My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
July 1924 saw the deep lava recovering in the crack and sealing off the
water, so as to bubble up in the bottom debris of Halemaumau and push
its way upward into the crevices of the island. It reached the top of
Mauna Loa in 1926 and reactuated outflow at the center of the island.
This migration of vents from top to bottom and back again took twelve
years of fracturing, and it relieved from lava this big piece of the
Hawaiian ridge. In reaching the groundwater and steamblast phase, it
accomplished something which had not happened since 1790, making a
supercycle of 134 years.
The decade after explosion at Halemaumau was marked by small lava
gushes in the bottom of the pit, bringing the depth from 1,300 feet in
1924 to 750 feet in 1934. The layers were something less than 100 feet
each, and they were fed by pahoehoe conelets at the slide-rock margin.
As usual, the lava was gushing up the western wall crack along the
margin of the bottom magma cylinder. There was no trace of recurrence
of steam blasts.
Despite the excitement of actual events, experimentation continued; and
I continued working on inventions for the experiments. Two approaches
to our problems concerned seismic recorders which could be put in the
hands of amateurs, and range finders for improving pit surveys. I had
been convinced for many years that the three-component seismograph was
too elaborate to be operated by volunteer school teachers or telephone
operators who have other things to do. Such a seismograph records with
photographic paper the north-south, east-west, and up-down motion of
the ground, on a chronograph which keeps accurate time and registers a
wavy line every second, so that the recording paper has to be changed
and developed every day. Moreover, these instruments are for measuring
distance to earthquake origins by physics of wave motion, and they have
become hopelessly mathematical. Such mathematics makes for assumptions
of uniformity about a rock crust which is not uniform. Qualitative
science wants to know what happens at a specific rock location and
wants the motion recorded by the simplest possible mechanical device.
It also wants a value in number at each location, for size and
direction of the first motion. This is for an earthquake, identified
as one incident, over such an island as Hawaii, where the rock units
are many and different. This is especially true of long periods of time
when there may be no earthquakes to record.
I devised a simple shock recorder, consisting of a horizontal boom of
very light wood attached to a hinged weight which swung like a door,
so that the boom scratched a line on a circular card which was rotated
and moved along by a common alarm clock. The result was a spiral mark
on the card, such that an earthquake interposed would write a zigzag
opposite a place on the clock face appropriate to the time of day. All
that was necessary was to remove and date the card, wind the clock once
a day, and measure the zigzag.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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