The same argument applies to the twenty-six years of summit and southern outflows, from 1903 to 1929, which followed a quarter century of alternations north and south. None of this takes account of all the summit crater outbreaks, the hinge line between the jostlings of the north and south rift sectors. Roughly the whole argument centers about a supposed rocking of the Mauna Loa mountain sectors, northward and southward from the crater. The two rifts become stiff and seal up for twenty-five years, and then break open for a new period of looseness. The summit well is somehow full always.
A remarkable event, namely repose of Kilauea for eighteen years after 1934, may be another reaction. The previous excitement was the buildup, collapse, and recovery of the mountain for the quarter century preceding 1934, with its culmination the steam blast in 1924 of underground water, the dormancy of Kilauea beginning ten years later. Kilauea in 1790 had a bigger explosive eruption, and was in repose for eighteen years beginning ten years thereafter, namely in 1800. Thus it seems likely that Kilauea executes quarter centuries of crisis in its own right. These times are not exact, but are approximations of scientific search for order in a big machine, the Hawaiian volcanic system, where rhythmic pulsations exist wherever gravity operates. A third of a century may prove more exact than the estimate of a quarter century.
The end of this 1940 decade completes a half century of my experience of volcanoes and earthquakes, dwelling with a single crater, and learning that volcanoes and earthquakes are tied together. They appear tied to deep ruptures 2,000 miles long, in the thick shell of the earth over a white hot liquid core.
I have recently started an experiment with a thick globe of cement, made with a shell, proportional in thickness to the earth’s crust, which is 1,800 miles deep, as all seismologists agree. Striking this shell with a sledge hammer, I find it breaks in straight lines at right angles to each other. Theory is bound to be influenced by the observational answers derived from watching lava emerging from the mountain rifts, at the end of the long straight belt of rifts of the whole Hawaiian chain.
I continually review my own geological muddles, the controversies over steam, flames, volcano swelling, explosion craters, layers in the crust, weighting and underflowing, continental uplift, the globe’s armor plate, contraction wrinkling of basins of sediment, submarine volcanoes, linear chains of volcanoes, siliceous shell, blocks lifted or sunk, planets solar or from the sun’s binary twin, original heat or radioactive heat, thick crust or thin shell, lava reservoirs or lava core, pregeology ancestors of volcanoes, and craters on the moon. The only way to calculate from observations on Hawaiian volcanoes is to copy the mathematicians; namely, to guess at the answers.
Chapter VII
Envoi
“Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll round us
Each with different powers and other forms of life than ours.”
I have spent sixty years in qualitative experiments in geology. I began with old volcanoes and geysers in the Yellowstone and the far west, and ended with experiments on the active Hawaiian volcano, Kilauea. Based on these experiments, I have written books about evolution of craters, and about distinct peculiarities of explosive eruptions from underground water.
The accusation that I am not orthodox in professional geology is false. Professional geology is largely continental because its field work has been on continents. My work has been oceanic; my field, seventy percent of the earth’s surface, extending over a thick crust down to the earth core. The earth core is fluid and massive and hot, as all geology agrees. Isostasy, which postulates a thin flexible shell, is violated by the ocean deeps and the volcanic ridges. Volcanic rift echelons like the Cordillera and the Hawaiian ridge are too long to be generated as the fracture of a crust fifty miles deep. The circularity and graduated size in linear stretches of the Pacific arcs are functions of a fractured thick-shell sphere. Similar gradation of arcs is on the lunar surface. Arguments, based on the knowledge of meteors, for an iron core and for large lunar craters are without analogy. Substratum theories, from Stübel to Daly, do not agree with oceanic volcanism. Gravitational crust balance applies better to a primitive thick fault block crust than to a thin shell. Earth lavas, as natural experimental models, imitate lunar features on small and large scales. Both make consistent history for two similar globes. Volcanology has to stand as global and ancient, and any geologist may accept the reasonings here enumerated without being unorthodox.