is for an earthquake, identified as one incident, over such an island as Hawaii, where the rock units are many and different. This is especially true of long periods of time when there may be no earthquakes to record.

I devised a simple shock recorder, consisting of a horizontal boom of very light wood attached to a hinged weight which swung like a door, so that the boom scratched a line on a circular card which was rotated and moved along by a common alarm clock. The result was a spiral mark on the card, such that an earthquake interposed would write a zigzag opposite a place on the clock face appropriate to the time of day. All that was necessary was to remove and date the card, wind the clock once a day, and measure the zigzag.

Mr. Ingalls of Scientific American read an article by me in which I described my shock recorder and thought it would lead amateur machinists to devise their own machines and to record the vibrations about them. Numerous amateurs did send in designs for instruments, and Ingalls believed that the seismograph hobby would become as popular as the amateur astronomical telescope hobby. But it failed because the amateurs were waiting for earthquakes, which didn’t happen. They were not content with vibrations from trucks, railroad trains, waterfalls, surf on rocks, artillery practice, or wind storms.

My improved shock recorder gained some use later in New Zealand and Montserrat, after big earthquakes in those places stirred the authorities to build simple instruments. However, popular seismoscope simply doesn’t exist.

The range finder I had been working on since my teaching days in Massachusetts Tech, where I had made an optical device with a traveling index mirror which moved along an upright scale of centimeters, and a sextant telescope. The idea was a transit, with self-contained base line close to the operator. My theory was that in such measurements of distance as we had to use—to about a thousand feet or less, to the lava fountains in the bottom of Halemaumau pit—we might read off the vertical distance from a single station, when all other stations were enclosed in smoke.

In the Aleutian Islands and elsewhere I experimented with a Zeiss stereoscopic rangefinder designed for artillery ranges, but it was not accurate enough for short distances. Everything in my instrument depended on moving a telescope parallel to itself with superlative precision, on a scale within the instrument. I finally hit upon using a track of taut piano wire, probably the straightest line in all mechanics.

If one first looked at an object twenty miles away (infinite distance), the telescope could be moved along right and left and the image would remain immovable on a vertical hair. If it were now focussed on an object 1,000 feet away, the displacement of the telescope on the centimeter scale would measure the distance with a high degree of accuracy. This was the stadia principle inverted to contain the rod at the observing position.

I also made several graphic devices for surveying Halemaumau daily from the rim benchmarks. However, when lava overtopped the rim and destroyed the datum posts, mapping became difficult.

Drilling temperature wells into the floor and rim of Kilauea Crater was a project I had anticipated when Mr. John Brooks Henderson of Washington came to Hawaii and offered to help finance it. We had taken the temperature of hot cracks in many places, and found them to range from 320° Centigrade at the Postal Card Crack close to Halemaumau, down to 96° Centigrade at Sulphur Bank, and then on to lower temperatures at many cracks which yielded visible vapor in damp weather but no vapor at all in sunshine. A spectacle for tourists was a crack on the Sulphur Bank flat, where a cigar to windward or the exhaust gas of a car would nucleate the invisible vapor and cause a big puff of white “steam” to show. This phenomenon, which depends on smoke particles condensing invisible water vapor, is well known at Solfatara near Naples.

The experimental approach to finding out what the temperature of the ground really is, is to drill a hole and keep the temperature measured repeatedly with a thermometer, and to find out the thermal gradient change vertically if possible. This means to measure how much the temperature changes with depth. The whole problem concerns how much unusual heat energy is released at a place like Kilauea Crater.

With the aid of Hobart, a drilling engineer, I started at Sulphur Bank with a churn drill. We quickly discovered that we were going through intensely hard basalt, containing metallic sulfide which appeared to be pyrite but turned out to be marcasite. After drilling for several years—with four holes at Sulphur Bank, one sixty-foot hole under the observatory shop, and about twenty-five holes in the eastern part of the Kilauea floor over a surveyed map pattern—we changed to a rotary core drill using steel shot, and then changed again to a percussion drill actuated by compressed air, for shallow holes to show cross-country temperatures. Unfortunately core drilling requires large quantities of water, which we did not have, for the Hawaii National Park depends upon rainwater collected from roofs in redwood tanks. Without water cooling, rotary bits heat and expand in hot rock, stick, and are often lost.

Two seventy-foot holes, one at Sulphur Bank and the other in the middle of Kilauea floor, showed no definite thermal gradient; and in general it turned out that drill holes were dependent on steam in the cracks for their temperatures.

Heat was brought up by vapor, and in a number of ten-foot holes scattered over the Kilauea floor, the hottest were at the edge of the floor. The Postal Card Crack, near the edge of Halemaumau and 600 feet above red hot intrusives, was exceptionally hot, and it is not at all clear how the water made contact with the hot intrusive rock underneath. This place completely caved in and was lost forever within the enlarged pit of 1924. Sulphur Bank itself is at the edge of an old Kilauea floor on a shelf at a high level. The extra heat at floor edges means a wall crack between the crater fill and the confining funnel, so that hot gas comes up from intrusive lava somewhere deep down toward the center.

Thus when a mercurial thermometer was lowered, ten-foot holes would show a hot place half way down and cold rock at the bottom. Some holes had no heat at all, which meant that an inclined steam crack was cut across by the hole or that no steam crack was present. The heat supply was dependent upon vapor channels from heated rainwater, but we were never able, owing to lack of funds, to drill a hole deep enough to find the water supply which made the steam. It is a remarkable fact that the casings on three wells at Sulphur Bank emit continuously a column of steam exactly at the theoretical boiling point for this altitude, as though the groundwater were boiling only a short distance below. Dr. Allen by his analyses proved that Sulphur Bank vapor was ninety-nine percent steam and that the remainder contained fractions of a percent of sulfur and carbon dioxide, but this sulfur was enough in the course of months to coat the interior of our casings with yellow crystals over black iron sulfide. It coated the Sulphur Bank with yellow crystals of sulfur and soaked the rock below to generate brassy iron sulfide.

The result of these experiments was to exhibit the complexity of any solfatara in its relation to underground lava, and to the soakage of a volcanic country by rainfall. This is especially important for Martinique and Montserrat.

Another experiment was conducted by Emerson, who was equipped by the Observatory with chemical apparatus to make qualitative analyses of numerous Kilauea products, and he also did critical photographic work, including some photography in the infra-red. In one valuable experiment, he melted Kilauea lava in a refractory crucible at a temperature of about 1200° Centigrade until it was as fluid as honey. Allowed to chill and harden naturally, it was shiny glass like pahoehoe lava. If stirred with an iron rod, it made sprouted black needles, crystallized all through, like aa lava. Thus he proved that stirring made Hawaiian lava crystallize and sprout like fudge, or like the solidification of such metals as silver and bismuth. Sudden outbreak and stirring anywhere will convert pahoehoe to aa; but never does aa become converted physically to pahoehoe, unless flame melts it. The standing pinnacles in the midst of an aa flow, which breaks up into boulders, give evidence of the stirring process.

When Emerson’s discovery is applied to basaltic lava flows, it appears that the glassy lava of a source, when stirred by gas fountaining or by flowing, will change from its glassy condition to a sprouting and crystallizing condition. All flows are glassy pahoehoe pumice fountains at source vents, and a quarter of a mile away they become aa. Later the source pahoehoe preserves itself within a glassy skin and pours forward under glassy shells and frontal toes.

R. M. Wilson’s work supplied proof of a swelling mountain. Wilson was one of the three leading members of the topographic party of the Geological Survey. The other two were C. Birdseye and A. Burkland. Wilson, whom I had known as a student in M. I. T., was a product of Spofford’s Civil Engineering department and was to become the chief computer of the Survey in Washington. As levelman in Birdseye’s organization, he became topographic engineer of the Observatory, and produced by precise leveling and triangulation the brilliant experiment which showed [the swelling and shrinking of the mountain during fifteen years.

By close cooperation with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey we placed a tide gauge at Hilo, both for a sea level base and to record tidal waves. Wilson also, in 1921, ran a level line from Hilo to the Volcano House benchmark, where the Geological Survey had run levels in 1911. The county roadway was marked with bronze plates inscribed with leveling heights, and Wilson’s results showed the edge of Kilauea Crater to be three feet higher in 1921 than it had been in 1911.

Wilson’s determination of heights above sea level certified that the whole mountain swelled up during the ten years prior to 1921. About 1918, lava and seismographs had proved rising overflow at the center, while the edge of Kilauea Crater was being tilted away from the center. This went on during the massive rising of the interior lava of Halemaumau into a dome where the pit had been, and it proved that Kilauea Mountain was being injected along cracks, not only under the pit, but along the rifts, as indicated by outflow on the southwest and east in the years 1920 and 1924.

But this was not all of Wilson’s work. He revisited all surveying stations after the big collapse of Halemaumau that accompanied the explosive eruption of May 1924, and found that the Volcano House benchmark lowered a little more than three feet during May 1924 and that places close to Halemaumau dropped nearly fifteen feet. This lowering of the mountain was graduated outward twenty miles from the center at trig stations, or concrete posts, in the Kau Desert and at stations along the road to Hilo. These stations changed altitude to show that the big mountain tumefied or swelled up to that distance of twenty miles during the big intrusion of cracks at the overflowing time, as though the mountain dome were a tumor forty miles in diameter with Halemaumau at the center. Of course there is no certainty that the shore line in Puna, or even the Hilo tide gauge itself, did not go down with the slumping of the mountain, for the thing called sea level is nothing but an average of tide gauge readings at a fixed wharf. Remember that the east point of Hawaii sank eight feet on the Kilauea rift during the April crisis.

Wilson also surveyed by horizontal triangulation in 1921, determining that stations around Halemaumau had moved inward toward the center, by a specified number of feet, different at each station, and that other stations outside of Kilauea Crater had changed position horizontally on the map, as though the mountain were shrinking. This entire series of measurements of change between 1911 and 1926 jibed with the seismograph’s measurements of the tilting of the ground. The seismograph picked out 1918, when Halemaumau overflowed, as the swelling year. In 1924 the tilt reversed itself, turning inward toward Halemaumau, and became tremendous when the pit collapsed and exploded.

It is impossible to accent sufficiently the importance of the discovery of a measured swelling and slumping of a volcano throughout a lava crisis occupying fifteen years. It was so tremendous that critical engineers in Washington refused to believe Wilson’s results. However, his findings were verified by the contemporaneous lava measurement results, earthquake enumerations, and tilt meter results. These showed that earthquake frequency increased when Kilauea slumped and that a lava mountain had swelled until it was three feet higher at the summit in ten years and had contracted by a larger amount during the years of an explosive eruption period immediately thereafter. This all agrees with the excellent results in Omori’s volcanic and seismic events, obtained by Japanese army and navy engineers at several volcanoes and earthquakes. It also agrees with the positive facts of Vesuvius and the Canary Islands, starting with the controversy about “elevation craters” started by Leopold von Buch in the first half of the nineteenth century and carried forward by Mercalli on Vesuvius in 1894 when a lava hill was seen to swell up. There, too, others would not believe. The opposition always insisted that a volcano was built by heaped material, that it could not possibly swell.

Wilson’s results are far-reaching, for the whole of geology depends on uplift of continents and downsinking of sedimentary basins. Most geologists account for these things by the theory of weighting and underflow at a thin crust (isostasy), refusing to grant that volcanic heat and tumefaction yield intrusive power everywhere through cracks in the deeper crust.

I wish that I could describe adequately the high adventure of this fruitful time. We built a vehicle from a model T Ford with a Ruckstell axle, stripped of mudguards and equipped with balloon tires doubled at the rear, so as to travel and carry loads over the smooth pahoehoe of the Kilauea floor. We found that a powerful light rig of this type, with excessively low gear, could climb up on lava lobes one to two feet high. But this called for experienced driving and special methods. Sending a man on foot ahead to pick a way and to drag a crowbar which scratched a track, we could drive anywhere on the lava. And we used this rig to haul drums of water and drill apparatus. I once drove artillery officers out over the rough floor of the crater, and afterwards saw similar cars used by the army in the first World War as cross-country transportation for the doctors and wounded in No Man’s Land.

Before a roadway encircled Kilauea Crater, Mr. Finch and I, carrying two-inch planks for bridging cracks, made the complete circuit of the crater by way of the rifted Kau Desert in our special vehicle, which has now been succeeded by the jeep, the most universal vehicle of World War II. Volcanology prospected the field of war in more ways than one, so I named my popular book “Volcanoes declare war.”

Inventions led to expeditions both in Hawaii and in distant lands during the decade of the twenties, some by invitation, some to offer assistance at disasters, and some for the natural extension of my own work. On September 1, 1923, came the big earthquake at Tokyo. With Mrs. Jaggar, I was permitted to land in Japan and make a study of the effects of the disaster. The destruction of Tokyo and Yokohama was a final, sad tragedy for Omori, who for years had worked to protect the Emperor and Japan by studying earthquake forecasts for Tokyo and by conducting research in earthquake-proof engineering. It was a cruel commentary that the disaster came while he was attending a science congress in Australia, particularly as the great destruction of life was occasioned by fire and typhoon winds. But Omori’s organization handled the seismic event admirably. Omori returned at once, but almost immediately died.

We steamed into Yokohama harbor, were welcomed by Captain Gatesford Lincoln U. S. N. and his destroyer flotilla. We went on board his flagship, and were sent in his launch to the broken jetties of Yokohama, where we found no custom house or police. We walked up to the camp of United States marines, amid the wreckage of the United States Consulate, where the Consul had been killed.

Yokohama, which I had known well in 1909 and 1914, was a tumble of ruins; and the long Bund with its splendid waterfront structures, including the Grand Hotel, was a heap of rubble. My classmate Purington, a mining geologist who had been staying at the Grand with his family escaped with one child and went back to rescue his wife. A second shock brought down more masonry and crushed him.

We were given a tent and allowed to mess with the marines, and next day we crowded into a train for Tokyo. It was packed to the doors and had people seated on the roof. We were warned by Americans to dress as roughly as possible, as the populace was on edge, and foreigners must not appear to be tourists. By great good luck we got into the Imperial Hotel which had withstood the shake and fire, though it was considerably damaged.

We visited the Honjo district of the river bottom, where the damage was at maximum, and we saw the remains of a pile of corpses, clothes, and household goods in one small yard where 30,000 people had been incinerated. Fire had closed in from all sides, and the shrieking mob of men, women, and children piled up on top of each other, amid handcarts and clothing bundles—kindling which added fuel to the horror.

The mayor of Tokyo sent us in a small steamer to the island of Oshima, on which is the volcano Mihara, close to the earthquake center. We climbed up and looked down into a glowing pit which was making no lava outflow at the time, though Mihara is famous for basalt flows.

Water soundings showed 900 feet of subsidence in Sagami Bay opposite Oshima, and there were changed depths elsewhere, some of them shallowing by underwater land slips. We went to the Boshu Peninsula east of Tokyo, where the beach had been rising for many years, and where the earthquake rising left wharves high and dry. The principal effect of the earthquake, occurring at noon just when all charcoal braziers were lighted for luncheon in the flimsy Japanese houses of wood and paper, was to set fires in an area of hundreds of square miles and a score of towns. Water reservoirs were destroyed, there was no adequate fire department to care for a conflagration, and a high wind was blowing in the bright sunshine. A characteristic of Japanese cities was the absence of open parkways for refugees, hence the crushing, burning, drowning, suffocation, and annihilation of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of factories, railroad trains, water supplies, power plants, and every essential utility in a great metropolitan area with a population of many millions. The horizontal movement of the ground in the shock was about eight inches, and aftershocks kept on for many months.

We explored Yokohama, clambering up to the Bluff where everything was wrecked and where land slips had tumbled down the precipice. We visited what remained of a beautiful English type villa with a slate roof, which had been occupied by two missionary ladies and their numerous parrots. These people were encamped, along with their parrots, in a shack built by their yardman, for the residence had tumbled down like a house of cards. One woman had been imprisoned between her bed and the wall, and was quite uninjured when the gardener dug her out through cracks of the roof.

Scientifically, what happened to the ground in this earthquake was not explained by any single fault. Whatever happened to the bottom of Sagami Bay was not communicated across the beach to the coast as any great rift. Small faults were identified in a number of places, the shoreline in one place lifted a few feet and lowered in another; but no such movement as the big subsidence of the bottom of the bay crossed the contact of sea and land. It appeared as though the margin of the bay itself outlined an area of sudden slumping, somehow related to Mihara Volcano on Oshima; but the shoreline of that island was not seriously affected. The great mountains of the foothills of Fujiyama, and the Hakone district, were shaken to a hash of broken railway tunnels and land slips, but the topography was not altered.

A resurvey of trig stations west of Tokyo revealed movements that indicated the country had been spirally twisted. However, it has always seemed a mystery to me that all the motion on land was so small, when change on the bottom of the bay was so great.

There was a local tidal wave at the bay shore of Kamakura, but no great tidal wave from the deep ocean came to Tokyo. Some volcanic effort of deep lava had wedged open and jolted the sea bottom, but how it acted is entirely obscure. It was quite different from the San Francisco quake, with its side slip of twenty-one feet and a crack 400 miles long.

When we returned to Japan in 1926 with the Pacific Science Congress, the restoration of Tokyo was practically complete and a magnificent greater city had been built with wide and large parkways. The government was lavish in its entertainment of the scientists attending the congress. Dr. Lacroix and I were sent to Osaka to lecture, and to show lantern slides of Mount Pelée; and expeditions all over Japan were arranged for the visitors. I had an opportunity to see for the first time the large basaltic lava fields of the lake district at the base of Fujiyama, and I was astonished at the similarity of the basaltic pahoehoe to our Hawaiian outflows and the freshness of the lavas and the lava caverns. I had never thought of Fujiyama as a “lava flow” volcano.

My next expedition was in the autumn of 1924, when I was invited by H. E. Gregory, Director of Bishop Museum, to go on an expedition on the USS Whippoorwill, Commander Samuel King, to Howland and Baker Islands. Others on the expedition were C. Montague Cooke (malacologist), George Munro (ornithologist), Erling Christophersen (botanist), Ted Dranga (marine shell collector), George Collins (Museum Trustee), and Bruce Cartwright (naturalist). These men were invited to make up one of several Bishop Museum parties which were sent out to south sea islands for collection and report.

As geologist, my job was to carry a portable seismograph and record earthquakes or microseisms and to take photographs. We had made up at the Observatory a one-component horizontal pendulum, in which the chronograph drum used smoked paper. In camp I lowered the box containing the seismograph into a hole in the sand under my cot, with a view to finding out what tremors occurred on these flat coral islands. However, no movements were detected during the period of our stay, within the sensitivity limit of the small seismograph.

Howland and Baker are coral islets, not atolls, close to the equator, with no lagoons and with deep water all around them. Howland later became famous in the tragedy of Amelia Earhart, for whom the Coast Guard prepared an airfield on the island. These islands had been guano diggings for parties from Honolulu fifty years earlier, and we found old cisterns and tracks. The islands were inhabited by thousands of goonies (gannets), man-of-war birds, and terns. In some places they covered the ground with their nests, eggs, and young, rising noisily in terrifying swarms as we walked among them. The land was perfectly flat brown guano and red weeds, with beaches of coral boulders and Tridacna, or giant clams, the highest bit ridges on the windward side. The easterly trade winds blew a powerful gale most of the time, and our ship had to land us on the leeward beaches, where we made our camp in a line of tents. The staff was divided into pairs for each tent, and Filipino mess boys did the cooking.

Landing was arduous, for there was heavy surf, even on the leeward side, and it was necessary to have a man swim in with a line in his teeth. The swimmer, Ted Dranga, made the line fast between a buoy and the shore, then built a signal fire while the ship stood off. Men and baggage were loaded into a skiff and hauled ashore by the sailor in the bow, who pulled, hand over hand, on the rope from the buoy, when the waves were favorable. The ship had to drift away each night and come back, as there was no anchorage. A few stunted kou trees still survived from guano-digging days, and numerous grasses and fleshy-leaved salt weeds grew. The beaches were covered with rats, hermit crabs, and some white ghost crabs. The ghost crabs were seen at night flittering down into the water when a flashlight was turned on the waves.

The hermit crabs, with borrowed shells, came clanking over the canvas floor under our cots at night; and as one walked along the beach with a flashlight, Polynesian rats pattered away in all directions. They had been brought by the guano schooners and doubtless lived on shellfish, birds, eggs, and fledglings.

The principal products of this expedition were notes, pictures, maps, and collections.

Within the next few years we were to combine expeditions with experimentation in the organization of new observatories in California and Alaska.

California volcanoes as a field of observatory study were an obvious choice when Judge Cramton proposed enlargement of the volcano enterprise. He succeeded in getting me a Section of Volcanology in the Geological Survey, and I sent R. H. Finch to Lassen Volcanic National Park, where he made his headquarters at Mineral. Lassen had made steamblast explosions in 1912 through 1914 which had rushed down into the forest with such horizontal destruction as occurred at Mount Pelée. It was not realized that this blast was terrible, for it was in the backwoods on top of the Sierra Nevada and little known. The national park there was created later. It is an area with a recent (1871?) cinder cone and rocky lava flow, boiling lakes and mud pots, numerous solfataras and hot springs, and a lava cavern much like those on Hawaii.