My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
There was a local tidal wave at the bay shore of Kamakura, but no great
tidal wave from the deep ocean came to Tokyo. Some volcanic effort of
deep lava had wedged open and jolted the sea bottom, but how it acted
is entirely obscure. It was quite different from the San Francisco
quake, with its side slip of twenty-one feet and a crack 400 miles long.
When we returned to Japan in 1926 with the Pacific Science Congress,
the restoration of Tokyo was practically complete and a magnificent
greater city had been built with wide and large parkways. The
government was lavish in its entertainment of the scientists attending
the congress. Dr. Lacroix and I were sent to Osaka to lecture, and to
show lantern slides of Mount Pelée; and expeditions all over Japan were
arranged for the visitors. I had an opportunity to see for the first
time the large basaltic lava fields of the lake district at the base
of Fujiyama, and I was astonished at the similarity of the basaltic
pahoehoe to our Hawaiian outflows and the freshness of the lavas and
the lava caverns. I had never thought of Fujiyama as a “lava flow”
volcano.
My next expedition was in the autumn of 1924, when I was invited by
H. E. Gregory, Director of Bishop Museum, to go on an expedition
on the USS _Whippoorwill_, Commander Samuel King, to Howland
and Baker Islands. Others on the expedition were C. Montague Cooke
(malacologist), George Munro (ornithologist), Erling Christophersen
(botanist), Ted Dranga (marine shell collector), George Collins (Museum
Trustee), and Bruce Cartwright (naturalist). These men were invited to
make up one of several Bishop Museum parties which were sent out to
south sea islands for collection and report.
As geologist, my job was to carry a portable seismograph and record
earthquakes or microseisms and to take photographs. We had made up
at the Observatory a one-component horizontal pendulum, in which
the chronograph drum used smoked paper. In camp I lowered the box
containing the seismograph into a hole in the sand under my cot, with a
view to finding out what tremors occurred on these flat coral islands.
However, no movements were detected during the period of our stay,
within the sensitivity limit of the small seismograph.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account