The 1940’s were enriched by three good friends Vern Hinkley, Stanley Porteus, and Frank Rieber; respectively journalist, psychologist, and physicist-inventor. They all took a keen interest in my writing and mechanical inventions, and Hinkley assisted in the Observatory work during the explosive eruption and wrote “that was the top experience of my newspaper career.”
Hinkley, who had edited the Hilo Tribune Herald, became managing editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and published a series of my radio addresses on Kilauea. He also sent his photographer to photograph our laboratories, thereby keeping the public informed about volcano study. And he worked up a history of my navy monographs and hardness testing instruments. He was a lovable fellow whose publicity instinct was a great asset to volcano science. He did not think of a volcano as something sensational, but remained moderate about it and informed his public accurately. Through him, the Volcano Observatory reports came to be accepted as desirable routine, and he was elected a director of the Volcano Research Association. His many friends were desolated by his early and sudden death.
Porteus is an Australian man of science who conducted expeditions among the Australian blacks and the primitive Africans of Kalihari and specialized in the mental outlook of primitive peoples. He devised a famous maze for intelligence tests. He has published numerous books about Hawaii and several novels, including “Restless voyage,” the life of Archibald Campbell, who lived with Kamehameha the great and survived amputation of both legs.
With Guido Giacometti, who suggested airplane bombing of the volcano lava flows, Porteus and I foregathered at the crater frequently to discuss the constitution of earth interior. Porteus differed with my belief on the evolution of mind as a mutation of evolution. Like Hinkley he became a member of the Board of Directors of our Research Association. He is a judge of the juvenile court, skilled in curing delinquency. Porteus is a world thinker, who agrees with me in thinking of altruism as a form of energy. Porteus invented the title of this present book.
Rieber started from the University of California where he became interested in making an echo from underground strata to locate oil. He moved to Los Angeles, where his father was a professor of classical languages and a college dean. Frank invented a complex recording seismograph carried on a motor truck, wherewith he set off explosive bombs and registered echo earthquakes from every important underground layer. These layers identified oil-bearing strata, so that the marks on a revolving drum practically mapped a section underground for a guide to oil drilling. He moved to New York and established war inventions, among them phonograph disks for repeating whole conferences of many talkers. He founded Geovision Ltd., a company which greatly abbreviated the scanning of echoes for subterranean mapping. Then he died suddenly, like Hinkley, in the full flower of a brilliant mind. Rieber and I corresponded for years on invention gadgets, comparing notes by letters, and meeting all too rarely. To me he was one of our most productive physicists, always inspiring. He was convinced that discovery of petroleum will endlessly increase and will become automatic. He and I looked downward into the shell of the globe.
This decade I devoted primarily to writing and publication, some of the writing voluminous and still unpublished. In 1941 I moved into an office in Hawaii Hall of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. My paper work consisted primarily in completing, revising, and illustrating a memoir on “Origin and development of craters,” in cooperation with the Geological Society of America. The censor chosen by the Society was Dr. Howel Williams of the University of California, who cordially endorsed the book.
The Society subscribed $350 from its Penrose Fund to assist with drafting and clerical work on the substantial results of our observations of Hawaiian craters in the twentieth century. The groundwork had long been laid, for beginning under Alexander Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge and during my visit to Vesuvius in 1906, I planned a book on volcanology. Later, in 1910 after careful study of the work of Dana, Hitchcock, and Brigham on Hawaiian volcanoes, I started analysis of Kilauea Volcano in the nineteenth century. Thus this one large volume with photogravures, maps, and diagrams covers the history of observations and conclusions from Hawaiian Volcano Observatory work for thirty years.
My thesis is that there must be some order in time and space for what is obviously 1,700 miles of submarine volcanic upbuilding in the Hawaiian chain. Active volcanoes are hot and erupting in Hawaii; sunken ones are covered with coral at Midway Island; and intermediate ones, half coral and half lava, are in the middle of the chain. Disregarding the ocean water, all of these are gigantic mountains below sea level. On the island of Hawaii I found symmetry, which I called “The cross of Hawaii” in an address to the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce in 1912. I noted that Mauna Kea forms the top of a cross on the map; the upright extends along the southwest rift of Mauna Loa, and two symmetrical curved arms extend to Hualalai summit and Kilauea summit. The lava flows from Mauna Loa north and south arrange themselves symmetrically about this design, with every evidence that Mauna Loa dome was piled up in a spoon underlaid by Hualalai, Mauna Kea, and Kilauea. It is obvious on the map that Mauna Loa upbuilding was obstructed by grandpa Mauna Kea and that it has been forced off to the southwest by the two daughters, to build the elongate point of the island. Kilauea is old on the Haleakala, Kohala, Kea line; and Hualalai is old on a right angle line at Kea.
From my training in physiography under W. M. Davis of Harvard, I was convinced when I first saw Hawaii and studied the books about it that downward faulting toward the sea bottom, of sliding island blocks, is conspicuous. It shows in the V-shaped fracture of Haleakala Crater, a broken sector, and in the straight fracture of the north half of Molokai volcano, leaving the mighty cliffs there. It shows in the eastern half of Kohala volcano leaving the fault facets and hanging valleys of Waimanu, and in the Mohokea embayment of the southeast end of Mauna Loa. The embayment shows evidence of the breakdown of an ancient crater as described by Hitchcock. Moreover, Kilauea, Wood Valley, Mohokea, and Waiohinu amphitheater are four old calderas of faulting in a line. This seemed to me confirmed by the down-faulted steps of the southeast side of Kilauea Mountain, and the observed down-breaking there of the shoreline during earthquakes. This, in 1868, drowned coconut trees below the sea and caused big earthquakes on a submerged fault in 1868 and 1952.
Such action was further confirmed by our experience of a down-faulted block during earthquakes at Kapoho in April 1924, before Halemaumau exploded, confirming the view that the active volcanoes break downward in slices along shorelines, even when they swell upward around craters. Harold Stearns always combatted the idea of faulting and made Mohokea, Haleakala, and Waipio erosion forms; but this I cannot accept.