But to get back to the eclipse, telescope lenses were mounted on high scaffolds, the ladies arrived in October, and the total eclipse of the sun happened and was photographed at the time anticipated.
When the time came for us to return to Samoa, some of us were fortunate enough to get a place on the Flood Brothers’ copra ship Carisso, out of San Francisco. Along with the family of a Navy officer, we went ashore at Niuatoputapu (Keppel Island) after climbing down a rope ladder to a bobbing whale boat. We found beautiful mats, which are the wealth of the people throughout Tonga. The village men and women who had mats to sell were not so much interested in coins or trinkets and merchandise as they were in the clothing we wore. I literally divested myself of a shirt and a suit for a beautiful fringed mat ornamented with clusters of shells, made to be given to Queen Charlotte on her next visit. We were fortunate in reaching Samoa in good weather, but a big storm after we got there wrought havoc with the Tanager carrying astronomical photo plates and bundles of Polynesian mats which were much damaged by sea water.
Chapter VI
Prophecy and Hope
“For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.”
The fifth decade of my sixty years of geology, 1931 through 1940, was a time of culmination at Kilauea; the ending of an eleven-year cycle on Mauna Loa; and the introduction, in 1940, of a new Mauna Loa cycle. This new cycle resembled strikingly the one which followed 1843 because of the similarity of places—notably the north side of Mauna Loa toward Humuula, followed by the northeast side toward Hilo—and the intervals of eruption. Kilauea behaved differently in the nineteenth century, because in 1840 it rent open the east flank to make a flood of lava into the ocean, though afterwards it restored its lava to Halemaumau.
In 1934, on the other hand, Halemaumau went to sleep, after adding one more extra thick filling in the bottom of Halemaumau pit in September, when it gushed up behind wall slabs 300 feet high, cascading down the talus in twenty-five ribbons of lava. This proved that effervescence in a small crack can rise far above the level of the lava lake in the pit. It made a marvelous display in early morning darkness, and the new lava lake rose rapidly within the flatly funneling talus. This lay at thirty degrees, so that the outward spread enlarged the lake and reached beyond the foot of the talus.
The slide-rock slope that was conspicuous had been fed by avalanches, and it rested against the half-circle of wall slab, behind which had risen the cascades. This source migrated around the slab to the north and developed the biggest fountaining jets there. By the outward and upward spread of the new lake these jets became lake fountains, while the cascading ribbons at the slope stopped. The lake rose and crusted over. The northern fountains became a small oval pond and center of accumulation and upward doming, while pahoehoe lava radiated down a slope to the edges of the floor heap, south and east. Surveys at this time placed the northern lava pond definitely at the top of an inner heap. The fountains in the pond changed to conelets with their own craterlets. These, after a month, developed gas explosions, flinging up lava shreds to 800 feet and sometimes higher than the edge of the pit.
This started a slumping of the exploding cones. The explosions were a symptom of increasing viscosity of lava under the bottom heap, and the viscosity was revealed in stiff lava welling up around the edges of the floor. This filled up the wall valley, and so compensated the slump that the bottom became level. Then the activity ceased. It all demonstrated how an inner dome in Halemaumau could become filled with an intrusive lens, which by welling out around the edges, could restore the dome to horizontality. It was like the “laccoliths” of the Black Hills. After the 1934 eruption, Kilauea simply went out of business for eighteen years. Halemaumau lava returned in 1952.
Mauna Loa activity was renewed meanwhile, with summit crater inflows in 1933 and with intense seismic activity under the northeast rift. Depths of seismic centers were at first seventeen miles down, and thereafter five miles down, as reported by seismologist Hugh Waesche. He worked with the formulae of distance, direction, and depth established by Austin Jones, using preliminary tremor, comparative excursions of lines, and a model of the island. These had become precise by mathematical triangulation of the island of Hawaii, with seismograph records from Kilauea, Hilo, and Kona stations. The distance from each station was interpreted from the duration of the preliminary tremor; and the meeting point of the several distances within the island model located the seismic focus inside Mauna Loa Mountain where the lava was splitting it open. The epicenter, or point over the focus, when the lava in Mauna Loa’s summit crater was stiffening, lay on the northeast rift in 1933. Therefore the eruption was expected at an old cone, whence had come the first outbreak of 1843. This came to pass in 1935.
E. G. Wingate, who had become superintendent of Hawaii National Park, agreed with my dictum, made on the basis of seismograms and history, that the next outflow would come at the north within two years and would endanger Hilo. This I discussed at a public meeting of the Hilo Chamber of Commerce in January 1934, and the report was published under the title “The coming lava flow.” The prediction was fulfilled in December 1935, when the flow came as it had in 1843. The eruption broke out on top and traveled down to Humuula, the saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, then pooled in the saddle and turned toward Hilo.