My experiments with volcanoes

by Thomas Augustus Jaggar

My volcano experiments are not influenced by any consensus of text books. I was educated on textbook opinions and found geologic science deficient in experimental measurement of the field progress of erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption. I expended most of my teaching in a plea for field observatories of time measurement of these four processes. The plea has done some good, and in this century we have seen grow up the International Geophysical Union. Experiment stations have multiplied, to make geophysics and geochemistry pure quantitative sciences. But they are generally commercial and have not extended to deep boring under oceans.

While working from volcano observatories for the extension of geology in Alaska, Japan, Hawaii, Tonga, the Caribbean and Italy, and on the mainland of California, Central America, and New Zealand, I have found myself on the outskirts of vast oceans, engaged in a science almost as unsatisfactory as the textbook science of historical and continental geology. It is always a compromise, for we are up against a crying need for maps of the bedrock under the muds of the vast oceans. Volcanism cries out for a knowledge of the globe, and it is helped by such work as that of Gutenberg and Richter. These men compiled critical maps of earthquakes, measured by elastic theory the world over. Their work necessarily made many contacts with volcanoes. The same may be said of the geophysical summaries of gravity, magnetism, climatology, hydrology, and oceanography. But all our sciences stop at the immense sea bottoms, and need salvation through experiment.

Science is not doing all it can. Finances and engineering are competent to contact sea bottom directly with expensive machines not yet invented and to create oceanic rock science. Offshore boring for oil is not enough. Pure science needs an example by financiers like Carnegie and Rockefeller who are not seeking profit. Engineering advice positively can reach under the few hundred feet of mud, find the rock, and bore into it in 2,000 fathoms. The first man who does it will open a new frontier. All honor to Shepard, Ewing, Piggot, Pettersson, and Kullenberg, men who have barely broken ground in this science. The whole of volcanology depends on collecting the crustal rock under the mud.

Hoyle’s book “The Nature of the Universe” takes us one step farther. It shows that all science is essentially cosmology, and science deals with the origin and progress of all nature. I would go farther than the universe. I would include the science of life and of our brains. We need an imaginative picture starting with the outer universe. We end on the earth with volcanoes and the birth of life.

Hoyle and Lyttleton of Cambridge have presented a condensation of current astrophysics, which includes earth, moon, and planets; sun and stars; origin and future of stars; and origin of solar systems. A most gratifying conclusion is that the background material of space creates hydrogen. This is proved by precise mathematical equations. This accounts for the expanding universe under the pressure of such creation. The outermost nebulae continually pass beyond the speed of light. The galaxies move out into infinite space endlessly. They are renovated endlessly by gravitation from hydrogen eternally created.

The sun, by knowledge built up from the days of Jeans and Eddington, contains more than ninety percent of hydrogen, and the small remainder is helium, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and iron. It maintains its surface temperature by nuclear reactions from within outward, at a rate suitable to make helium out of hydrogen, so as to compensate for the energy which the sun radiates.

This dominance of hydrogen inside the solar star makes it impossible that the earth should be solar. Rather, it was a product of a companion star, a supernova which exploded and, with excessive heat, created elements atomically. The sun was a binary pair of stars, and the companion occupied the place of the four greater planets. The remnant body, after explosion, moved away.

A gaseous ring formed around the sun condensing from many molecules to rotating superplanets. These broke up many hundred million years ago into Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Small blobs escaped to become the inner planets including the earth. The earth captured small solids and acquired the moon as a satellite. It got radioactive matter exteriorly, plus nitrogen, water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.

There is a hundred times more hydrogen per unit of mass in the sun than in the planets. Its supply will last for 50,000 million years. The solar system is tunneling through variable interstellar gas. It picks up more or less material, and so changes climates occasionally. This makes such episodes as the ice ages on earth. Lyttleton estimates that the dust clouds encountered form bundles of particles captured by the sun to make comets.

The mathematics of the interior of the sun, applied by Bethe to the use of carbon and nitrogen as catalysts and changing hydrogen to helium, is a model of experimentation. It should be imitated to explain Hawaiian basalt. The core of the earth produces gas reactions up cracks. The gases act on deep crust. The surface product is olivine basalt. What are the reactions between gas and crust to make Mauna Loa foam fountains? This problem has not been tackled. Geologists have clung to a theory of shallow reservoirs.