“He took his journey into a far country.”

The next decade began true experiments with volcanoes, when two organizations some 5,000 miles apart combined their resources. The Whitney Foundation created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology an endowment of $25,000 for geophysical work on earthquakes and volcanoes, expressing a preference for work in Hawaii; and a group of businessmen in Honolulu, the Volcano Research Association, offered to pay my salary for five years.

When President Maclaurin and a group of professors at M. I. T. gave me a dinner at the University Club in Boston to celebrate my departure for Honolulu, the dinner table conversation turned to the terrors of the deep sea, the dangers of volcanoes, the awfulness of leprosy in Hawaii, and the heroism of giving up a secure teaching job in Boston. I replied that their pessimism reminded me of the last words of Daniel Webster, as quoted by a New England farmer, who said “Dan’l opened his eyes, took one look at the glass of whiskey on the table at his bedside, another at the pretty nurse, and said ‘I ain’t dead yet.’”

I had organized the funds available so that a pair of Bosch-Omori seismographs were shipped from Strassburg, and other seismographs were ordered from Omori’s instrument maker in Tokyo. I collected experimental instruments such as high temperature thermometers and chronographs, of the type used in experimental physiology. Vaguely, I was going to take the blood pressure and pulse of the globe. Also I obtained a full set of weather bureau instruments for temperature, rainfall, barometric pressure, and humidity, together with the electric pyrometers, range finders, and photographic apparatus used in my previous expeditions. And I had some small Japanese transits, as well as plane tables and alidades for topographic experiments.

I was unable to go to Hawaii until 1912, so I was delighted when Perret consented to go to Kilauea Volcano in company with E. S. Shepherd, gas chemist of the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory of Washington, in the summer of 1911. Dr. A. L. Day, director of the Carnegie laboratory, kindly supplied at our expense two Leeds and Northrop resistance pyrometers and the accompanying Wheatstone bridge, as well as thermocouples loaned from his equipment. Perret and Shepherd went to Kilauea Volcano House; and Perret built a hut at the edge of Halemaumau pit, where an inner lava lake was bubbling and maintaining an island some 200 feet below the rim. Kilauea is the big cauldron, Halemaumau is the firepit in its floor. “Kilauea” activity generally means Halemaumau. They have separate cliff margins.

L. A. Thurston, leading journalist and publicist of Hawaii and keen promoter of a proposed Hawaii National Park, did everything possible to help the scientists. Perret wrote weekly reports on the condition of Halemaumau lava, and sent in photographs to Mr. Thurston’s newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Living and camping at the fire pit, Perret inaugurated something new for Hawaii, and set a standard for the Volcano Observatory. These continuous reports had been my dream for such volcanoes as Vesuvius, where publication had usually been in delayed annuals and gave no current news of what the volcano was doing. Furthermore, the Vesuvius observatory was at the foot of the peak.

I had ordered from the Lidgerwood Company an equipment of cables, including some containing electric wires. These were to span the 1,500 feet and to lower a thermometer into the pit of Halemaumau. Assisted by Alex Lancaster, the active little half-breed guide from Virginia, and by numerous laborers from the plantations, whose managers, spurred on by Thurston, took a great interest in the project, Perret and Shepherd erected two high A-frames on opposite sides of the fire pit and built a trolley on the cable stretched between them. Perret kept constant angular measurement of the changing height of the liquid lava, as the glowing slaggy pool rose and fell overflowing its banks. At one side of a triangular island was a point of ebullition called “Old Faithful” where gas bubbles burst in a fiery dome, irregularly, but approximately once a minute. The objective was to find the temperature of the liquid lava in the vicinity of the bubbling. This was achieved by actually dipping the electric pyrometers into the molten slag, then observing the precise temperature at the recording box, which was in the hands of Dr. Shepherd, who remained on the pit rim at the upper end of the connecting wires.

Finally the day came, after numerous rehearsals, when the long steel tube, or terminal, on the end of the movable cable could be moved out by the trolley to a middle point over the pit, where it would make contact with bubbling liquid lava when lowered. This was an extremely ticklish procedure, for the lava was a heavy mat of self-crusting liquid rock with the crust forming hard slabs; few places kept up an appearance of bubbling porridge. No one had ever made contact before with the liquid of a fountain like “Old Faithful.” It was fortunate that the apparatus, which was expensive, consisting of platinum wires imbedded in silica glass, was made in duplicate so that we had two of everything. The splashing liquid of “Old Faithful” looked as harmless as a kettle of boiling soup, but Perret and Shepherd were in for a surprise. When Shepherd lowered the terminal directly into the liquid, “Old Faithful” exploded, for the molten slag proved to be a suction whirlpool which threw tentacles of lava over the steel pipe. The apparatus went down to destruction “like a bass under a log,” and the cable was bitten off like a piece of line. The entire terminal vanished into the vortex, leaving only a corroded wire.

To shorten a long story, the second terminal was lowered into a seemingly safer liquid place. A wave of the melt slapped and strained the pipe, and though it was recovered, no electric resistance reading was obtained at any time with the box at the rim of the pit. Close to $1,000 in equipment was lost. The resistance pyrometer is a sensitive tool in the laboratory, for giving precise degrees of temperature in the region of 1200° Centigrade, supposedly the melting point of basalt. But it was unsuited for the rugged bubbling of basalt slag, where flaming gases and chilling air play more important parts than mere melting.

Fortunately Shepherd and Perret were not at the end of their resources. There still remained the thermocouple, a simpler pair of wires of platinum and iridium encased in a steel tube. The connectors from these go to a simple galvanometer in the hands of the operator. The trolley could still be used, and the thermocouple pipe had no glass inside it to be shattered. A temperature of 1000° Centigrade was recorded in a bubbling area, and this was considered good enough for an approximation.

Another experiment was to lower an iron bucket into the liquid, and pull it up full and dripping with black lava glass. This was sent off to Washington for analysis. Afterwards the lava lake went down, no more experiments that year were possible, and Perret began the plotting of a curve of high and low in the rise and fall at the bottom of the pit.

It may seem extravagant to waste valuable apparatus on such seemingly small results; but as a matter of fact, the Shepherd-Perret journal of the summer of 1911 was epoch-making in the history of volcanology and in the work of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. It proved that skilled observers could dwell inside an active crater and there apply their skills in photography, chemistry, note-taking, and continuous publication. The substance of active lava lakes was proved to have viscosities and solidifications quite different from those implied by gases, and it was shown that different types of thermometers gave negative or positive results useful for the future. Above all, the notes on volcano chemistry by Shepherd and Perret demonstrated that engineering apparatus could be applied to the hottest and most continuously active pit in the world. Their success was at the relatively small expense of a journey and a few machines. Brun of Geneva had set an example of similar work, but Perret’s curve of rise and fall added a more detailed record of the Kilauea pit from day to day than had ever been made before.

An observatory is a place of observation and measurement, whether the things observed are glaciers, rivers, stars, the weather, or volcanoes. The motive of observation in modern science is either the quality of what happens or the quantity expressed in lengths and degrees and rates of speed. Remembering the precedent of Vesuvius, I was confronted in Hawaii with the necessity of determining how a volcano should be observed, the need to measure changes in a single volcano, and the need for permanent records of what those changes are. We chose measuring instruments, photographic equipment, and thermometers, and I invented a note-taking system which was compiled into a single record book, from field notes taken uniformly by many different assistants.

The textbook needs for volcanology are records of the shape, height, number, distribution, temperature, and differences among volcanoes. How gaseous is lava? how radioactive is it? how often does it erupt? and how dangerous is it for human beings? With reference to the source, crack or crater, we need knowledge of how the earth crust is ruptured, how deep are the fractures, and how much accompanied by earthquake is the wedging upward of lava in those cracks.

My first job on arriving in Hawaii was to make contact with Mr. Thurston and his associates. The next was to get a good map made of Kilauea Volcano as a basis for measurement of changes in the fire pit. Governor Walter F. Frear came to my rescue and immediately sent Colonel Claude Birdseye and Captain Albert Burkland to make a topographic map of the proposed Hawaii National Park. These engineers brought into the field the topographic camp of the U.S. Geological Survey, and they were extremely sympathetic with my project, furnishing me with surveying monuments, and sketching out methods wherewith to make an accurate base line for measurement of changes inside the pit.

A laboratory on the northeast edge of Kilauea Crater was quickly provided through the energy of the brilliant Demosthenes Lycurgus, hospitable Greek manager of the Volcano House, the hotel where I stayed. All the merchants of Hilo, thirty miles away, contributed funds and in a few weeks carpenters were at work, on land belonging to the Bishop Estate and sublet by the Volcano House. Furniture was paid for by the Whitney Fund.

A cellar for seismographs was blasted by Territorial prisoners in the hot rock under the laboratory, at the actual northeast edge of the greater crater of Kilauea. The lava pit Halemaumau, always smoking, was in full view two miles away. The cellar lined with concrete, which shut off the steam cracks, became a warm, dry place for instruments at a constant temperature of about 80° Fahrenheit. Concrete tables on the floor of the cellar held the pair of east-west and north-south horizontal pendulums, recording with delicate pens on smoked paper, stretched over a chronograph drum. These paper records, removed every day and fixed with shellac varnish, became the seismograms of the permanent files. Long belts of wavy lines on each paper exhibited seconds, minutes, and hours; and when a sharp zigzag in one of the lines occurred, it was evidence of either a local or a distant earthquake. H. O. Wood, who had been my assistant in field geology at Harvard and had had experience with Omori seismographs at the University of California, was summoned to the Observatory as seismologist.

Thus in the first six months of 1912 I became a resident of a volcano in Hawaii and had an adequate laboratory of eight rooms, and suitable porches, a darkroom for photography, and the beginnings of seismograph records in the basement. Horses and saddles were purchased, the necessary outer houses were built, and Alec Lancaster was employed as janitor and field man. Francis Dodge, athletic young Honoluluan and son of a government surveyor, was appointed topographic assistant. He was a hardy cowboy, with some experience as rodman for the Geological Survey.

From the moment of my arrival I adopted uniform pocket scratch pads with detachable sheets for the use of all employees, insisting that anyone who went to the lava pit should write notes, inscribe the date and hour, tell what he saw, and hand the notes to me. Even Alec Lancaster, whose father was a Cherokee Indian carpenter and whose mother was a mulatto, took notes and learned about the points of the compass and the names of the coves and blowholes of the lava lake in the bottom of the pit. Some of Alec’s notes were very amusing, as when he wrote, “9:30 A.M. April 3, Old Faithful is on her job right sturdy.” However, he quickly learned the correct technical expressions for surface streaming of the lava, brightness of the fountains at night, numbers of the bubble fountains, and places of smoke on the bottom of the pit. At all times Alec was a useful camp man, a good cook, and a fearless climber of cliffs. When it came to making and using rope ladders with hickory rungs for descent down a 200-foot cliff to the edge of the lava, Alec was the first to volunteer. He drove spikes into cracks in the rock and tested out the ladders, surrounded by smoke. This was done in June and December of 1912, when the gas chemists of the Carnegie Institution were conducted to the bottom to collect gases, by pumps and vacuum tubes, from flaming spatter cones.

I hope this introduction gives some idea of what the first year of the Observatory accomplished. Meanwhile problems of policy and of the publishing of results crowded upon me thick and fast. The notes of all employees had to be compiled; critical scientific visitors had to be convinced of the usefulness of the new effort; the Massachusetts Tech and Honolulu sponsors had to be given suitable reports; a permanent record book, reproducing surveys, notes, and photographs, had to be devised; and I had to make occasional journeys to California, Boston, and Washington for contact with the Government, with scientific societies, and with scientific magazines.

It was necessary to keep track of improvements in photographic plates, for the fire pit with its dark red heat and dark red rocks was a difficult subject for photography. Fortunately, the panchromatic plate had recently been invented by Dr. C. E. K. Mees, and was a godsend for experiments in recording liquid lava splashing at night. Dr. Mees, chief of research at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, has since been a visitor and good friend of the Observatory. Both surveying and photographing were difficult during 1912 because the inner pit sent up a dense column of fume which diminished only at those times when the liquid lava became hotter and developed fountaining. There was such smokeless development with hundreds of roaring fountains of liquid lava in January and July. The intervening period showed a great deal of smoke, and in August there was a dense column of silently rising gray fume the full width of the pit, so that nothing of the bottom could be seen.

To determine the height of the bottom lava it was necessary to work from a fixed station with a transit, using a flashlight at night, and waiting for a view of a glowing spot or fountain. This involved reading vertical and horizontal angles, dependent on difficult determination from two stations, of the distance to the glow spot measured. Often in daytime one had to wait hours in order to get a view of the bottom through the fumes, from stations at the ends of a base line on the edge of the pit. At no time later, fortunately, were the fume conditions so bad as during 1912. A procedure was adopted of making a daily photograph of the smoke of the distant pit from the window of the observatory, and this proved of value when the inner lava lakes and crags rose to view in 1917.

Like Perret, I made reports to the newspapers in Honolulu; and gradually these reports took the form of a monthly bulletin, edited in Honolulu by Dr. Howard Ballou, who was the secretary of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. This association had occasional Directors’ meetings, which I attended and before which I made reports and gave lectures. The report of the complete work done during the first few months of the year 1912 was published in Boston by Massachusetts Tech.

The earlier history of Hawaiian volcanoes had been recorded in excellent books by such travelers as the Misses Gordon-Cumming and Isabella Bird, William Lowthian Green, and Drs. C. H. Hitchcock and W. T. Brigham, and Professor James D. Dana of Yale. Dana had been furnished with data from 1840 to 1890 by a Hilo missionary, Titus Coan. When I arrived in Hawaii, two books on Kilauea’s activity in 1909 had just been published, and a big monograph by Brun of Geneva who had determined that Kilauea lava was free from water vapor and was the hottest lava in the world.

Furthermore, R. A. Daly of Harvard had published his “Nature of volcanic action” on the basis of his summer at Kilauea in 1909. There was strong controversy against Brun on the water question, but the experts, including Day and Shepherd, came to the conclusion that lava eruption of the Kilauea type was actuated by such flaming gases as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and sulfur; that these gases were in solution in some elemental form deep down in the earth; and that the chemistry of their emission heated the lava on its way up. The lava lakes were hotter at the top than at the bottom. We shall see that all lava partly solidifies at its own bottom and stays liquid above.

The items of activity at Kilauea Volcano during the decade from 1911 to 1920 were marked fluctuation up and down in 1912–1913, with a notable low level in 1913, culminating in a strong earthquake in October. In 1914 the liquid lava came back into the bottom of Halemaumau pit, and in December Mauna Loa erupted in a fountain at its summit crater. The lava lakes of Kilauea grew bigger in 1915, and a triangular island appeared, lifting itself up from a shallow flat and even rotating or hinging horizontally. Its uplift was as a peaked escarpment of lava layers tilted in one direction, something very like Perret’s island of 1911.

An affinity between Kilauea and Mauna Loa was obvious. In 1916 Mauna Loa completed its summit gushing by splitting open the mountain’s southwest rift and making a lava flow into ranch and forest lands of South Kona. But just as Mauna Loa activity ended, the entire Halemaumau bottom thirty miles away lowered dramatically during one day, leaving a deep seething puddle of melt, surrounded by roaring red hot avalanches. The coincidence, along with appropriate earthquakes, was unmistakable.

Immediately after the lowering, the liquid lava of Halemaumau welled up border wall cracks and cascaded through the talus to form an oval pool in the bottom funnel of broken rock. The lava column rose 600 feet in the next six months and a lobate lake developed, its coves separated by sectors of overflow lava which lifted slowly into crags in the center. In 1917 the lakes and crags inside Halemaumau were less than 100 feet down, the lake shores became accessible for experiments with iron pipes, and the crags came into view from the Observatory, fully justifying the daily photograph for comparing changes of the distant pit.

By 1918 and 1919 the pit was full and overflowing the Kilauea floor. During the whole of 1919 Halemaumau, as a pit, was obliterated by its dome of fill. In autumn the south flank of Mauna Loa broke out again, into a flood of lava that reached the sea in South Kona. Remembering 1916, we predicted that, even though Halemaumau was full to the brim, the sinking away of Mauna Loa lava would pull down Kilauea lava suddenly, like a siphon. Exactly this happened on November 28, 1919. During the night the crags, the clover-leaf lake, and the bulging dome of the lava fill above Halemaumau’s edge went down as a cylinder to a depth of 400 feet in two or three hours leaving incandescent avalanching walls, a gratifying confirmation of theory.

As in 1916, the Halemaumau lava immediately returned to the bottom of the pit, and lifted itself thirty feet a day for three weeks, so that in December it was a violently boiling ringshaped puddle, surrounding a horseshoe of crags with a quiet inner lagoon and resembling a coral atoll. The Kilauea floor, which is dome-shaped outside of Halemaumau, split open radially to the south, made floods of lava into the Kilauea Crater wall valley, and even escaped out into the Kau Desert. This was extended into a mountain crack, making flank lava flows of Kilauea Mountain, nine miles away to the southwest, something which had not happened since 1823 and 1868. Concentric craters like Kilauea caldera and Halemaumau pit are thus ring-in-ring, or cup-in-cup, structures by means of slag heapings over a deep fracture in the rock crust, the circularity determined by occasional central sinking.

This circularity has sometimes reached perfection. In 1894 and 1909 the liquid pool inside Halemaumau, by steady welling up about a central hole, became perfectly circular within a circumferential rampart of overflow. This is a rare condition dependent on steadiness of upwelling, temperature, and viscosity. It is important because it shows how the perfect circles, and rampart cauldrons, were made on the moon, where there are also angular calderas of subsidence like Kilauea Crater. Evidently gas heating and liquidity changed on the moon, just as it has done in Hawaii. The sources there are over cracks, as in Hawaii. The analogies are so complete in these and many other ways that I completely disbelieve in meteor impact for the moon craters. The moon awaits a complete comparison with active terrestrial basaltic lavas, by a modern volcanologist.

This is only a thumbnail sketch of the astonishing luck which met the photographers and note takers of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in its first decade. There were similar decades in the nineteenth century, and there were similar jagged crags rising as islands and shorelines around clover-leaf lakes in 1879 and at other times. There were undoubtedly earlier similar sympathetic movements whereby Kilauea had lowered following the end of Mauna Loa outbreaks. But none of this had ever before been measured from day to day. Our staff from 1912 on occupied the trig stations, every day or night when the weather permitted, in order to measure within one foot the level of the live lava up or down. The lava was like the mercury in a barometer and needed incessant watching. This was done with a telescope, by people who dwelt on the edge of the vertical pipe. After 1913 the measurements clearly showed that sinkings were just as important as risings. They proved that the solid overflow matter and slide-rock slopes around the edges of lava lakes and coves measurably were a paste. This containing bank rose and fell at a different rate from that of the gassy liquid which streamed and fountained inside. The compiled results showed that the source of the liquid streaming was always at the west side of the pit bottom and that the streaming was toward fountaining grottos at the east. The liquid might at any time overflow its banks or sink down leaving inner cliffs, by failure of full supply up the west wall crack.

All of this may sound highly technical; but notes, photographs, seismograms, records of weather, and unceasing press releases and reports to the sponsors, while difficult for literary description, created a new technique. Science, when one is devising a new approach, consists of observation first, of experiment second, and of explanation or theory third. Something of that order has to be followed in the record of a scientist’s life.

The surprising sympathetic lowering of Kilauea following the end of Mauna Loa eruptions was only one of numerous surprises during the first decade of the Observatory. For instance, the temperatures of hot cracks were repeatedly and systematically measured, and nothing sympathetic with lava motion was found. The same may be said about the weather. At the beginning it was supposed that rainfall, air temperature, barometric pressure, and possibly fluctuation of the trade wind, would affect the volcano. However, the only quickly evident effect was the visible vaporing of many cracks on the Kilauea floor which dried up and diminished when the sunshine appeared, becoming dense and increasing in cold or wet weather. This obviously meant that the moisture content of the vaporing cracks, some steam, but mostly moist hot air came from shallow rain water a short distance underground.

An effect that was more volcanic, but similar in principle, was the visible vapor inside of Halemaumau, close to the lava lakes, which always increased when the lava lowered and let the groundwater seep inward. These visible vapors dwindled when the hot slag bubbled and rose, and acquired a brighter glow. No steam vapor rose from the glowing lakes. There was drying up of groundwater by increased volcanic heat, just as the cracks of the bigger crater had their moisture dried by the action of sunshine.

I shall have more to say on the subject of the seasons, the calendar effects on the plat of rising and falling lava, and especially the solar equinoxes and solstices. There appeared the hint of a daily tide-like rise and fall of the lava in the pit.

Finally, there arose the question of counting earthquakes, measuring their spacing in time and place, and seeing which belonged to Mauna Loa and which to Kilauea fault rifts. We had to plot earthquake frequency and size in relation to lowering lava, to day and night or to the seasons. The study of rhythmic swelling and creaking inside the great pasty mountains became an exciting quest. It gave promise of cycles from the hours of the day to the decades of the century.

We also discovered, by measuring vertical angles, that the inner floors rose and fell differently from the liquid lakes, hence the floors could be called the bench magma, as distinct from the liquid magma. This led to a bold experiment in 1917 when the liquid lava lakes became accessible, after a casual visitor, Mr. Walter Spalding of Honolulu, discovered an easy path down to the overflow floors at the edge of the north lake. Here the streaming slag rushed toward a glowing grotto, built up by spatter of a border fountain into a huge half-dome containing a glowing cavern hung with stalactites on the shore of the lake. The platform outside of the grotto was overflowed, and built up as the liquid lake rose, the platforms of overflow sloping away to the wall valley under the pit cliff. Thus the lake was at the top of an inner dome a thousand feet across, just as Halemaumau pit rim was at the top of an inner dome of Kilauea floor three miles across. The outer edge of Kilauea Crater is a big oval at the top of the outward sloping greater dome of Kilauea Mountain forty or fifty miles across.

When a little conelet formed on the northern or western floor platform inside Halemaumau, its slope around a splashing and fountaining crack would make a fourth innermost dome a few feet across in the series of progressively smaller cone-in-cone structures from the outer rim of the big mountain inward to the Halemaumau centers of eruption. We saw such a conelet cave in just where I had stood and tested a flame the day before. Quietly the cone collapsed into a fountaining well of boiling lava beneath. The ring-in-ring conception must be held in mind with regard to any volcano, for one thing which we discovered is that cones are not only built up and collapsed but they are also swollen up by internal percolation of cracks and expansion of the hot stuff. This tumefying, or swelling, is concerned with the experiment now to be described.

Even after Perret described his “floating island” of 1911 and I saw the triangular islands appearing like shoals in a mud flat and gradually rising into crags in 1916 and 1917, I remained incredulous of the possibility of a basaltic island floating. When solid lava cracked off in pieces from inner cliffs around the lava lakes, the fragments immediately sank. Furthermore, when solid crusts formed on top of the foaming and streaming slag, the shells, when they got thick enough, cracked up, tilted up, and slid down and foundered in the melt beneath. It was obvious that lava rock is heavier than lava foam. Hence as an island is a rock, it would not float. This raised several questions. Where was the bottom of the lava lake on which it rested? Did the lava lake have a bottom, and if so how far down was the bottom when the same lake rose 600 feet in Halemaumau pit between June and December of 1916? In other words, was the lake 600 feet deep in December?

What would be the answer at any time if a stiff iron pipe were thrust down vertically into the liquid lake as a sounding rod? No one had ever raised the question. Cross-section drawings had always depicted the liquid as extending downward indefinitely within a vertical tube. When the lake became accessible in 1917, it seemed to me that a long steel pipe might be shoved over the border rampart, end on, and allowed to bend and sink, or to strike bottom. If the pipe could be recovered by dragging it back, fusible samples of known melting point might show the temperature of the depths.

For the experiment, 200 feet of one-inch iron pipe, which was screwed together in a single long piece, was laid across the north floor of Halemaumau. Ten assistants were distributed along the pipe twenty feet apart, and I stood on the rampart with Alec at the edge of the central portion of the lava lake. This was a high bank ten feet or more above the streaming liquid lava. The men were instructed to lift the entire long tube and walk forward with it, so that it would plunge into the liquid lengthwise, arching down toward the center of the lake as it came past me. Alec helped guide the pipe over the bank, and the men came forward with it at a steady walk. The end of the pipe, covered with a screw cap, was plunged into the liquid lava, traveling toward the bottom at a good speed. The strong current toward the left dragged it somewhat, but not enough to prevent its sinking. After two and a half 20-foot joints of the pipe had plunged into the liquid at a slope of about fifty degrees, I could feel the pipe encountering the increasing resistance of a pasty bottom. Continued forward progress of the pipe caused it to stop and arch up, while the surface lava streamed past it, and its lower end was definitely stuck in the bottom substance of the lake.

I then gave the signal to the carriers to try to walk back to the place where they had started, with a view to pulling the pipe up and recovering the terminal length. The pipe trailed upward out of the lava lake like a red hot rope, then stuck and refused to come out. It came close against the bank where it was frozen solid in the stiff blankets of pahoehoe crust, which gripped it like hot iron.

The terminal length had been equipped internally with a spiral of spring steel, containing Seger cones which are used in the porcelain industry and which bear numbers indicating they melt at graded temperatures. This first thermometer by meltability was never recovered. The free lengths of pipe had to be unscrewed close to the bank, and four twenty-foot lengths were lost. In later tests we learned to keep the pipe oscillating back and forth so it would not freeze.

The epoch-making significance of this experiment was not understood until later. Calculation of the angle of slope of the pipe, where it went down into the liquid and hit on the bottom, showed that vertically the liquid was about fifty feet deep. With the aid of soldiers from the Kilauea Military Camp, this experiment was repeated several times; and each time the lake was found to be the same depth.

This conclusion was later verified by sudden subsidences of the liquid lava until the cliffs bordering the liquid were fifty feet high. The eastern grottos turned into cascades, with the liquid pouring down a well. The liquid lake had become a river pouring over a ledge of its own bottom, across from the western source wells to the eastern sinkholes. These latter were fountaining grottos when the lakes were full, but they exhibited internal rectangular upright sinkholes when the lake level was down. This was verified repeatedly, and the phenomena of source wells at the west and cascading sinkholes at the east were confirmed and photographed. It thus became evident that the lava lakes were nothing more than convectional lava flows over pasty solidified substance of their own bottom sediment. Convection means rising foam, loss of gas, and sinking gas-free heavier liquid.

In other words, the bench magma capped with overflows on the marginal platforms was a paste, cooled from the top and bottom and sides and making the saucer of streaming liquid. It was this paste which constituted the swelling heart of the bench magma. The fountaining of gas bubbles escaping from solution robbed the lava of heat and caused it partially to solidify, always at a depth of about fifty feet. Thus there were necessarily three substances: The deep lava fizzing with self-heating gases (later proved to be inflammable hydrogen, carbon monoxide, sulfur, and inert nitrogen and argon), the streaming foam into which the deep lava expanded, and the semi-solidified refuse of the foam created at the bottoms and banks of the liquid lava when it cooled from bright yellow heat (about 1150° Centigrade) to a dark-red heat (about 900° Centigrade).

The streaming across the bottom from west to east meant that during six months of rising lava, some 600 feet in the last half of 1916, the lava column was a cylinder of semicooled lava, maintained by upward pressure of the deep lava bubbling up in the western crack between the cylinder and Halemaumau wall. Meanwhile, at all times, the lakes were nothing more than streams of foam fifty feet deep and skinned over on top, congealing on their bottoms and shores and cascading down sinkholes in the eastern wall cracks of the cylinder. A convectional circulation was what maintained the rising, foaming, heating, and cooling and the changes in density of the liquid as it lost its gas. Thus the entire fountaining phenomenon of the lava lakes was due to the self-heating of what is known as exothermic reaction of gas escaping from solution in molten basalt. Much of this is actually the burning of hydrogen in air, creating a convectional circulation wherever the deep lava can find an outlet.

Ordinarily these outlets are along cracks or rifts in the slope of the mountain, where they are seen to break out in gassy fountains 500 feet high, and often to flow along the crack to a cavity where they cascade downward when less foamy and heavier. A lava flow is always solving a problem of foaming and liquefying, just as does champagne or beer.

There still remains the unsolved problems of how much of the deep lava is gas and whether it is mere pressure which holds the gases in solution, as in soda water. The alternative is for the deeper magma to be entirely gas, oozing up cracks in the globe, and reacting with oxygen from the air and solid rock, percolating from the core of the earth upward, and melting its walls.

In a sense, the entire decade to 1920 was an experiment. The results of that decade showed that the mountain swells and shrinks in tides with the passages of the sun and moon, but that Kilauea Mountain and Mauna Loa Mountain are all parts of what might be called Hawaii Island Mountain. The island of Hawaii is above an old ocean bottom 18,000 feet deep and is only the end of a ridge 1,700 miles long, which even at its lowest end, Midway and Ocean Islands, is still 12,000 feet high above the smooth mud-over-rock ball of the Pacific Ocean bottom. All the evidence shows the ridge to be a pile of lava flows over a crack, with a veneer of coral. If, then, the relatively small Kilauea dome is swelling and shrinking in sympathy with the sun, the long Hawaiian ridge is doing the same thing to a much greater degree.

Michelson has shown that the solid rock of the globe rises and falls in a tide about one foot every half day. As I have said, our daily measurements in 1912 showed that the lava in Halemaumau had a daily tide and that the larger movements reached maxima in June and December and minima in the intervening months, which proved it must be a solar effect. This was very exciting information and suggested a long train of experiments, which were to be successful in the next decade, based on the idea that the whole mountain swells as shown by leveling. This extends out to a radius of twenty miles from Kilauea Crater, and probably extends all the way to the seashore.

The actual measurement of a lava tide in Halemaumau was done during July and August 1919. R. H. Finch had just come from Washington to be my assistant. Oliver Emerson of Honolulu was another assistant, and two Harvard youths, Sumner Roberts and Charles Thorndike, who had been on war missions in submarine chasers, sent word through their parents that they were anxious to do something dangerous around an active volcano. I jumped at the chance to employ them to help me measure the lava tide.

The north lake in Halemaumau was quite accessible, and we organized night and day shifts for surveying measurements from a canvas shelter on the actual bench lava near the lake. For twenty-minute periods, each observer critically measured a number of monuments on the bench magma and glowing places of the lake edge. Then a new measurement was started by leveling the transit. This sequence was kept up night and day for a lunar month, namely twenty-eight days. One of the monuments was a fixed Halemaumau benchmark, equipped at night with a lantern and used as a datum for the fluctuating lake points.

A second tent back from the Halemaumau rim was a camping base. Ford cars were kept running from the Volcano House for the changing of crew, Mrs. Jaggar looked out for the food, and I directed repeated surveys of the position of monuments and of the observation shelter.

Meantime the lava steadily rose during July, and at one time split open the Kilauea floor making an outflow back of the shelter. The vertical angles kept track of the movements of both the liquid and the semisolid lava. The instrument was planted on the lava column itself. On one occasion, Mrs. Jaggar’s glove fell into a floor crack inside the shelter and burst into flame.

In all, there were more than 20,000 observations recorded. These were plotted on coordinate paper, and results were reduced to a smooth curve by overlapping averages. The actual curve of measurements was subjected to harmonic analysis at Yale University by Professor E. W. Brown, mathematician and specialist on motion of the moon and on lunar tides. The results showed a definite daily tide in both liquid lava and semisolid lava; of a few inches for the lunar tide, and of larger amounts for the solar effect. The curve plotted reached its greatest perfection of daily up-and-down waves during July at periods when the lava was steady. This became interrupted and ragged when accidents of drainage out on Kilauea floor pulled the liquid lava down.

H. O. Wood, seismologist at the Volcano Observatory, was skilled in compiling the volcano’s historical heights and depths of the nineteenth century and in plotting our curve of surveys of the liquid lava. He published a commentary on such plots for 1912–1913 in relation to solar curves of solstice and equinox, and to the oscillations of the global axis. He demonstrated a definite correlation between seasonal fluctuation of sun and moon and the seasonal rise and fall of the lava, presenting an extensive analysis of the rock tide in the globe and its application to Hawaiian volcanoes for a century. Perret had made a similar analysis for earthquakes and volcanoes in Italy.

These curves applied to the seasons, if compared with our lava tide applied to the hours of the day, left me with the conviction that the cyclical variations are a fact. They show correspondence between the swelling and shrinking of the globe and the movements of lava, when those movements are free and subject to surveying measurements. For few volcanoes are surveys possible, and our measurements were the first in the world of any continuity.

Earthquakes, too, were studied. Dr. Arnold Romberg of the University of Texas—who has become a distinguished inventor in the world of seismology, magnetism, gravity, and oil prospecting—was Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii about 1918 and for several summers came to the Hawaiian Observatory to assist me in experimental seismology.

From 1917 to 1920 I took the records of earthquakes and other seismic movements, as recorded by our Omori instruments, and Romberg remodelled these instruments. With his knowledge of the fundamental mathematics of pendulums, for at Harvard he had experimented with sensitive galvanometers, his facility for making instruments out of nothing but wire, solder, and old clockworks was wonderful and inspiring.

I spent many months measuring our smoked-paper seismograms of 1913 through 1918, with the assistance of Mrs. Jaggar, to whom I dictated. I measured types of local earthquakes, of volcanic tremors (some of which definitely accompany lava fountaining), and tilting of the ground, publishing the results in 1920. Tilt upswelling is shown in amount and direction by gradual change of the writing seismograph pens, and this is correlated with the recorded rise and fall of the lava.

In the course of three years, with Romberg’s valuable advice, we changed the seismographs to record with little mirrors supported on silken fibers and with beams of light projected on photographic paper. And Romberg invented an ingenious improvement with a vane and a bath of oil, whereby a tilt-free seismograph for earthquakes only would keep the spacing of its lines uniform. Ground tilt crowds the lines.

We also experimented with a heavy cylinder which hung as a normal pendulum and which was capable of swinging in any direction, so that it threw a beam of light vertically upward to a chronograph covered with bromide paper. The chronograph was capable of being revolved and stopped, until the mocroseisms and microtremors reached their maximum of amplitude, for any given period of recording.

The permanent waviness of ground motion, the tremors with periods of about two-tenths of a second, and the microseisms with periods of about five seconds showed their maxima of back-and-forth movement when the chronograph was revolved to a position where the pendulum swung northeast-southwest. This northeast-southwest tendency was found to be a characteristic of the seismograph cellar for many seismic measurements, including local earthquakes.

This was the direction at right angles to the edge of the cliff on which the Observatory stood. We concluded that this motion was characteristic of the upright flat slabs, with cracks behind them, which constitute the face of the crater cliff, and decided that any motion communicated to these slabs would tend to be a swaying toward the crater, rather than in the direction of stiffness parallel to the crater’s edge. Omori has found a similar permanent tendency for Tokyo city, where the directions are northwest and southeast for maximum amplitude. This means that any spot on earth oscillates easiest in one direction.

These first ten years of the Observatory answered many questions and pointed the way for future experiment and study. It now appears that liquid lava is a gas froth, that Kilauea and Mauna Loa are all one system, that hydrogen is the most elemental gas in eruption, that a gas-free paste is the residue of flowing foam both in pits and lava flows, that earthquakes and vibrations are a function of this paste wedging up cracks and sinking back underground, and that the rise and fall is in tides and cycles, short and long. These things are not guesses, but measurements.

The earthquake problem at volcanoes is misunderstood in geology. The superstition that volcanic quakes are small is wrong. “Volcanic” in volcanology is not limited to volcanoes. Los Angeles, Charleston, Lisbon, and the deep ocean bottom are all volcanic, are all tremulous; and all have “lava” underneath. Kilauea and Midway Island are one, Rome and Etna are one, Iceland and St. Helena are one, Redlands and Mount Rainier are one, and the paste is underneath. These facts concern the globe, not a little bundle of wrinkles like the Alps.

We do not know what an earthquake is or what lava is. However, “lava” falling suddenly and rising slowly with big and few earthquakes accompanying fall, and little and many earthquakes appearing with rise, are facts observed at Kilauea. At Tokyo in 1923 the greatest quake in history centered at lowered lava and lowered sea-bottom next to Oshima Volcano island. The Messina quake in 1908 made a hissing noise, and nearby Etna lava was low. There are long cracks in the earth shell somewhere deep down, and we know little about them except that volcanoes and faults are in lines. So long as the three-quarters of the globe under oceans are unexplored by man, with no rock specimens or even decent maps, and so long as there are no instruments planted on sea bottoms, we cannot use the term volcanic intelligently. Most volcanoes of the earth are undiscovered. Kilauea measurements whet the appetite for a new scientific frontier, the prospecting for ores, volcanoes, and mountains under the sea. The absence of core drilling and rock sampling over three-quarters of the earth is a disgrace to the oil-drilling and quarrying sciences of mankind.

The founding decade of the Hawaiian Observatory produced two effective expeditions, one to Japan and one to New Zealand.

The Research Association voted to send me to Kagoshima in Kyushu, the south island of Japan, where the volcano Sakurajima made earthquakes, explosions, and lava flows in January of 1914. About the same time Perret was sent to Sakurajima by Friedlaender of Naples, so we met in Japan.

Sakurajima, or Cherry Island, is a 4,000-foot cone in Kagoshima Sound, a deep inlet at the southernmost end of Kyushu. The volcano threatened 22,000 persons in villages on Sakurajima Island itself, and 70,000 in Kagoshima. It is a land of orange groves, fisherfolk, Satsuma porcelain, and maritime commerce, situated at the north end of the Okinawa-Ryukyu islands, a volcano chain extending north to Nagasaki.

Authorities in Kagoshima knew all about Pelée; and the army, navy, and governor wasted no time. Professor Omori, who had a seismograph at the weather station of Kagoshima, went at once to the volcano, and profiting from the lesson of Pelée, guided the lives of 90,000 persons.

The Sakurajima eruption began on a Saturday and Sunday with hundreds of earthquakes locally identified as coming from the volcano. Public and private vessels were called into service to move all the people of the island over to Kagoshima and beyond. With a general of the army in command, this was accomplished in two days. On Monday at ten o’clock the great, picturesque peak, quite like Pelée or Vesuvius, suddenly ejected vertically and quietly, from a crack in its flank, a column of “smoke” 30,000 feet high. This was answered by another, similar column on the opposite side of the mountain; and the two columns joined above into a colossal arch of cauliflower clouds consisting of sand, dust, and boulders. The crack in the mountain which gave vent to all this opened with slight rumble and behaved like two radial ruptures meeting toward the peak, extending southwest and southeast. The sector of the mountain between them appeared to have been lifted like a piece of pie shoved up in the center. But the summit craters played no appreciable part in the eruption, unless it was a gush of steam on Sunday evening. The line of craterlets along the cracks and only half way up the mountain quickly developed lava flows, and these poured down, the one toward Kagoshima Strait, the other toward the narrow Osumi Strait, which separated the volcano from the wilder eastern mainland. This strait was filled up with heavy block lava, or aa, converting the island into a peninsula. A similar aa lava flow, fifty feet high in front, swept down to the beach on the Kagoshima side, with boulders as big as a house tumbling over its andesite front.

Tidal waves made by these two lava flows entering the sea were small but perceptible. The principal effect was thousands of white steam jets where the red hot blocks entered the ocean. Culmination of glowing heat came the second night, Tuesday. The flows continued for months, but the maximum of seismic effect had happened at six o’clock in the evening of the first day, Monday.

This was a really big earthquake damaging masonry and causing landslips from the cliff next to Kagoshima city and killing a number of people. The flux of refugees from the volcano villages on Monday was a dramatic event. When the lava outbreak occurred in the forenoon, the schools sent the children home. On their way, the children gazed entranced toward the terrific arch of cloud over the mountain, vomiting trajectories of stones. Shops closed, and the city was quiet while everybody sized up the crisis. As a schoolboy in English class wrote, “Monster rocks went horizontally from the down to the up, with smokes on their behind.”

After the evening earthquake, however, when many buildings had shaken down, all except public officials were ordered to leave for the back country. Young men’s clubs organized to receive the refugees along the roads which led into the interior of Satsuma province, while temples and schoolhouses were impressed into service to house them. The migration of more than 50,000 people with packs on their backs and with handcarts bearing household goods, demonstrated how easily the Japanese people took to a nomad existence. This hegira came to an end on Wednesday, when Dr. Omori arrived from Tokyo, sized up the seismic record and the fiery crisis of Tuesday night, and took the grave responsibility of announcing that the population of Kagoshima might safely return. This was done, he was right, and no further damage beset the city.

Through all of this eruption, so different from Pelée in administrative control, no one was killed by the volcano, though one or two old people died of shock. One old lady who refused to leave her home on the island survived. Village roofs were bent down, crushed, and half buried under a heavy snowfall of ash, and it was notable that flat-roofed cottages were crushed, whereas those with steeper roofs were less damaged. Orange orchards were hopelessly destroyed.

At the west shore of Sakurajima in a place called Hakamagoshi, a fiery blast rushed down to the sea from the rift. Trees were stripped of limbs and bark, saplings were bent away from the volcano, and wood fiber on stumps was shredded by flying rocks. This blast was very short lived and never reached across to the city. It bore the marks of being similar to the downblasts of Mount Pelée. The lava flows kept on for a year and built new shore islands.

I had the remarkable experience of being rowed in a skiff over the submerged tongue of an eastern flow, trailing a thermometer in the increasingly boiling water. When the steaming water about us reached scalding temperature, we had the unpleasant thought that if we should capsize we would be cooked. We found boiled horses and cattle along the beaches, and thousands of dead fish. A climb near the eastern flank vent showed a portion of the moving lava flow pouring down the slope into a glowing cavern under a shell of its own bouldery texture.

The thousands of dollars of relief which came to Japan from America and elsewhere were handled with scrupulous honesty, and the inhabitants of the island were rehabilitated on Tanegashima, another island of the Ryukyu Archipelago.

Scientific investigations showed by leveling that the mountain had been lifted a few feet by the internal penetration of the lava, and reexamination of the benchmarks along roads extending out radially indicated that the north end of the bay bottom and shore had definitely sunk, as though underground lava had been withdrawn from that region, to push up, swell, and overflow the mountain. This effect of subsidence outside was traced and shown to gradually lessen for a hundred miles from the place of greatest sinking. Investigation carried out by the geologist colleagues of Omori culminated in a monumental publication which demonstrates the solidarity of the Japanese methods of science. And both Omori and Professor Koto published books on Sakurajima in English, with maps, photographs, curves, and seismograms.

Omori, in 1910, had anticipated movement of the earth about a volcanic center as swelling up one place and sinking down in another while eruption was going on. At that time, he described Usu Volcano at the opposite end of Japan, where leveling instruments showed graded changes in height made by the Usu eruption. A remarkable physiographic character of Usu Mountain, and of the adjacent basin of Lake Toya, is that basin and dome appear complementary, just as Kagoshima Bay was compensated by Sakurajima. This same pairing of lake with volcano has been noted in other parts of Japan, as though tumefaction by lava penetration and lava eruption had robbed the underpinning of an adjacent piece of ground, which lowered and became a lake by filling up with groundwater.

From Sakurajima I went to Bandaisan, or Kobandai, a famous volcano in central Japan northwest of Tokyo and on the shore of a beautiful lake. It looks like an ordinary rocky peak, but its fame was made by a steam explosion from its flank which blew out the side of the mountain and left avast sulfurous quarry with numerous solfataras and hot springs. Bandai was known by geologists to be one of a chain of volcanoes, but prior to 1885 its activity was in question. One morning the sky was darkened by the overwhelming explosion, and vast volumes of rock from the outbreak poured down as a landslide and completely dammed a river system. It left extraordinary little heaps in the new dammed up lake. These appeared to be individual blocks of rock against which heaps of debris were piled so as to leave pyramidal humps scattered over the surface of the impounded water near the volcano. An excellent report in English on this eruption was published at the time, and the eruption became the type of what geologists call a phreatic explosion, meaning pure steam. There was doubt as to whether any fragments of new lava were thrown up.

I took with me to Bandaisan a photographer-guide. We camped in a mountain inn with thatched roof, visited a hot spring resort, and hiked to the crater where we measured temperatures and took photographs. It was a vast flat-floored shelf, dug out of the side of the mountain, with steam jets and puddles of boiling water at the back. Looking out at the new water-filled valley with its many islands at the base of the slope below the crater, we could see shoreline levels higher than the present beach, where the damming had produced the highest stand of the water. The eruption and landslide overwhelmed villages and killed many people, though it lasted only a few days. It was on the side of the mountain remote from the older lake. In clambering over the broken debris, which looked more like glacial deposits than volcanic agglomerate, I picked up some pieces of vesicular basalt that were definitely lava. Wada, a Japanese geologist, had found the same thing, and we both concluded that these were an internal live basalt blown to fragments in the Bandaisan eruption, but that most of the material was from the shattered old mountain.

My interpretation of Bandaisan is that it is an old volcano in the line of Asama and other volcanoes of central Japan, and that the line is a deep crack always full of lava in the depths, which is selective of outlet, depending upon what part of the crack opens as the path of least resistance. Eruption may be occasioned by lava wedging upward at one volcano, or by lava sinking downward at another volcano, according to the way the medial rift of continental Honshu is warped and stressed by the earthquake forces. One part of a volcano chain is always sinking, with lava withdrawn. Another part is always swelling up, with lava penetrating the cracks under active crater pits, like that of Asama.

Asama is the Vesuvius of central Japan near the village of Karuizawa, famous as the resort of American missionaries. Bandaisan is one of a line of volcanic peaks north of Asama, all of which have hot springs and solfataras. The explosion of Bandaisan, where the big natural lake represents the groundwater level of abundant rainfall, occurred when the underground lava column suddenly sank rapidly by the gaping open of the deep rift. The water poured into red hot cavities, while the lava was rising and erupting by frothing up in the depths of one of the other volcanoes. The results of Bandai’s explosion were first, earthquake collapse, which was assisted by vast outjets of boiling steam from groundwater, and then the blowing out of the mountainside.

Of special interest is the spacing, twenty to forty miles, between volcanoes along such a system as Asama-Bandai. The underlying cracks must be in echelon arrangement, and the spacing is a function of the thickness of the upper earth crust and its capacity through the ages of producing spaced-out widenings or bends in the crack, above whatever shell confines the lava. The same spacing of the new and old volcanoes is true in the Caribbees and in the Costa Rica-Mexico line. There an old peak might make a Bandaisan by unforeseen breakage and steam development.

This applies also to the Ryukyu-Sakurajima line. I visited Kaimon at the extreme south end of Kyushu, a steep dome blocked on top by a lava plug. South of here to Suwanose Island, an active volcano, the spacing of islands is similar to the northward spacing of Sakurajima, Kirishima, and Asosan, following the same law of selected vents and offset cracks. Kirishima thirty miles north of Sakurajima is a treacherous and dangerous volcano that made a bad explosion just prior to the Sakurajima eruption. I saw on the rim of its summit cavity a breadcrust bomb, a triangular block of rock eight feet long, with its surface beautifully tessellated with gaping cracks. This breadcrust fracture indicates that the fragment of glowing andesite was thrown up while pasty, then congealed on its surface to smooth glass and continued to swell evenly with internal gas, so as to rupture the glassy surface as expanding dough.

At Aso Volcano farther north I entered a natural gateway into a cauldron nine miles across, surrounded by a wall, and with a hilly country inside, from which a river escaped through the gateway. The summit peak in this landscape proved to contain an active pit on top. The pit was steaming and the source of the steam was boiling puddles of mud at the bottom. This was the “Halemaumau” of Asosan, which has had a record of many eruptions near the city of Kumamoto. The chain of Kyushu volcanoes ends, after the usual spacing, with a volcano at Nagasaki.

From Shimonoseki Strait, going northeastward, new belts of volcanic fissures have built the mountains of central Japan, cut across northwest of Tokyo by what Naumann called the fossa magna or big trench. This is famous in the history of Japanese geology, for which this German geologist laid the foundations. The fossa magna extends northwest and southeast, through Fujiyama and Oshima Volcanoes to the Ogasawara Islands and the Bonin Islands, scene of volcanoes making and disappearing, from craters under the ocean.

Omori had discovered historical similarities between the eruptions of this chain and those of the Ryukyu chain. This is significant, because as we go from the small spacing of the individual volcanoes, we come to some deeper and larger fracturing of the whole crust of the earth that determines a spacing of hundreds of miles between such larger arcs of rupture as those of Kyushu and the Bonin Islands. As all are volcanic and have been so since the birth of the globe, it is unthinkable to me that they are anything but deep fractures which go down to the earth’s core. The surface geology of marine strata is a mere veneer compared with the deep and ancient igneous rocks.

I went to New Zealand in 1920, taking with me in manuscript form the Hawaiian Observatory results of the past decade. Notable among geologists there was Dr. Allan Thomson, director of the Dominion Museum in Wellington. Dr. Thomson and his distinguished father, the Honorable William Thomson, guided Mrs. Jaggar and me all the way from Auckland to Dunedin. It was my task to give lectures on volcano research, to show lantern slides of Mount Pelée and Kilauea, to tell about seismographs and cycles, and to urge upon New Zealand science the importance of establishing a volcano observatory system in the Taupo Belt of volcanoes.

Here, in 1886, had occurred the terrific eruption of Tarawera. Here are spaced out volcanoes extending north into the islands of Tonga. Here, possibly, along the Cook Channel between the North and the South Islands, is a transition from volcanoes to earthquakes, and quite possibly another fossa magna worthy of comparison with Japan. Off to the east lies the profound linear Tonga Deep, compensating the New Zealand volcanic uplift. This is analogous to the Tuscarora Deep east of Japan.

We were fortunate to procure accommodations in Rotorua, the boiling geyser district, at the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, and to see the hakas, or dances, of an encampment of 5,000 Maoris, gathered to honor British royalty.

I was interested in the relics of liquid basalt collected on the lip of the great rift through Tarawera Mountain. The rupture extends the length of Rotomahana Lake, which sank away as a groundwater phenomenon in 1886. This, like Bandaisan, was one of the great steamblast eruptions of history. It was right on the line of volcano spacing extending from White Island in the Bay of Plenty, to Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu Volcanoes, beyond Lake Taupo at the south. Here was a land of echelons of deep cracks, building up along scores of miles from submarine eruptions such as Falcon Island in the Tonga group. Farther south is the dangerous looking White Island close to the New Zealand shoreline, resembling Bogoslof, and so on to the lava volcanoes at the south. Big earthquakes have been characteristic, along with uplift, of both shorelines of Cook Strait.

This kind of gradation is certainly like the transitions from submarine eruption to continental uplift, crowned with volcanoes, so characteristic of Japan, the Aleutians, California, and Italy. It is impossible to think of it, when we consider water depths of 4,000 fathoms, and a step upward to such altitudes as the New Zealand alps, all linear for a distance of several hundred miles, except in terms of the faulted deep earth crust. And seismologists tell us that that crust is 1,800 miles deep.

The associations made on this trip were destined to have far-reaching effect in meetings with New Zealand scientists at later dates. I met Professor Bartrum of Auckland; the officials of the New Zealand Geological Survey; Dr. Ernest Marsden, distinguished physicist who had worked with Rutherford in England; and Dr. C. A. Cotton, physical geographer and author. Cotton showed us the elevated shorelines of Wellington associated with the big earthquakes of 1851. Other personages were Professor Speight, geologist of Christchurch College, and in Dunedin, Professor R. L. Jack, physicist of Otago University and our host. Dr. C. E. Adams, government astronomer of Wellington, we were to meet again on Tin Can Island in 1930, during the United States Eclipse Expedition. Dr. J. MacMillan-Brown, chancellor of the University of New Zealand, and his daughter entertained us in Christchurch; and he later visited us several times in Hawaii in the course of his extensive travels.

I was glad to stimulate volcanology in New Zealand and pleased when there eventually appeared the splendid work of Dr. L. I. Grange, on the “Rotorua District,” with a project for geophysical surveys made imperative by the Napier earthquake disaster.

Before this chapter is closed, some personalities of the first decade of the Observatory should be mentioned. Foremost was L. A. Thurston, founder of the Volcano Research Association and its president for many years. It was his interest and enthusiasm coupled with that of the other members of the Association that made the Observatory possible. Prominent among those members was L. W. de Vis-Norton, for many years secretary of the Association and a devoted apostle of volcanology.

Mrs. Isabel Jaggar, from 1917, was my helper not only as wife and amanuensis, but as general assistant at the Observatory. She could operate instruments, take notes at the pit, keep the record books, and act as buffer against an overinquisitive public.

There was Demosthenes Lycurgus, genial Greek host of the Volcano House, who did all in his power to help us, by grants of lands, raising money, and personally promoting science with all the vigor of his wonderful personality. He went home to Greece to be married, and alas, died during his honeymoon. Later came my good friend George Lycurgus, who still operates the Volcano House.

Colleagues of the founding decade included H. O. Wood, who came from Berkeley in 1912, acted as seismologist and geological assistant, and established a seismological bulletin. He left to enter the army in 1917. In years to come Wood established in Pasadena under the Carnegie Institution one of the great seismographic laboratories of the world, and his name became coupled with a California Institute of Technology physicist to name the Wood-Anderson seismograph. Later came R. H. Finch who had worked with Dr. Humphreys of the Weather Bureau in Washington and had been a flight meteorologist in Ireland during the first World War. He was assigned by Marvin to me as assistant in 1919, when the Congress took over our work for the U.S. Weather Bureau.

Finally, I should like to name the numerous workers of the U.S. Geological Survey in topography and geology, notably Birdseye, Burkland, Stearns, Wilson, Clark, Meinzer, and Macdonald. These men brought to reality my Geological Survey estimate of 1899, when I recommended to Walcott a survey of the Hawaiian Islands.

The Hawaii geologic survey included investigations of water, highways, and minerals, and was to map lavas, volcanic processes, and island growth. The annual cost of the work had been estimated at $22,000, including $6,300 for salaries in geology and $10,000 for the total cost of topography study, or $90,000 for five years. The project was begun in 1909 in cooperation with the Territory of Hawaii. In 1951 the mapping was completed and the cost had been many times the original estimate.

Among visitors who contributed to the Observatory work were Sidney Powers, a voluntary observer who had been one of my students in Boston. He explored and published on many volcanoes around the world and followed me in Sakurajima and the Aleutian Islands. He later became an outstanding petroleum geologist of the Amerada Company in Tulsa. Arthur Hannon, an architect from Cleveland, acted as a volunteer mapper, and for months aided with sketches of the changes in Halemaumau. William Twigg-Smith, an artist from New Zealand, joined us in the lava-sounding experiment and made numerous sketches and paintings. He later became the illustrator and photographer for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association. Dr. A. L. Day of the Geophysical Laboratory visited us repeatedly, in association with gas chemist E. S. Shepherd. He wrote important monographs, along with E. H. Allen the chemist for the Carnegie Institution, on the Yellowstone and Lassen National Parks, and on Geyserville. Allen came to the Observatory for critical analysis of the steam of Sulphur Bank.

Among other visitors were geologists, geodesists, and biologists of the Pacific Science Congress, held in the spring of 1920. These included H. E. Gregory, Griffith Taylor, Frederick Wood-Jones, William Bowie, T. W. Vaughan, E. O. Hovey, E. C. Andrews, F. Omori, H. S. Washington, and Dr. Chilton of Christchurch, who had been one of our inspirers in the New Zealand trip. This Honolulu world congress assigned one meeting to Kilauea Volcano, which enabled me to summarize results before a cosmopolitan group of scientists.

The Washington executives who at this time promoted the Observatory were Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston, Director George Otis Smith of Geological Survey, Chief Charles Marvin of the Weather Bureau, and Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian. Later came W. C. Mendenhall, firm friend of the Observatory, and Director of the Survey.

It was my good fortune that between 1914 and 1919 Mauna Loa and Kilauea were building up lava toward a fiery crisis, and that the sugar business of Hawaii boomed at the same time. When the 1920 science congress convened there was much fresh lava to be seen, and our Research Association was so prosperous that M. I. T. in Boston kept up its financial interest. The American Journal of Science under Edward Dana of Yale published our results. This was fitting, as Dana’s father, J. D. Dana, had published much about Hawaiian volcanoes. Consequently the end of the foundation decade made easier the financing of the next five years. Just at this time the Geological Survey spurted ahead, the National Park was opened, the Army built a recreation camp and a trail up Mauna Loa, the Inter-island Steamship Company took over the Volcano House, and a Promotion Committee was bringing many tourists.