My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
The question of ancient greenstones in Africa, Scandinavia, and Canada
is much discussed, for there were old volcanic lavas in many places;
mixed with gneisses, schists, and granites. They were not a deep
layer, but presumed to be ancient remnants of interspersed lavas among
sediments. They are one more evidence that volcanic eruption goes
back to the time of the most ancient rocks on continents and that its
lavas were affected by metamorphism. But no continuous deep stratum of
greenstones is known. At depths of fifty miles, under continents only,
is the Mohorovicic change to denser rock. This is an echo surface in
earthquake waves, but it is absent over the whole Pacific. It may be
the top of the armor plate.
Justice Holmes wrote that the Constitution of the United States
was an experiment. That all law of the nation works salvation by
prophecy based on experiment. The experiments were extended to the
Bill of Rights and all the amendments to the Constitution. I feel
that geology--in view of its extreme ignorance of submarine rocks,
ores, metals, oils, spring waters, temperatures, magnetism, gravity,
and gases for most of the earth--needs a bill of rights and numerous
amendments to its constitution. Its salvation by prophecy needs to
be based on experiments with instruments, drill rigs, and anchored
laboratories in this vast area. These experiments, superficially,
have been conducted by oceanographic sampling of bottom materials, by
gravity pendulums operated in submarines, by cameras on sea bottoms,
and collections of bottom waters, by tests of radioactivity of
bottom materials, by echo sounding to determine thickness of muds,
by volcanology on oceanic islands, by topographic surveying of the
bottom, and by all the excellent work of the oceanographic and geologic
stations and their seismographs, with some studies of marine chemistry,
physics, and biology. The conclusions in this book amount to only one
small prophecy based on experiments with volcanoes. But the rock under
deep ocean mud is still uncollected.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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