My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
The continental crack system between crust blocks and full of rain
water is waiting to assist the crisis, while the blocks are poised
over uprising gases of the ages. The gases of the ages, reaching to
the core of the globe, are eternally melting the walls with white-hot
core matter, walls of siliceous rock blocks 1,800 miles deep. In this
system, Vesuvius is a tiny pimple. Incidentally, the 1944 earthquakes
were recorded in largest number during the period when the liquid
pumice fountains were in action in the nine different spells between
March 20 and March 23. This means that the maxima of engulfing
crater, seething slag, outrushing gas, crunching mountain weight, and
avalanching inner walls were all happening together. The clogging of
vents forced the ground water steam into pulsations. This could not
last; the mountain blocks settled and resumed pressure, deep lava
drained off, heat dwindled, and gas was relieved. The bigger volcanic
system asserted its downward weight of the adjusted globe.
By making much of pulsations and thirty-three year intervals, we are
dreaming of an ideal volcano such as might be constructed as was our
geyser apparatus. But there is no question of the reality of tides
in rock, as well as in ocean; of day and night; cold and sunshine;
year and century. Continent and ocean are positive, globe and solar
system are positive. The ideal volcano is part of a tidal system and
is limited in size. Therefore science has a right to inquire how it
happens that through centuries most volcanoes stay 4,000 feet high. It
has a right to look for averages and periodicities, just as a doctor
looks for respiration, temperature, and heartbeats.
Like men, volcanoes are not all alike, but both men and volcanoes are
orderly organisms. The object of volcanology is to find order and
relate the small orderliness to the big regularity of globe and solar
tides.
My 1906 visit at the end of the Vesuvian eruption crystallized my
lifework idea, begun at Pelée; but my accomplishment was dwarfed to
triviality by that of Perret, whom I first met while he was assisting
the Italian volcano observatory. He was a photographer and observer
of rare merit. He had been living in Naples and photographing all the
Italian volcanoes, and he had worked out a solar control diagram for
predicting volcano tides. Italy had made a volcanologist out of a
physicist-engineer. Discovery of Perret meant to me much more than any
phenomenon of geology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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