My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
I disliked geology in 1902. And I disliked mining because of its
secrecy and its devotion to profits. Geology failed to tell businessmen
the mystery of granite, of felsite, and of greenstone. Astronomers told
the same men of mysteries, and they were fascinated. Physiology led
them to cells, plants, animals, and chemicals in the blood, solving
mystery after mystery. Men, money, inventions, engineers, buildings,
and staffs grew by leaps and bounds in those sciences. The best geology
could do was guesswork--a mastodon, a big reptile skeleton, a guesswork
color map--while seventy percent of the earth was seabottom rock,
unmapped, and twenty percent more consisted of fractures covered with
soil.
Seeing the Carnegie and Rockefeller laboratories and observatories, I
grieved for field geology. The public did not even know that granite,
the mystery, is the commonest rock and that quartz, the gold maker, is
the commonest mineral. Nor did they know that both are almost absent
from the whole Pacific. Nor that geology is almost ignorant of their
origin and injection, if it is injection. Here was the globe, the
end product of astronomy, the most fascinating research in the whole
range of science. The source of all raw materials of commerce, yet its
fire-made rocks and its seabottom rocks remained a mystery.
Before leaving the Grand Canyon, let me record my impressions of the
erosion. It is a gorge a mile deep usually described as “cut” by the
Colorado River. As I shall show in discussion of experiments with the
Grand Canyon model, it is possible, in stratified layers yielding grit
to flowing rainwater, to cut a deep canyon by surface runoff. It is
possible for underground water and tributaries from side rainfalls
to increase the volume of such a stream greatly in a hundred miles.
But Dutton’s showing of upheaved and downdropped big blocks of broken
mountains, and such obvious breaks as the Tonto and Bright Angel faults
shown to tourists as traced out by Bright Angel Canyon, prove that the
earth crust is broken. And Searchlight showed a fault to be a water
supply.
The enormous canyon appeared to me to be a million-year break system
of earth-crust rotting. The water is a giant modern grinding mill of
rainfall, underground accumulation, and transport. But with five great
erosion surfaces shown in the discordances, from 2,000 million years
ago to the present day; and with upheaval of the high plateaus in block
faults, and bent strata age after age; and farther north with recent
volcanoes that spouted up the cracks, it seems more vivid to think
the valleys at least partly water-filled cracks and chasms. Volcanoes
cannot be shallow. The canyons and the great bend are different from
the Green River source, because of upward push in waves. The up-push
of the Uinta Mountains is well known to have been slow. It kept pace
with the ruptures followed by the river. Going back to Daubrée, rivers
follow cracks much more than do the textbooks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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