Hovey and I put through a resolution in 1907 at the meeting of the Geological Society of America, “strongly recommending the establishment of volcano and earthquake observatories.” Perret and I were both inventors of instruments, both experimenters, and both convinced that the expedition method alone would never solve the volcano problem. The brothers Friedlaender of Zurich were establishing a “Zeitschrift für Vulkanologie,” in Naples, and a laboratory with German, Swiss, and Italian assistants. The Carnegie Institution established in Washington a geophysical laboratory devoted to high temperature physical chemistry. We others were influenced by field ambition, and since 1899 I had fought for a Hawaii geological survey, for I was convinced that Kilauea Volcano there must have an American volcano observatory.
My experiments on erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption convinced me that a field experimental science was bound to grow up in each of those parts of dynamical geology. All of these needed field observatories to determine index of erosion, index of sedimentation, index of ground movement and earthquake, index of volcanism; these indices to be quantitative just as the thermometer and barometer and wind gauge made climatology a quantitative science of the air. I found almost nothing being accomplished in these new field sciences. No one dreamt of attacking the Mississippi as a field of pure science of erosionology, compared to the Amazon. It was felt that these things could be left to commerce and the engineers.
By index of eruption I mean the geographical peculiarity of Vesuvius, for example, as an eruption center. Perret tried to reduce this to diagram form. I published, in Washington, a plea for geophysical observatories.
An earthquake in 1908, predicted and photographed by Perret, had killed 125,000 people in Italy at Messina, near Mount Etna. Hence I felt more strongly than ever that something must be done. So it was that in 1909, at my own expense, I made a journey to Hawaii and Japan with my family. Everything within me converged on making a life work of the results of my Pacific journey.
In Honolulu I was invited to show my colored lantern slides of the Mount Pelée disaster and to describe Massachusetts Tech’s plan for a seismograph station on Blue Hill near Boston. When the Honorable L. A. Thurston of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser interviewed me after the lecture, and asked whether Kilauea Volcano on the island of Hawaii would not be better than Blue Hill, I replied that it certainly would have many more earthquakes and, in addition, would offer volcano lavas to observe in action. Thurston asked, “Is it then a question of money?” I replied that it was, largely, but that it also entailed persuading Tech authorities that I was right.
After visiting Kilauea, where I stayed at the Volcano House and saw Halemaumau lava pit in action, I went on to Japan. There I visited the seismograph stations of Professor Omori and traveled to active Tarumai Volcano in Hokkaido. Tarumai, which was undergoing an interesting eruption at that time, is a 4,000 foot cone in pine forests on the north island of Japan. (Notice the usual 4,000 feet.) It had broken out explosively, sent up a great spiral of cauliflower clouds of steam and ash thousands of feet, and followed this by piling up a lava dome in its summit crater, the dome lifting the crater floor and protruding above the top of the mountain.
This was an extrusion of andesite, more refractory and giving hotter steam than Kilauea vents, as measured with an electric thermometer. We got 450° Centigrade with Bristol thermocouple in sulfur-covered cracks hissing on the actual face of the lava dome. Kilauea had given 300° Centigrade in the famous “postal card crack” where visitors browned their cards.
The stiff rising lava dome of Tarumai was a duplicate of the lavas of Bogoslof and Pelée, but Bogoslof was a crater at sea level, and Pelée’s big dome and spine above the mountain top developed in the second year of eruptions. I found further inspiration in a visit to Asama volcano in central Japan. Here, just as at Tarumai, the hard lava lay in a rigid swirl, hissing and steaming at the bottom of the summit crater after the crater had announced eruption by “cauliflower” uprushes.
It was evident that hard lava push-ups from the bottom of craters were characteristic of the Pacific and Carib shores, in contrast to Hawaiian and Italian flow-downs. The pressure upward breaks a mountain, the slag and boiling groundwater inside churns up avalanche gravel and dust, columns of dust-laden steam rush out, the break-up lets up lava, and according to its frothing gas and heat and the air temperature, it is capable physically of either foaming out liquid through radial cracks or pushing up semisolid and piling as an aa heap.
The net effect is flat lava shields for Hawaii, with flows into and under the ocean, and shapely high cones for the Andes and Japan, with Italy somewhere in between. The difference in the lavas is a matter of internal meltability, due to chemistry and gases.