My experiments with volcanoes

by Thomas Augustus Jaggar

The logic to the effect that in the long and large the old volcanoes from Hawaii to Midway have been on slices of the earth’s crust faulted downward below sea level through the ages seems incontrovertible. The fault planes are diagonals across the main volcanic rift trend and make the channels between the islands at an angle in plan to the trend of the island chain. These channels are very deep. All of this philosophy developed in my mind before I came to Hawaii.

Also I thought that the origin of life might have been from volcanic gas, owing to the prominence of carbon dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen, sulfur, and nitrogen, all ingredients of both protein and volcanoes. I put this up to R. T. Jackson, who taught me phylogeny when I was studying fossils and he was studying genetics. Knowing the sulfurous quality of an egg yolk, I asked him if it wasn’t possible that as evolution goes back behind the embryo, we should find volcanic traces chemically. Phylogeny means that the history of the embryo reenacts the history of the race, and I merely extended this back to the inorganic. I was laughed at for carrying biological origin back to gases of volcanoes; but Shepherd and I collected gases from flaming Kilauea lava, and found the five elemental constituents: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. These also make up the aminoacids of protein, so my philosophy of origin still seemed to me to be reasonable. Volcanoes erupted through the ocean, and life came out of the unexplored deeps of the sea.

Thus in 1910 I began a book on craters which came to fruition in a Memoir of the Geological Society. This was not published until 1947, but I was working on it, drawing the diagrams, dictating the typescript to Sato, and selecting for illustration the best of our photographs during the thirties.

One of the diagrams shows eleven-year cycles, beginning with 1790 and ending with 1935. I adopted this after finding in Hitchcock a tabulation for Halemaumau, indicating big lowerings of lava in 1790, 1823, 1855, and 1891, to which we added 1924 from our own experience. These were approximately thirty-three years apart, as I found when I plotted the data on a curve of Hitchcock’s table. Taking other major sinkings as punctuation points—such as the outflows and collapse of Halemaumau in 1832, 1840, 1868, and 1931—there developed a correspondence in the subsidence times treated as repose periods, with the years having the least numbers of sunspots at average intervals of 11.1 years. The intervening times of maxima of sunspots all occurred in the intermediate times of rising lava.

The curve as a whole from 1823 to 1924 shows a notable crest from 1855 to 1890, and a crest of the greatest volume of Mauna Loa gushing occurred between 1855 and 1877. Stearns and Macdonald object to this diagram as not showing all the little intermediate events, but what I have taken are the actual peaks and depressions above sea level and those which correspond to the sunspot interval of 11.1 years. This is an average even for sunspots, which had long intervals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when no reports were made for Kilauea.

I have guessed a drop of Kilauea lava as dating from about A. D. 1800, corresponding to the notable expulsion of Mauna Loa lava through Hualalai, and an imaginary unreported lowering eleven years thereafter, as it is improbable the island was wholly dead in the first twenty years of the century. The explosive eruptions of 1790 certainly produced a big collapse at Kilauea.

My faith in this diagram is based on the fact that our own eruption sinkings at eleven year intervals (1902, 1913, 1924, and 1935) agree so well with an eleven-year theory that we are justified in looking backward for eleven year averages. Perret has found intervals of about a decade for Vesuvius. All my experience of Hawaiian lava leads to the belief, shown by our lava tides and several short-term diagrams, that rhythmic periods of a volcanic system are related to gravitational control of the sun and moon. There are rhythmic controls of the globe by the gravitational control of the sun and moon. There are rhythmic controls of the globe by the sun, and rhythmic controls of very deep volcanic cracks by the globe, and rhythmic controls of individual groups of volcanoes by the long volcanic chains over cracks. Our experimental data are limited by the little groups of volcanoes, and so the big rhythmic movements seem inaccessible to science, mostly because we have no record of relationships of single volcanoes 500 miles apart in such a place as Alaska.

We raise no question about night and day or about the oceanic tides or about the moon’s phases. We know there is a rock tide in the earth, that there is a hot earth core of about 2200° Centigrade which appears to seismology to be a very massive liquid 1,800 miles down. Gravitation is the controlling force of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe, and it works by rhythms, from the orbits of the planets in years, to the outermost spiral nebulae in millions of centuries. We are ourselves controlled by it in locomotion and in the circulation of the blood. Therefore to think of volcanoes as anything but periodic and gravitational in their relation to the globe would, to me, make the science of volcanoes entirely uninteresting. All science lives on rhythmic action.

A second manuscript entitled “Steamblast eruptions,” was based on Mount Pelée in Martinique and a comparison with the 1924 steamblast of Kilauea. This last had conclusively shown outflow under the sea, and inflow of groundwater, to change lava surging to blasts from a steam boiler. A paper published in 1940 was a study of the gas collections from flaming basalt on Kilauea and Mauna Loa, made by E. S. Shepherd and me. In this I plotted curves of relative excellence of collection in relation to the amount of the volcanic gases, in contrast to the non-volcanic aqueous and oceanic gases. These latter, notably water vapor, decreased in proportion to the manipulative excellence of the handling of vacuum tubes; and the volcanic gases increased, notably hydrogen and the carbon gases. This convinced me that the deep gas of volcanoes is hydrogen, associated with carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

In this decade, too, war brought new demands on my time and experience and had its effect on the Kilauea Observatory. Major James Snedeker of the Marine Corps, legal officer for the Commanding General in Honolulu, having heard of our experience with motorcar amphibians, told me that the Pacific Ocean war would depend on amphibian landing craft. And a letter from Admiral Bloch urged me to send to the Navy details of our experience with amphibians. As this involved geology of beaches around the Pacific Ocean, I set to work on twelve monographs for the Navy dealing with the mechanism of amphibians and the problems they posed on beaches in Hawaii, Puget Sound, and Alaska. Other subjects about which I supplied information were the inflammability of Japanese buildings in the Tokyo earthquake, the handling of earthquake and volcano catastrophes and our material from journals on many places of volcanic danger in the Pacific.