Chapter III: Expedition Decade (2)

My experiments on erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption convinced me that a field experimental science was bound to grow up in each of those parts of dynamical geology. All of these needed field observatories to determine index of erosion, index of sedimentation, index of ground movement and earthquake, index of volcanism; these indices to be quantitative just as the thermometer and barometer and wind gauge made climatology a quantitative science of the air. I found almost nothing being accomplished in these new field sciences. No one dreamt of attacking the Mississippi as a field of pure science of erosionology, compared to the Amazon. It was felt that these things could be left to commerce and the engineers.

By index of eruption I mean the geographical peculiarity of Vesuvius, for example, as an eruption center. Perret tried to reduce this to diagram form. I published, in Washington, a plea for geophysical observatories.

An earthquake in 1908, predicted and photographed by Perret, had killed 125,000 people in Italy at Messina, near Mount Etna. Hence I felt more strongly than ever that something must be done. So it was that in 1909, at my own expense, I made a journey to Hawaii and Japan with my family. Everything within me converged on making a life work of the results of my Pacific journey.

In Honolulu I was invited to show my colored lantern slides of the Mount Pelée disaster and to describe Massachusetts Tech’s plan for a seismograph station on Blue Hill near Boston. When the Honorable L. A. Thurston of the _Pacific Commercial Advertiser_ interviewed me after the lecture, and asked whether Kilauea Volcano on the island of Hawaii would not be better than Blue Hill, I replied that it certainly would have many more earthquakes and, in addition, would offer volcano lavas to observe in action. Thurston asked, “Is it then a question of money?” I replied that it was, largely, but that it also entailed persuading Tech authorities that I was right.

After visiting Kilauea, where I stayed at the Volcano House and saw Halemaumau lava pit in action, I went on to Japan. There I visited the seismograph stations of Professor Omori and traveled to active Tarumai Volcano in Hokkaido. Tarumai, which was undergoing an interesting eruption at that time, is a 4,000 foot cone in pine forests on the north island of Japan. (Notice the usual 4,000 feet.) It had broken out explosively, sent up a great spiral of cauliflower clouds of steam and ash thousands of feet, and followed this by piling up a lava dome in its summit crater, the dome lifting the crater floor and protruding above the top of the mountain.

This was an extrusion of andesite, more refractory and giving hotter steam than Kilauea vents, as measured with an electric thermometer. We got 450° Centigrade with Bristol thermocouple in sulfur-covered cracks hissing on the actual face of the lava dome. Kilauea had given 300° Centigrade in the famous “postal card crack” where visitors browned their cards.

The stiff rising lava dome of Tarumai was a duplicate of the lavas of Bogoslof and Pelée, but Bogoslof was a crater at sea level, and Pelée’s big dome and spine above the mountain top developed in the second year of eruptions. I found further inspiration in a visit to Asama volcano in central Japan. Here, just as at Tarumai, the hard lava lay in a rigid swirl, hissing and steaming at the bottom of the summit crater after the crater had announced eruption by “cauliflower” uprushes.

It was evident that hard lava push-ups from the bottom of craters were characteristic of the Pacific and Carib shores, in contrast to Hawaiian and Italian flow-downs. The pressure upward breaks a mountain, the slag and boiling groundwater inside churns up avalanche gravel and dust, columns of dust-laden steam rush out, the break-up lets up lava, and according to its frothing gas and heat and the air temperature, it is capable physically of either foaming out liquid through radial cracks or pushing up semisolid and piling as an aa heap.

The net effect is flat lava shields for Hawaii, with flows into and under the ocean, and shapely high cones for the Andes and Japan, with Italy somewhere in between. The difference in the lavas is a matter of internal meltability, due to chemistry and gases.

In the first decade of the twentieth century this was new to me as a geologist, for the books did not explain internal gas in lava. Geography understood nothing of the relation of a volcano to lines of cracking earth crust and depth of crust, and gigantic explosions dominated history as exceptions. Refractory slags were then believed to be stiff by reason of chemical fusibility, and gas in solution in a melt is not understood even today. The Japan journey explained the textbook contrast between oceanic Hawaii and continental Ecuador, both volcanic, and the further contrast with Yellowstone agglomerates, and intrusions of the Black Hills of South Dakota. Clearly Hawaii must be studied, and experimental geology extended to the globe as a laboratory.

On my return to Honolulu, Professor Ralph Hosmer, forester, met me and reported that Honolulu money was available, if Massachusetts Tech would send me to Hawaii to found a volcano experiment station. Then and there the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association formed by business leaders in Honolulu became a reality, to crystallize later into an educational corporation.

In 1910, while I was still a professor at Massachusetts Tech, the United Fruit Company invited me to go in one of their ships to study the earthquake destruction of Cartago, Costa Rica. I saw an opportunity to study seismology in the field, as I had studied volcanology in Martinique. The United Fruit Company owned the railroad and much of the national debt of Costa Rica. F. R. Hart, treasurer of M. I. T. and director of the fruit company told me to make my own plans and the company would pay all expenses. Knowing that engineering is of first importance in earthquake disaster, I invited Professor Charles Spofford, head of our Civil Engineering Department, to go with me, and he promptly accepted.

Our journey was from New Orleans, in one of the splendid snow-white steamers of the fruit company. This ship, going by Belize in British Honduras, took us to Limon on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, a place of banana plantations and Jamaica-negro labor. From Limon we took a mountain-climbing, narrow-gauge railroad, to the high and healthful capital, San Jose. We passed the ruins of the city of Cartago, with its earthquake tumbled churches and wrecked lower buildings, all covered with heavy roofs of red tiles. Don Anastasio Alfaro, government scientist, showed us seismographs and maps, and we called on President Jimenez, who owned a dairy farm on the high slopes of Irazu Volcano directly above Cartago. I arranged with the President to have the government make an official inquiry all over the Republic, suggesting a study of ten grades of earthquake damage, adapted to Central American habits. These grades, from mere alarm up to wrecked churches, were to apply to what had happened in each place. According to the answers, we would make for each place a numerical value of intensity and plot these on the map.

We visited the wreckage of Cartago, where the quake had come like the crack of a whip on May 4, 1910, just at the supper hour. An American railway conductor and his family were seated at table and with the first jarrings, they all pitched forward under the dining room table. When the low adobe house fell on top of them, the table saved their lives. A pathetic object was the hollow square of the Carnegie Palace, designed by a Costa Rican architect to promote Central American peace. It was improperly braced, and everything came down, including the ornate stone wall around the grounds; and a cracked gate post held a melancholy buzzard in the hideous ruin. This and several of the big churches, cracked and disrupted, gave Spofford food for his architectural notes.

The President’s farm on Irazu was a lovely place of green glades, fat cattle, and attractive Spanish dairymaids, at an altitude of more than 9,000 feet. The crater of Irazu at 10,300 feet was a tumbled depression on the top of the mountain with a steaming solfatara on one side, and a lot of circular holes inside, within a rim more or less circular.

Poas crater was very different, with a crater lake of boiling water surrounded by bright-colored horizontal layers of ash. We found buried bombs from a recent eruption which had punctured the soil with holes one or two feet across. There was wild adventure for me in being given a horse at 4 A.M., equipped with a rotten saddle, which slipped when I mounted him. The horse resented me in the early morning darkness, having just left his grain, and immediately bucked off both me and the saddle. More adventure followed. On the ride up the mountain and in the midst of the forest we encountered a jaguar trap which had recently caught two big cats. It was a pen, roofed with logs baited with a fowl, and disguised with brush; a shutter fell and closed the opening when the bait was touched. On the way down we had a terrific tropical thunder storm, with sheets of cold rain, and I got chilled to the bone and was sick with dysentery for two or three days.

There are a dozen volcanoes like these two on the backbone of the Costa Rica rocky mountains. They trend in a ragged line from the Panama boundary on the southeast, to Nicaragua on the northwest. All have records of explosive activity, but lava flows are rare. Beginning at Nicaragua the line of the Cordillera, capped with volcanoes, continues through Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; and some of the lower ones have lava flows. Cosequina is famous among them; and conspicuous as a frequently active volcano is Santa Ana in Salvador, one peak of which is Izalco, the index volcano of Central America, erupting frequently. Other index volcanoes are Kilauea for Hawaii, Stromboli for Italy, and Bogoslof for the Aleutians. The next line of volcanoes, also trending northwest, extends from Guatemala into southern Mexico. The Costa Rica line overlaps the northeast side of the Nicaragua-Salvador line, and this in turn overlaps the Guatemala line, and so on. The chains of volcanoes are over an echelon of cracks, surmounted by heaped-up lava peaks on the continental divide.

From the point of view of experimenting with volcanoes, the exploration of the Cartago earthquake and Poas and Irazu craters and a study of their relations typified the unsatisfactory combination of upheaved mountains of strata and of volcanic eruptions and underground friction. This extends all the way along the Cordillera from Patagonia to Alaska. I say unsatisfactory because from the science standpoint, the action of eruption or earthquake is far scattered in time and place, and only local observatory geophysics and traveling scientists will do the work. Cartago is directly at the foot of Irazu Volcano, but the volcano did not erupt simultaneously with the earthquake. In the same way Messina is at the foot of Etna, and Tokyo is at the foot of Fujiyama; and the great earthquakes do not accord with eruptions. Sakurajima in 1914 was an exception, it had a quake after outbreak.

The direct outcome of my study, on the map of Costa Rica, of lines of equal earthquake effects, showed the maximum of the 1910 quake on the continental backbone, and the lines were crowded together along the western mountains. However, they spread out wider and wider along the Caribbean coastal plain, which is an elevated sea bottom on the northeast side of the country. In other words the terrific jolt was a deep slipping or scraping under the volcano line, and the elastic waves of like strong effects were close together in the mountains on the Pacific side, opposed by hard rock. On the other hand these waves, much feebler, widened out their lines in going through flat, soft strata on the Caribbean side. The answer seems to be that along the jagged rupture which underlies the volcanoes there is continuous upward pressure of lava, which occasionally is accelerated into a big bump or slip, now here, now there, as the whole great mountain range volcanically heaves through the ages.

Our next journey was from Barrios across to Guatemala City, where we had distant views of such volcanoes as the pure cone of Agua and the sharp peak of Santa Maria, which in October of 1902 had blown out its flank and left a vast hole. The Guatemalan plateau of rich soil and abundant market products rises gradually from the wet banana lands on the Caribbean side to a height of 4,870 feet at Guatemala City. This is on the line of volcano cracks. Then the land plunges abruptly in a precipitous down-faulted slope, to a low flat shelf along the Pacific Ocean. This shelf is covered with the merging of many deltas formed by the streams and torrents which drain the well-watered plateau. Along this line at the top of the precipice is the chain of volcanoes, with rich coffee lands at their feet on the upper slopes. Coffee plantations were destroyed by steam, mud flood, and ash blasts in 1902, and similar destruction was destined to begin again in 1923.

A large model of Central America has been built in a park in the open air in Guatemala City, showing magnificently the upland plateau and its mountains, the flat slope to the east, and the long straight steep plunge to the Pacific coastal shelf. This is one of the best illustrations of the block faulting of a continent, lifted like a huge flat slab along a crack, and tilted away from the Pacific. The Pacific block dropped down.

The same structure is true, on a larger scale, of the line of the Andes, lifted as a volcano-covered slab, down-faulted along the Chilean coastal plain. The upland slopes away to the basin of the Amazon. In these studies we are experimenting with volcanoes on the scale of geography, but the principles involved apply to Mexico and to the Cascade Range in Oregon. They probably apply also to the Aleutian, the Kamchatkan, and the western Pacific arcs, considered as upheaved and eroded ridges. They are arcs because they are ancient calderas.

We traveled by steamer along the Pacific coast to Panama, where the canal was being finished. We were impressed by General Goethals and his associate engineers, and with the marvellous organization of big engineering as the United States could administer it. Yellow fever had been conquered, ships constantly brought dairy products from New York to canal employees, houses were screened and unglazed, and the jungle was cut back to limits of safety from the mosquitoes. We found lively young American college graduates, both men and women, playing tennis in the deep tropics, where earlier hundreds had died of fever. We arrived just at the time when sides of the Culebra Cut were continuously sliding inward like a glacier, to close up the ditch. The ground under a village at the top of the bank was cracking in long crevasses, and habitations had to be abandoned. The only answer was to dig away the hill with hundreds of dump cars, until the slope was flat enough to stop sliding.

An amusing episode occurred at the Pacific end of the canal, where giant monitors, or hose nozzles, were being used to cut away the banks. Engineer Williamson had conceived the idea of mounting these monitors on concrete barges made on the spot. He covered the frames with steel mesh, and sprayed concrete against the mesh until a water-tight hull was produced. Fellow engineers jeered at Williamson and said that a boat made of rock would surely sink. Someone asked Williamson, when his first barge bore up the heavy monitors and was successful, what he was going to name it. He painted the name in large letters on the barge “Ivory Soap, it floats.”

We met in Costa Rica and Panama Arthur Herschel, city engineer of Kingston, Jamaica, who was responsible for the reconstruction of that city after the terrific earthquake of 1907. Herschel invited Spofford and me to stay with him on our way home, stopping off when we passed Jamaica. We did so, were delightfully entertained, and learned about engineering and rehabilitation after the most intense earthquake of all history.

The momentary intensity of the quake had been utterly without warning, as though two mountains had collided, and the masonry of the business section of Kingston crumbled almost instantaneously. A British major was walking along the main thoroughfare, carrying a heavy walking stick, when at the other end of the street, he noticed a commotion and thought it was a negro riot. The disturbance came toward him with a roar, and he saw clouds of dust rise from the street like a tornado and approach him. He felt the ground jolting, raised his stick, and decided to stand and fight it. The buildings right and left simply exploded, and he was fending off bricks and stones and timbers. His feet were half buried in rubble, and he sat down on a steel girder which had lunged out into the street behind him. The dust was suffocating, the noise was a traveling roar which went past him and on down the street behind him. He called to a black man to dig out his feet, but the man rushed by with staring, crazy eyes. He heard screams and saw women running. It was some time before Red Cross stations were established and the army men rescued him.

The lesson taught by this earthquake, more intense than the one at Cartago, was that the wooden bungalows of the hilly suburbs on rocky ground stood the disaster better than even reinforced concrete in the congested waterfront district. The better built government buildings were preserved in part.

The Jamaica law of 1907 had established definite boundaries for wooden construction, limited to the suburbs, and made new and wider streets in the business district. It had also established rigorous fire insurance laws, and a city building code requiring specified construction for all masonry. The result was a marked ring of parkway separating the commercial center from the dwellings in the suburbs. The trouble with such legislation, the effect of which I saw in Kingston twenty-six years later, is that earthquakes are hopelessly discontinuous. With no more big earthquakes as testers, such laws become dead letter, a new generation remembers nothing, and an irresponsible and ignorant native population poses new problems of poverty and vice. Earthquake construction reform becomes an impractical dream. This is part of the unsatisfactory quality of earthquake science, where assistance to humanity is concerned.

So ends my expedition decade, 1901 to 1910, after a succession of studies in the field, which may be called Operation Pelée-Soufrière, Operation Vesuvius, Operation Aleutians, Operation Kilauea-Tarumai, and finally Operation Cartago. I did not think of these at the time as the strategic work of warring with a task force in geographical volcanology; but now as I look back on it, I can see in each expedition the organization of an institution and men, and progress of volcanic geology.

The Martinique event was destined, through many explorers, to reform geophysics. Vesuvius introduced me to the importance of superb photography as represented by Perret and Anderson. The Aleutian Islands introduced the question of nautical exploration and the importance of a field base laboratory for work in a land of adverse weather. The Japan-Hawaii expedition showed me the national seismometric work of Dr. Omori in the field, and laid the foundation for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Finally, the Costa Rica expedition introduced me to the complexity of seismological field work in a land of volcanoes, with the problems of engineering ably investigated, and afterwards published by Spofford. This decade thus logically leads into a totally different one, field experiment in geography and founding a volcano observatory in and on the most active volcano in the world, with a permanent dwelling on a crater.