The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  The entire area was steaming more than it had the previous week. The ground was also noticeably hotter, enough to burn the leather soles of their boots if they were careless and stood still. The only solution, as Jaggar and Thurston soon discovered, was to keep raising one foot, then the other to avoid the smell of burning leather and to give the steel nails on the soles of their boots a brief time to cool.

  Thurston had brought a small log. Standing atop a small promontory along the edge of the peninsula, he tossed it onto the lake. A few small flames sputtered out from beneath the log where it set atop the lava. There was too little oxygen in the air directly over the lake for the log to flare into flames. Slowly the motion of the lake surface carried the log away until it got caught in a down-going lava stream. Eventually, it was pulled under, a puff of white steam marking where it had disappeared, followed by a small lava fountain that continued for several minutes.

  Back with the others, Jaggar had the men screw together several lengths of pipe. At one end he attached an empty iron capsule that would hold the Seger cones. He placed six cones inside with fusible temperatures that ranged from 1,810 to 2,100°F. He then closed the capsule with an iron screw cap. To the other end of the pipe he attached a rope that would be used to pull the pipe out of the lava lake.

  When all was ready, Jaggar led the way, the other men following and carrying the assembled pipe, climbing onto the ridge, then out onto the peninsula. The men could hear their boots crunch through thin crusts of new spatter.

  Jaggar positioned himself at the end of the peninsula farthest from the ridge, standing within four feet of the edge of the lava lake. The heat radiating off the silvery satin surface of the lake was incredible. Breathing was difficult. Fortunately, he did not smell any noxious gases. Shouting, he directed the others to push the end of the pipe with the iron capsule to him. He grabbed onto it, steadying himself as best he could, then plunged the end of the pipe into the lava. It was instantly swept aside by a strong undercurrent, nearly pulling him off his perch.

  He crouched down, holding the pipe in place with one hand, which was covered with a heavy leather gauntlet glove, while shielding his face with the other, shifting his feet constantly. He dropped his free hand only once, briefly, to look across the fiery lake. The air was surprisingly clear. Lava fountains seemed to be in every direction. Surprisingly, there were no sounds, the heated air somehow muffling the noise.

  Yellow flames tinged with pale blue danced frantically across the surface of the lake. The hot air shimmered so fast that the huge distant black crags of solidified lava seemed to oscillate. He decided not to take any deep breaths lest the nearby searing furnace-like air singe his lungs.

  The four other men stood far away, holding onto the rope tied to the free end of the pipe. They waited for a signal. “How long?” Jaggar shouted. “Six minutes,” someone called back. Jaggar sprang to his feet and told the men to pull with all they had.

  The four men wrapped their gloved hands around the rope and leaned back and pulled. But lava hung tightly to the submerged end of the pipe and it would not move.

  The men began to pull in rhythm. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the pipe started to slide. At last, it came up in a rush.

  The pipe was carried to a safe place. The capsule had been submerged to a depth of only a few feet. It was covered by several inches of still-hot lava. The men cooled the lava with water from their canteens. Then Jaggar chipped away at the crusted lava with an ice axe. As soon as it was clean, he unscrewed the cap and pulled out the six Seger cones. None had fused. The capsule had not been immersed long enough for the cones to feel the full heat of the molten lava.

  Over the next months Jaggar tried the experiment several times again. On one occasion he enlisted the help of five men of the United States Army infantry who were visiting the volcano. One of the soldiers, who had been in the Spanish-American War, remarked that standing near the lava lake made him more nervous than any gun battle he had been in.

  Jaggar tried different ways to preheat the capsule before immersing it. The most promising method was to hold it inside one of the red-glowing caves found around the edge of the lava lake for ten minutes, then immerse the capsule beneath the molten lava for five more. In one such experiment, all of the cones fused, except one. From that single experiment, Jaggar concluded the temperature of the molten lava lake at Kilauea was 2,010°F (1,100°C), almost 100°F hotter than the temperature measured six years earlier by Perret and Shepherd. Countless measurements of lava temperature, using a variety of techniques, made since then have confirmed Jaggar’s result.

  Standing next to the lava lake for hours at a time, he naturally wondered how deep the lake was. Those who had seen the lake and drawn cross-sections—including James Dwight Dana of Yale University and Ernest Shepherd of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, as well as many others—had assumed the liquid lava extended deep into the volcano. But might the lake have a bottom, one that could be measured? From his years of observing the lake, he thought so. And so he devised a way to measure it.

  The first attempt was made on January 23. Nine volunteers, all guests from the Volcano House, assembled at the lake’s edge. Jaggar had them screw together ten lengths of twenty-foot-long half-inch-diameter stainless steel pipes to make a single long one. He then had the nine men lift the long pipe and walk forward with it until each man stood within a few feet of the lake’s edge. Some of the men became nauseous from the suffocating heat. Others would later recount how the skin on their faces blistered immediately from the radiant heat of the lake. But all nine stood firm and waited for instructions. The instructions came quickly.

  Jaggar stood at one end of the long pipe, holding it steady, then plunging it into the lake of liquid lava. He chose that part of the lake because it had a current. As soon as the pipe touched the lake it began to slide away in the direction of the current and the nine volunteers. As the submerged part of the pipe passed each man, Jaggar came running by, telling the man to drop his section of the pipe and stand back.

  Down went the pipe until it could go no farther. Grabbing hold of it, Jaggar could feel that the submerged part had encountered resistance. He tried to push the pipe in deeper, but that caused it to arch up. His hand shot up, signaling the others that it could penetrate no farther. Sixty feet of the pipe was submerged. Now began the difficult work of retrieving it.

  Hand over hand the nine men pulled, each one grabbing the hot steel, enduring the pain as hundreds of tiny shards of volcanic glass cut through their gloves and sliced into their hands. Lava had congealed around the immersed section of pipe, making it difficult to pull out the pipe. The men could pull out only the first twenty feet; forty more feet of steel pipe was still immersed when Jaggar told them to stop. A block and tackle was rigged and the men again tried to retrieve the pipe, but it was hopeless. And so Jaggar had the men unscrew the sections that could be reached. The last two lengths were abandoned.

  Someone had the idea to place his hand over the open end of the stuck hollow steel pipe. He felt cold air coming out in regular pulses. He placed his ear near the open end and told the others that he could hear a sound similar to the rhythmic beating of an exhaust pipe when a car motor is running. Everyone took a turn, surprised by both the cold air and the fact that there was anything to hear.

  Jaggar made a second attempt to sound the lake the same day, this time from a place a few hundred feet from the original spot. Another long steel pipe was constructed and it, too, was slid into the lava, then it stopped. Again the men pulled out the pipe, this time, retrieving the entire length. And, again the pipe had gone down about sixty feet.

  Jaggar repeated the experiment four more times on four different days at four different places around the edge of the lava lake, each time with a different team of volunteers. And each time the depth was the same.

  From these crude experiments and from his years of closely watching the circulation pattern of the lake and making daily measurements of the lake
’s changing level, Jaggar came to the following conclusion. He discarded the old concept that the lake was merely the top of a large cylinder of molten material that continued deep into the volcano. Instead, he had shown that the lake was a shallow feature. Most of Halema’uma’u was not filled with molten lava, but with a plug of pasty lava—in his words, “an impenetrable pudding”—laced with channels. It was through these channels that hot liquid lava was fed upward from a deep reservoir and supplied molten lava to form the lake. And it was through similar channels that the fluid lava circulated back down.

  On January 12, the day after Jaggar made his first attempt to measure the temperature of the lava lake using Seger cones, MIT President Maclaurin wrote to him acknowledging the receipt of his resignation from MIT and to tell him that MIT had no future plans “for carrying out scientific work in Hawaii.” Three days later, the board of trustees of Bishop Museum issued a report that supported Gregory’s proposal for Yale University to take over the operation of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory after MIT’s support ended on June 30 and for Bishop Museum to fund the effort. To Jaggar, it must have seemed as if there was a conspiracy to oust him.

  And there was. Thurston had already lent his support to Gregory’s plan, writing to Jaggar, “I have great hope that the combination can be made between Yale University and the Bishop Museum.” Jaggar had reacted magnanimously, writing back, “If necessary for the good of the work I would eliminate myself entirely provided I was assured that that ideal of systematic recording of the volcanoes would be preserved at the Observatory along the line which I started.”

  But, as the months passed, his public attitude changed. He now wrote to Thurston of “the seemingly high handed demands of Yale” and of Gregory’s call for the “unconditional surrender of the Observatory.” But how could he stop what seemed to be inevitable.

  Fate intervened.

  Some members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association, the group that officially financed the observatory, wanted Jaggar to continue, but Thurston was the dominant member and, as in most things in his life, he got his way. But in June 1917 he became ill and went to New York for medical treatment. That opened the door for other members of the Association to act.

  They met while Thurston was away, having a quorum so that all votes were binding. To discard Gregory’s proposal outright would have been too drastic, and so they sidestepped the issue. They voted to keep control of the observatory, even though there would soon be no money to operate it, including the paying of salaries. And they voted to keep Jaggar as director and to dismiss Wood, who Gregory was proposing as the man to replace Jaggar.

  Later one of the members of the Association sent an unsigned note to Jaggar about the meeting and Wood’s dismissal. “I cannot help feeling glad that our little friend is to go. I have known for a long time that his attitude towards you was one of never neglecting a chance to sneer at your work, and your private affairs.” At the end of the note, the writer added, “Thurston will not like it, but he is not the whole cake.”

  When Thurston returned, the decision had been made. He continued as a member of the Association, though reduced his financial support of the observatory.

  Jaggar, now assured that he would continue as director and remain at Kilauea—though his salary would no longer be paid—made an important decision. He and Isabel Maydwell decided to marry. He wrote to a friend about the coming nuptials.

  “Truly happy? Yes, I am truly happy, and the harmony is love, labor and liberty. I am going to be married. . . . The lady is Mrs. Maydwell who has been helping me in doing all the volcano record books, records which have won out to keep the Observatory going.”

  The wedding took place on Monday, September 17, 1917, at a private home in Hilo. The couple exchanged vows twice that day, once in a public ceremony, then in private. The public ceremony was done in the presence of a few close friends. The private one was between them: They agreed not to involve each other in their respective families, or, as he later stated it, “We agreed not to embarrass each other with kinfolk.”

  The next afternoon Thomas Jaggar was again standing at the crater edge taking notes. Two spatter cones on the crater floor were “spurting high with puffing noise.” The north arm of the lake had “cracking and floundering crust.”

  The next day Isabel began an apprenticeship.

  Initially, in observatory reports, her husband identified her as “general assistant,” “recorder” or “skilled mechanic.” As the months and years passed, she became much more. She learned to adjust and repair the seismographs, to read and describe earthquake tracings—Was the source beneath Kilauea or Mauna Loa or was it a distant quake?—and to describe subtle changes taking place at the lava lake.

  She began by taking notes, her husband dictating to her. For example, on October 20, about a month after their wedding, her husband dictated five pages of notes to her. Four days later, it was eight pages. Each page was later transcribed and typed by her. She started taking her own notes. This went on for nearly six weeks. On December 11, Isabel made her first solo trip to describe the crater.

  It was night, about 8 P.M. when she arrived. The sky was clear and moonless. She noted that a slight wind was blowing from the north. She stood at the southeast edge of the crater, just outside a dense plume of smoke rising from the crater. She could see faint bluish flames all around the edge of the lake. She noted the red glare of the lake was particularly bright that night, indicating, so she speculated, that the glassy crust was probably thin. There were two streams of molten lava creeping across the crater floor. One was contained within the main lake and flowing to the southeast toward her. The other was a stream originating from a far cove where lava fountains were bursting. She ended her first report succinctly: “Heat from the lake was strong.”

  Soon after their marriage, the Jaggars built a house at Kilauea. They chose a site just below the top of the cliff near the observatory building, out of sight of the hotel and on the leeward side of a rock wall that would protect them from cold rain carried by trade winds over the volcano’s summit. They named their house Kualono, which means “near the mountaintop.”

  “I think you would enjoy staying awhile at Kualono,” Isabel once told an interviewer, “sitting as it does on one of the down-sunken ledges of the crater wall, among trees and ferns and native plants.”

  Their house was comprised of three separate buildings connected by wooden walkways, each building at a slightly different level.

  To reach the house, one descended a steep, narrow, zigzag path. A railing had been built to help visitors down. At the bottom, one stood on a wooden platform between two large buildings. The building on the right was the main one and was entered through a large sliding glass door. Inside was a single large room furnished with furniture made of rattan. Bookcases stood along one wall. A wood burning stove provided heat, though it was seldom used: The Jaggars had built their house over a steam vent, and the wooden floor was usually warm to the touch.

  Beyond the main building was a smaller building that housed a pantry, a kitchen and a small dining area. A kerosene stove with four burners was used for cooking.

  Back at the wooden platform and off to the left, opposite from the main building, was the third building. This one had two bedrooms and a bathroom with an iron tub, an iron basin, a toilet and a small kerosene stove to heat water. The master bedroom was the room farthest from the other two buildings. During the day it served as a private office. At night, the Jaggars slept in a Murphy bed that was pulled down from the wall. From the bed they could look across the room at a wall that was covered from floor to ceiling with glass panes. And through those panes they could see all of Kilauea caldera, including Halema’uma’u, and the distant profile of Mauna Loa.

  Every night during their first two years of marriage, their bedroom was filled with red light reflected off the cloud that hung over the lava lake. During those two years, the scene was interrupted only once.

  It was two hour
s after midnight on November 28, 1919, and Isabel Jaggar, the lighter sleeper, was awakened by the shaking of an earthquake. She looked out the window across Kilauea and saw the red glare of the lava lake brighten suddenly, then go dark. The floor of Halema’uma’u had collapsed.

  She then turned and looked at her husband and saw that the volcanologist was still asleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE LAVA LAKE

  Charles Marvin never saw Kilauea—in fact, there is no record that he ever visited the Hawaiian Islands—and, yet, in a lifelong desire to extend his personal influence and involve himself in as many different scientific fields as possible, he made an important decision that would lead to understanding how Kilauea—and other volcanoes—worked.

  In 1891 Marvin was a “junior professor of meteorology” in the Signal Corps of the United States Army when that part of the military morphed into the United States Weather Bureau. His expertise was the development of instruments that could automatically record meteorological data, such as air temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. Marvin excelled at his work. In 1903 when the Bureau acquired its first seismograph, an early Omori-type instrument that relied on the swinging of a long horizontal pendulum, it was put in his care. The thinking was: Since the Bureau was already collecting meteorological data at hundreds of stations across the nation, it might as well also collect seismic data.

  Marvin installed this first seismograph owned by the United States government in the basement of the Bureau’s office in Washington, D.C. Years passed as he carefully adjusted and maintained it, the instrument recording only the occasional, barely perceptible wiggle on a sheet of paper attached to a slowly rotating drum. Then, on the morning of April 18, 1906, the pen that normally traced out a straight line on the paper suddenly began to swing. And it did so for nearly thirty minutes.