The 1946 wave was very large and the water rose in pulsations until it swept away the railroad bridge and washed out the whole waterfront of Hilo. The earthquake seismogram came at 2 A.M. when no one was watching, and the water wave at 8 A.M. came just when the Observatory workers went on duty. When the flood of ocean destroyed the Hilo breakwater and leaped over it to damage the principal wharves, many people were drowned. Considerable damage was done on Oahu and Maui. The disaster came when Dr. F. P. Shepard, oceanographer of La Jolla, was occupying a summer cottage on the north shore of Oahu; and he was delighted to experience a big tidal wave. Collaborating with geologists in Hawaii, Shepard compiled a most thorough report on height of waves in all bays of the Territory. Seismographs and tide gauges got to work all around the Pacific Ocean, the place on the sea bottom which had jolted was exactly located, and the Coast Survey and Navy started far-reaching precautions for predicting against future combinations of earthquake and water. This included seismographs that ring alarm bells at night. The object of science is always prediction and assisting humanity; and the need is always for more men.
Another significant event of 1947 was the visit of Hans Pettersson of the Oceanographic Institute of Sweden who was conducting an expedition which followed the path of the Challenger. The object of the project was to study the oceanography of the sea bottom around the equator. Thus Pettersson was enthusiastic about my paper in Natural History and its emphasis on studying sea bottoms. With him was inventor Kullenberg who had made a device for boring into the mud of the sea bottom and taking longer cores than had been dug previously. His apparatus consisted of a core barrel, tripped with valves close to the sea bottom under a heavy weight, which would allow it to sink sixty feet in suitable bottom ooze while the core rose inside the pipe without being compressed.
Pettersson had a skilled staff consisting of biologist, physicist, chemist, and geologist; and they had laboratories on board the Albatross for study of the collected bottom materials. They also took echo data of explosions near sea bottom, giving depths of soft materials over hard rock. This place of transition was found to be shallower under the Pacific Ocean than under the Atlantic. They discovered hard lava flows in many places between Tahiti and Hawaii and under the Indian Ocean, indicating extensive submarine volcanic eruption. An attempt was made to measure the temperature of a core, and this suggested that the bottom of the boring was warmer than the top, meaning a thermal gradient of sea bottom. A core of volcanic agglomerate was obtained in the deep trench opposite the East Indies.
It was during this period that President Gregg Sinclair of the University of Hawaii urged a plan for geophysics of the Pacific, and Professor R. W. Hiatt of that institution succeeded in advancing interest in organic oceanography. I wrote an appeal, based on such work as that of Pettersson, Perret, and others urging the Regents of the University to plan a large geophysical institute in Hawaii, to make a science of the rock bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Thousands of soundings made in the Gulf of Alaska and in the central Pacific had shown seamounts, or guyots, shaped like high volcanoes on the sea floor, some of them with flat tops, but having characteristics of ancient isolated volcanoes. New soundings revealed mountain ranges on the sea floor, probably volcanic, one of them right across the middle of the Hawaiian chain. No one had yet discovered fiery eruption in deep water, but oceanographers were beginning to use boring machines, cameras, electric lights, and devices for determining radioactivity of the muds. As sea bottom occupies three-quarters of the globe, it is inconceivable, when compared with the continents, that it has no hot solfataras, hot springs, and hot volcanoes. In fact, we know some of the latter in shallow water. It is only a question of scientific organization to locate the sources of Pettersson’s submarine lava flows. President Sinclair took to the chiefs of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations a proposal for a five million dollar Geophysical Institute at the University of Hawaii, to utilize the advantages of its central Pacific position.
As for my own experiments, my Department of Volcanology at the University was moved into a concrete basement room a thousand square feet in area in the Home Economics building, and the expense was shared with the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. Here I had office and shop and collections of the Research Association, and the assistance of a secretary and a junior researcher who is an instrument maker. Thus were assembled in a fire resistant location my petrographic and mineral collections from Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific lands, together with manuscripts from my days of Harvard and Massachusetts Tech to the middle of the century and classified accumulations of my Navy monographs, lantern slides, negatives, photographs, maps, drawings, correspondence, and instruments, including material obtained by the Research Association for experiments still continuing on the hardness of minerals.
One objective of this hardness measurement was an instrument for machine shops which would give in half a minute the length of a standard scratch made by a standard dental disk of silicon carbide. I called this the “Jaggar Scratch Tester” and Mr. Paul Rushforth, a Honolulu optician, made improved models of the instrument. When a book was published on the experiments with some three hundred woods, minerals, metals, and plastics, Dr. Grodzinski of the commercial diamond establishments in London became interested and reproduced the paper in a review dealing with industrial diamonds, which have become of great importance in the world of grinding machinery. This made a new contact with England, similar to that made by Boynton with my microsclerometer in 1908, when he applied it to the microscopic constituents of steel under the British Iron and Steel Institute. I sent a copy of my new report to the Pearl Harbor industrial laboratory, along with one of the instruments. Endorsers of this report were Mr. W. H. Hammond and Dr. Earl Ingerson, director of the mineral laboratories of the U.S. Geological Survey.
A result of the experiments on hardness is the knowledge that the important quality is softness, or abradability, and speed of removal of material in any uniform mechanical cutting process. It was formerly thought that the big intervals in values were between the hard substances. It turns out that the biggest gaps in value are in soft substances like coals and clays and plasters. Hardness is purely a negative quality of resistance, and measurements are of yielding, not of resisting.
Other experiments on which I worked dealt with location of the Zenith in the sky for quick determination of latitude and longitude from stars and telescopic studies of the moon, an old hobby of my master, Shaler. I have long been convinced that Kilauea lava resembles moon lava in the craters it builds, and my special interest is that Mauna Loa and Kilauea build structures of basalt, small and large, which are earth experiments imitating the moon on a smaller scale. The astronomers say their field is the stars, the geologists must explain the moon. As a matter of fact, one geologist has made a start. My classmate J. E. Spurr, who after retirement to Florida from work as U.S. Geological Survey geologist among the faults and lavas of the far West, published books on the comparison of the moon with geology. In view of increasing attempts to explain moon craters by impact (Baldwin), I feel that experienced volcanologists should also take a hand in moon science. Larger arcs of circles on the globe, the Aleutian Islands for instance, resemble moon features and are deeply volcanic. Furthermore, magnificent detailed photographs of the moon from modern telescopes are available to volcanology.
I spent my summers at Hawaii National Park, becoming consulting geophysicist. Dr. Chester K. Wentworth of the Board of Water Supply became geologist. The laboratories were extended to a seismograph station seven miles up the northeast flank of Mauna Loa, but operation of the original cellar adjacent to the Volcano House was continued. A basement under the Natural History building of the Park held seismographs, Finch’s office and library, and Loucks’ shop.