John Dvorak (1)

I had no idea that so much earthquake science developed in California. Fascinating for the way it relates recent history to the geography around us. Dvorak is a great storyteller.

> In 1864, in recognition of his leadership, his men named the highest peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—which is also the highest point in the contiguous 48 states—Mount Whitney. The same year, this expert on mineral ores issued his first major report. Its contents shocked the people of California when they read it because, instead of telling where additional mineral deposits might be found, this 236-page tome described something else—paleontology! … In scanning through the hundreds of pages of text based on four years of intense fieldwork, one finds the word “gold” only three times and the words “wealth” and “riches” not at all. One outraged citizen carried the tome to the state assembly and antagonized legislators in their offices by reading sections to them. And the legislators reacted. They reduced both Whitney’s annual salary and his budget by half. He responded by leaving the state and returning to Massachusetts, where Harvard College honored him with a professorship.

> Showing either an ignorance of or a total disregard for political realities, he pronounced more than half of the mining claims in the state as either worthless or unproductive. And, more than that, there was an important element missing from the report: There was no indication where additional gold might be found. This lack of telling where new gold strikes might be made caused the state legislators to act again. This time, they cut Whitney’s salary and his budget to zero.

> Today Whitney’s Geology is regarded as a masterpiece, exquisitely written and describing not only the geology of California but also its fauna and flora, much of it now gone. Whitney recounts a visit to Yosemite when the valley was still pristine. He is the first to use the term “High Sierra.” And he tells of personal adventures in confronting flash floods and assisting local lawmen who were searching for desperadoes.

> The blocks of granite that lie along the coast, which are part of a large feature known as the Salinian Block (named after the Salinas Valley north of Monterey), have actually slid hundreds of miles from where they formed at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

> In Whitney’s view, a single local and rare cataclysm—a powerful earthquake—had caused the floor of Yosemite Valley to drop suddenly, forming the spectacular vertical walls of Half Dome and El Capitan. It was such a cataclysm that explained why Yosemite Valley was unique in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Muir was unconvinced and responded to Whitney in his first published work, “Yosemite Glaciers,” an essay that appeared on December 5, 1871, in the New York Tribune

> This idea—that earthquakes were underground explosions caused by the mixing of naturally occurring chemical compounds—was the prevailing one when Whitney attended Yale College in the 1840s. By the 1870s, the idea had been tempered and some authorities were now suggesting that the sudden strong quaking of the ground surface might be a product of the slow, constant cooling of an initially hot Earth, which caused the entire planet to contract

> in 1883, when Gilbert did his work in Owens Valley, it was revolutionary. And, as often happens with a new idea, it was ignored—in this case for more than 20 years. Not until 1906, when an earthquake devastated San Francisco and the surrounding area, did geologists readily accept Gilbert’s idea that earthquakes were caused by the sliding of crustal blocks. That earthquake, as will be shown, gave undeniable proof that the sliding of crustal blocks had caused the shaking. Barely a decade before then, someone had discovered the San Andreas Fault

> if Muir and others had known more about glaciers and their ability to scour and erode, he probably would not have proposed a glacial origin for Yosemite Valley. It would not be until 1913, when Francois Matthes, a geologist working in national parks, disposed of the earthquake theory and downplayed a glacial origin. Today, the general opinion is that Yosemite Valley is an erosional feature formed by river erosion and exfoliation of granite. The flat valley floor owes its existence to sediment trapped in shallow lakes that formed during a retreat of the glaciers

> Three miles south of Colma is where the San Andreas Valley begins. The water reservoir lies along the axis of the valley. If one projects the axis northward, it intersects the Pacific coast at Mussel Rock.

> a one-kiloton explosion, whether by a nuclear device or by a conventional chemical bomb, equates to a magnitude-4.0 earthquake. Furthermore, an increase of one earthquake magnitude corresponds to a 32-fold increase in energy. That means that the largest nuclear device detonated by the United States—the Cannikin underground test on Amchitka Island, Alaska, in 1971, which had an energy yield of 5,000 kilotons—corresponded, in energy release, to a magnitude-7.1 earthquake.

> On a typical day, Dibblee slept until midmorning. Once awake, he would walk around for hours and return to camp and, after a quick meal of hard biscuits and coffee, he would sleep again. A day’s main work would begin in the midafternoon, when he would start a long walk. And Thomas Dibblee was a prodigious walker, typically covering 10 miles or more a day. Instead of a backpack, he carried a paper shopping bag, which was not replaced until after he married and his wife sewed a cloth one for him. Inside the bag were the essentials for his work: maps, pencils, a compass, rain gear, a water bottle, and a large box of raisins to support himself on his treks … It is said if you drive any road that connects San Francisco and Los Angeles and look at any distant outcrop of rocks, even those on steep peaks, it is almost certain that Thomas Dibblee once stood there … Then he had his major meal of the day: a slice of bread, a half can of beans, a few leaves pulled from a head of lettuce, several cups of water, and finally a cup of coffee. He then proceeded to prepare his bed. He pulled out a wooden plank and laid it across the front seat of his coupe so that part of the plank extended outside the open door on the driver’s side of his coupe. He then stretched out and fell asleep: The bottom half of the steering wheel was sawed off so that he could turn without waking himself up.

> Within Liebre Mountain is a Triassic monzogranite that can be reached by driving along a barely maintained paved road, the Old Ridge Route Road. A monzogranite is a type of granite that is the last part of a magma body to solidify. For that reason, it often has unusual mineral and chemical compositions and especially large crystals. The one at Liebre Mountain—which solidified 215 million years ago during the Triassic Period and was reheated 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous—catches the eye because it contains large well-formed crystals—often more than an inch across—of a salmon-colored potassium feldspar.

> Follow State Highway 330 toward Big Bear ski resort. Just two miles south of Angel Camp is a high roadside cut where an equally distinctive and attractive Triassic monzogranite is exposed. It also has large salmon-colored feldspar crystals that solidified 215 million years ago and were reheated 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous.

> Today the station is known as the Mauna Loa Observatory. It would be here, just a year after Wilson’s visit, that scientists would announce the first measurements that showed that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing at a high rate. But on the day he visited, December 4, 1958, that equipment was still being tested. After the scientific discussions and after a lunch, the six men went outside. The wind was now blowing. Wilson walked off to look around. Only years later, reflecting on that visit, did he realize that he had arrived at a revolutionary way of understanding the Earth.

> Wilson, of course—as did almost every geologist of the time—passionately discounted any theory to the contrary, which included the one proposed in 1912 by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener that the continents had shifted their positions a significant amount during geologic history, an idea that was later corrupted into the phrase “continental drift.”

> I suggest going to the rocky Marin Headlands immediately north of the Golden Gate Bridge. After gazing at the fantastic view of San Francisco’s cityscape, turn around and look at the rocks exposed in the roadcut. What catches the eye are the parallel ribbons of red chert folded into giant kinks and the occasional chevron. If the chert is examined closely—a glass hand lens is of great utility—one sees countless white dots. Those dots are skeletons of a tiny sea creature, a radiolarian, that built its tiny shell out of the mineral silica. Radiolarians thrive only in warm equatorial waters, and when they die their skeletons sink slowly to the ocean floor to form what is inelegantly though accurately known as radiolarian ooze.

> as the North American plate drifted west, the Farallon plate moved southeast. The collision formed a subduction zone as the denser Farallon plate slid under the lighter continental rocks of North America. As it did so, the brow of North America acted like a bulldozer and scraped off some of the rocks of the seafloor, forming what plate tectonophysicists call “an accretionary wedge.” The rocks of this wedge are the crushed and mangled and highly deformed rocks of the Coast Ranges—which includes the red ribbon chert north of the Golden Gate—as well as the hills of San Francisco, most of the mountain mass of Big Sur and its spectacular sea cliffs, and much more

> At a few places along the coast, hillside streams and ocean currents have combined to concentrate rocks washed down from the Franciscan at several beaches. The most famous is Moonstone Beach near San Simeon

> Why is there oil in California? Almost all of the oil in the Golden State is derived from the organics of siliceous diatom frustules. Diatoms are microscopic bivalves; frustules are the hard external cell walls covering diatoms, composed almost entirely of silica. When diatoms die, their frustules, now containing decaying organic matter, sink. Unlike radiolarians, which live far out in the ocean, diatoms thrive close to shore in shallow basins. During the middle Miocene, about 16 million years ago, there was a great proliferation of diatoms along the California coast. In part, this proliferation, which produced a thick section of organic-rich sediment, was caused by a change in the pattern of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean—a change in pattern caused by a closing of the Indonesian Seaway as the plate carrying Australia pushed up against southern Asia

> only a small amount of the organics in the Monterey Formation were converted into oil; the vast majority still exist as waxy kerogen. But kerogen cannot be pumped out of the ground; however, it can be extracted by a process known as fracking that requires the hydraulic fracturing of rock by pressurized liquid—an action that might induce earthquake activity—followed by the injection of chemicals to dissolve the kerogen and cause it to separate from the rock, putting it into a liquid form that could be pumped to the surface.

> In all, the series lasted 5 minutes and 11 seconds. In that time, the ground surface ruptured and two major hospitals suffered extensive damage in the Sylmar District of the San Fernando Valley in California. … The best place to see it is on Glenoaks Avenue south of Hubbard Street. Here the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant runs right along the base of a three-foot-high step dividing the restaurant from its parking lot. That step is where the ground ruptured and rose in 1971

> History shows that whenever there is a major earthquake in California, say a magnitude-6 event—which can do substantial damage—there is a 1 in 10 chance that another earthquake of equal or greater magnitude will happen in the same general area within the next three days.

> In the last 3,000 years, 14 of the 15 major earthquakes that occurred along the northern segment were preceded by a major earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone. The average time interval between a Cascadia event and the subsequent San Andreas earthquake is 40 years, yet some of these paired events might have been simultaneous. The only major earthquake not preceded by a Cascadia event was the 1906 earthquake

> the segment of the San Andreas Fault that runs through San Andreas Valley—the namesake of the fault and where Lawson first recognized the fault—may be the youngest strand of the entire fault, having formed one or two million years ago. It also has a relatively small amount of accumulated movement; in the San Andreas Valley, the fault has displaced rocks only about 20 miles. If the position of the fault has shifted before, it will almost certainly shift again. A future candidate for taking up much of the motion between the Pacific and North American plates and replacing the current active trace of the San Andreas Fault is the Hayward Fault on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

> For 4,000,000 years, after its separation from North America, Baja California has been ramming into southeastern California. The net result is that the greater Los Angeles area is caught in a vise. The area is being squeezed, and that has caused the crust to buckle and throw up an east-west line of mountains—the Transverse Ranges, which run from Santa Barbara to San Bernardino—and is responsible for the “Gordian knot” of geology declared by Josiah Whitney when he began to examine California geology. At the same time, the Los Angeles area is also being dragged to the northwest by the Pacific plate

> the Pacific plate is moving to the northwest at a steady rate of 1.9 inches per year relative to the interior of North America. Two-thirds of the movement—1.4 inches per year—is occurring across the San Andreas Fault and its subsidiary faults, such as the San Gregorio-Hosgri, Hayward, and San Jacinto Faults. A quarter of the relative plate motion—0.4 inches per year—is occurring across the Walker Lane seismic zone, which is consistent with the lower seismic activity of the Walker Lane compared to the San Andreas system. But that still leaves a small amount of plate motion—0.1 inches per year—to be explained. And GPS measurements have revealed this motion: It is occurring across yet another seismic zone—the Intermountain Seismic Belt—that bisects Utah from south to north, includes the Wasatch Fault east of the Great Salt Lake

> A more recent storm occurred in eastern Mongolia between 1905 and 1957, when four magnitude-8 events struck. And an earthquake storm is happening now along the Xianshuihe and adjacent faults along the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau in southwest China, where 11 major earthquakes have happened in the last 120 years

> Hollywood offers an unusual opportunity to recognize and walk along an active fault. The area was urbanized in the 1920s, before the widespread use of mechanized earth-moving equipment, so much of the original topography is still intact, even subtle features such as alignments of low hills and shallow troughs that record the trace of recent earthquakes

> In all, nearly 100 miles of the San Andreas Fault can be seen from the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. It is this, the southernmost segment of the fault, that worries seismologists because this is the only segment that has not ruptured in historical time.

> points on opposite sides of the fault are sliding slowly and continuously—those on the west side of the fault moving to the north and those on the east side to the south—at an average rate of 1.5 inches a year. This means that, since the last major earthquake in 1690, 27 feet of crustal movement has accumulated on opposites sides of the fault—without any movement yet along this part of the fault

> California Earthquakes by Carl-Henry Geschwind recounts the history of earthquake studies in the United States. Richter’s Scale by Susan Elizabeth Hough is a passionate telling of the complex life of Charles Richter. Chapter 11 of this book is a postscript to Assembling California by John McPhee. Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth by Naomi Oreskes tells the personal stories that led to the development of the theory of plate tectonics. And Apocalypse by Amos Nur shows how one person can bring a new perspective to a problem and thereby challenge established scientific thought… (altro)

Really, really good. Certainly better than I expected from the somewhat sensationalistic title. John Dvorak is a skilled writer who also has respectable credentials as a scientist, having worked both in planetary science and for the U.S. Geological Survey. His book is a thorough and fascinating history of the San Andreas Fault, combining some very sound science explained well with some very interesting human, um, interest.

One learns that Charles Richter, of Richter scale fame, was originally trained as a physicist and did his dissertation on quantum states of a spinning electron. He was invited to take charge of a new seismology lab being set up by Caltech and spent the rest of his career there. Curiously, for a scientist whose name is close to being a household world, he apparently published very few papers in peer-reviewed journals. He was also notably eccentric, with a volcanic and unpredictable temper and an inability to look someone in the eye when conversing with them except, apparently, when both were nude: He was introduced to "naturalism" by his wife and it apparently helped loosen his inhibitions. There is excellent reason, in fact, to think Richter suffered from Aspberger's Syndrome. He once was a guest on a call-in show, where a woman spoke of her great fear of earthquakes. Richter's response: "Get the hell out of California."

The Richter scale itself was inspired by the magnitude scale used in astronomy, being a logarithmic scale (Richter later said that logarithmic scales were of the devil, except he got lucky) with an arbitrary zero point, based on the lowest detectable displacement on a certain model of seismometer located 100 km from the earthquake. Richter and his colleague Gutenberg later tried to tie the scale to energy release, finding their first attempt wildly off when calibrated against nuclear tests but eventually converging on a magnitude 5.0 earthquake being equivalent to about 500 tons of TNT. Each unit of the scale is about a factor of 32, so a magnitude 9 earthquake (the largest historically recorded) releases the equivalent of 480 megatons. That's roughly eight times the release of the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. Hmmm. I need to up my game.

Richter is not the only fascinating character. There are Andrew Lawson and Bailey Willis, two pioneering seismologists who first collided over the Golden Gate Bridge. Lawson was hired to help the designers make sure the bridge would be earthquake-proof; the north pier would be on solid ground, in the form of a very tough basalt formation, but the location for the southern pier was underlain by badly decomposed serpentine. Lawson concluded this would be only 25 feet deep and there would be solid rock underneath. Willis intervened, publishing editorials complaining that there was a fault directly under the pier location and that the serpentine would be underlain by fault gouge. The debate was resolved when workers dug through an unexpected 50 feet of rotten serpentine and finally reached undecomposed serpentine that, as Lawson reported, "rang like steel" when hit with a hammer. It was a solid footing for the pier and the bridge was completed. This did not end the feud between Willis and Lawson, though, which became legendary; it came to be practically an agenda item on any geological meeting the two attended (and they seem to have always made a point of being sure one did not go to a meeting without the other there) for there to be a shouting match between the two. At one point, the two men vacationed together at Valyermo, the estate of Levi Noble, an Eastern sophisticate turned geologist. Noble, with his wife, did much of the mapping of the Grand Canyon, and chose Valyermo in part so he could experience a major earthquake: The San Andreas ran through his orchard. (His wish was not fulfilled; in spite of his best efforts, he managed never to experience a major earthquake.) Lawson and Willis doubtless visited Noble together so that they would have another opportunity to shout at each other, but were disappointed to find that for just about the only time in their lives they agreed: Noble's theory that the San Andreas had produced horizontal displacements in excess of 100 miles was nonsense.

Actually Noble was wrong: He correlated the Mormon Rocks at Cajon Pass with the Devil's Punchbowl west of Valyermo, both sandstone formations but on opposite sides of the fault, a hundred miles apart. The correlation turns out to be incorrect; fossils now show the resemblance is superficial, the formations being much different in age. And the greatest displacements along the San Andreas are hundreds of miles.

Geologists just knew that earthquakes produced significant displacement only in the vertical direction, due to the slow cooling and shrinkage of the earth; there just wasn't any geological force anyone could conceive of that would produce huge horizontal displacements. This resistance to the idea continued even after Hill and Dibblee, who had made their reputation successfully predicting where oil fields could be found in the mountain valleys of south-central California, presented a paper showing a dozen correlations across the fault that had been displaced by hundreds of miles; the older the formation, the greater the displacement. After they presented their paper, the moderator asked the audience by show of hands who was convinced. Not a geologist raised his hand.

Stubborn bunch.

Dibblee was apparently quite a character. He mapped a good fraction of southern California by means of his astonishing knack for walking at a fast pace for miles a day, hardly picking up a rock, and yet knowing the nature of each formation he saw and spotting the contacts on the run. ("Run" in this case is very nearly literal.) He carried his supplies in a paper bag, including the raisins he subsisted on during daylight hours, then slept in his car at night (he cut the lower half off the steering wheel to make room to turn in his sleep) after a dinner of lettuce, a slice of bread, canned beans, and coffee. His extensive mappings were recorded in his head; he didn't use a field notebook.

There's a chapter on Tuzo Wilson, whose unusual use-name is actually his middle name and his mother's maiden name. Turns out there was another John T. Wilson in the geology community and Tuzo chose this expedient to avoid confusion. Wilson used the massive data collected during the International Geophysical Year to finally convince his colleagues to accept the theory of plate tectonics, and one of his best arguments was the interpretation of the San Andreas Fault as a transform fault on a plate boundary.

There's a good description of several quakes, including of course the 1906 quake. There is a famous photograph of the fault rupture, straight as an arrow, crossing a substantial hill, with a somewhat frumpy-looking woman standing nearby. Turns out the woman, Alice Eastwood, was the curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Franciso, who had climbed six flights of a demolished stair (by clinging to the rail) to rescue the irreplaceable botanical specimen collection. She also happened to be the mistress of Grove Gilbert, a geologist at Berkeley who had been commissioned by the first President Roosevelt to make recommendations on hydraulic gold mining, and who led one of the investigative committees after the quake. He finally proposed to Miss Eastwood, but died of a stroke before the marriage could take place.

There are also some pretty detailed descriptions of how to get to some interesting geology; I followed along on Google Street View, sometimes successfully. You probably want to read this book with Google Maps or its equivalent open on a nearby computer.

Earthquake storms? Turns out that earthquakes don't actually do a good job of releasing stress. The part of the San Andreas Fault that continually creeps, in central California, is pretty quake-safe because it never builds up stress in the first place. Elsewhere, when there's a major quake, the likelihood of a second major quake actually increases tenfold for a decade or so afterwards. In other words, the historical and paleoseismology records show that earthquakes occur in clusters. The Bronze Age may have ended in such an earthquake storm in the Mediterranean. And California has been seismically quiet, relatively speaking, for a long time; a cluster is due. It will most likely occur on the southernmost part of the fault. 57% chance in the next 30 years.

The San Andreas has been around for something like 25 million years, but it's not the first nor will it be the last major transform fault in California. There is a fault along the seacoast west of the San Andreas that is mostly inactive now, but was the major transform fault before the San Andreas. There is another fault zone developing along the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, and potentially yet another fault zone along the Wasatch Front in Utah. My mother may eventually own a beachside condominium, but she's gonna have to be patient. California is being sheared apart; Dvorak even titles one of his chapters "Disassembling California", a quite conscious riff on John McPhee's excellent Assembling California, one of the volumes in his Annals of the Former World. Dvorak describes both the ancient assembly and the present disassembly process.

The book closes with Dvorak ruminating on his favorite vacation spot, Borrego Bay, which is the northernmost point where the San Andreas crosses land. The bay is formed by a headland that is crossed by the fault. There was once a proposal to build the first commercial power nuclear reactor here, just a mile from the fault; the proposal was successfully killed by geologists. There is still a large hole in the granite headland where the reactor construction had already begun, which Google has labeled as "Hole in the Head." Dvorak talks about picking up a granite boulder here and moving it 15' northwest; a head start on the next major quake and, he suggests, his only personal contribution as a tectonic force. I think Set would like this guy.

Set would definitely like the book, if he hasn't already read it. Two thumbs up.… (altro)

I very much enjoyed Dvorak’s Earthquake Storms and so I picked up this book without hesitation. Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment.

The Last Volcano is effectively a biography of Thomas Jaggar, the pioneering geologist who established the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and kept it going from 1912 until his retirement in 1940. There is an ample cast of supporting characters, and some fairly interesting geology. Of these, Isabel Jaggar and Kilauea are most significant.

Jaggar was the son of an American Episcopalian bishop who was prominent in Indiana and an early advocate of what would now be called the Social Gospel. Jaggar absorbed this sense of mission from his father, but he also had the wanderlust, at least as a younger man. When his sister died of a mysterious ailment at age 19, their father was left a broken man; on advice of his physician, he took the family to Europe, where Jaggar saw Vesuvius and was hooked.

Jaggar studied geology at Harvard, constructing his own apparatus to model sand ripples and getting himself assigned to the Hague expedition to Yellowstone in 1893. Here he managed to drop a loaded rifle, which went off, sending a bullet into a bank of Cambrian limestone that knocked loose a chunk of rock that gave Jaggar a slight wound. He later joked that “The trilobites took a shot at me!” Jaggar studied in Germany and made a second trip to Yellowstone. He then scandalized his parents by announcing plans to marry a divorced opera singer, though the marriage never actually materialized. Dvorak treads lightly around it, but the impression I get is that Jaggar was something of a womanizer.

Expeditions to Vesuvius and Alaska followed, and Jaggar invited himself to join the Navy relief expedition to Martinique following the eruption of Pelee that destroye St. Pierre. The sight of the ruined city seemed to have engaged Jaggar’s sense of mission, and he devoted the rest of his life to vulcanology. Dvorak gives a pretty gripping description of the eruption itself.

After returning from the Caribbean, Jaggar began to court Helen Kline, a rich heiress. The courtship was difficult, not helped by the unannounced arrival of a woman from Europe who smoked, dressed provocatively, and wanted to talk with Jaggar about marriage and money. Nevertheless, the marriage (to Helen) took place, and proved fully as difficult as one might anticipate. Jaggar would not sit still; he made another trip to Vesuvius, secured funding for an expedition to Alaska, and bought a home as close to the middle of nowhere as was possible in Massachusetts; his wife found this entirely unsatisfactory. Jaggar tried to mend fences by taking his wife to Japan, with a stop in Hawaii to see the famous lava lake at Kilauea.

In Hawaii, Jaggar became acquainted with Lorrin Thurston, a very wealthy sugar planter who had played a role in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and subsequent annexation of Hawaii to the United States. (Dvorak tells the story in some detail.) Thurston was willing to help fund a Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, purportedly for its potential to draw tourists and tourist dollars. However his venture to buy Volcano House, the hotel on the rim of Kilauea, fell through when the lava lake abruptly drained and the tourist potential seemed to have drained with it.

Things got worse with the Jaggar marriage. Thomas’ father died shortly before Helen and their two children arrived in Hawaii, and Dvorak delicately informs us that Jaggar’s response was to go to Honolulu and send a night with his female secretary. Shortly thereafter Helen arrived from the States. She was not keen on Hawaii, and even less keen on Kilauea, preferring to stay in Honolulu with their two children. Attempts to reconcile were in vain, and the couple divorced. This was still scandalous in the early 20th century, and Helen was all but ostracized by her family; her mother fired the family cook and informed Helen that she was to take the cook’s place, and that her children were not to be seen in the lower story of the house. Eventually Helen’s father quietly gave her some money to get a house of her own. Jaggar rarely saw his children after the divorce.

Jaggar meanwhile had been trying to understand the workings of Kilauea, perfecting the art of collecting volcanic gases for analysis (they turned out to be mostly water vapor, with significant carbon dioxide and some sulfur oxides) and making some of the first reliable measurements of lava temperature (nearly 1200 Centigrade). Both required climbing into the actual crater of Kilauea, Halema’uma’u, which was filled with a lava lake at this time. A certain amount of daring was required, notwithstanding the relatively gentle nature of Hawaiian eruptions.

Not long after his divorce, Jaggar met a new woman, Isabel Maydwell, a widow who had come to Kilauea as a tourist. About this time, Thurston tried to get Jaggar fired as director of the observatory, possibly because of the wiff of scandal in Jaggar’s personal life, but the other directors of the Observatory arranged to have a quorum at a meeting where Thurston was not present and took a binding vote to keep Jaggar on. With his funding and salary assured for a time, Jaggar married Isabel, and they lived together atop Kilauea for most of the rest of their lives, Isabel becoming a capable and reliable assistant in Jaggar’s scientific work.

Jaggar became fairly proficient at predicting the course of eruptions at Kilauea and Mauna Loa, and began attempting to predict tsunamis. There were some successful predictions, but also some misses, which were viewed by many prominent Hawaiians as worse than no prediction at all; but Jaggar got a fair amount of support from the U.S. Navy, whose commander let Jaggar know that he wanted the predictions to continue. I suppose taking your fleet to sea avoid a tsunami is not as big a deal when you are accustomed to regularly taking your fleet to sea anyway.

Funding and support continued to fluctuate, with the Observatory bouncing back and forth between different government agencies before finally landing more or less securely in the U.S. Geological Survey (where it seems like should have belonged all along.)

Jaggar retired in 1940; he died in 1953 and his ashes were scattered somewhere at Kilauea. Dvorak apparently found documentation of the exact spot, but felt obligated to preserve its privacy. Isabel had her ashes scattered in their garden when she subsequently passed on.

I think there are a couple of reasons why this book is not as terrific as Dvorak’s earlier book. One is that Jaggar comes across as a surprisingly bland character for a man who visited many of the most famous volcanoes in the world, did field work at Yellowstone and in Alaska, apparently had a colorful private life, and frikkin’ climbed into craters full of boiling lava to make scientific measurements. I’m not quite sure how that is possible. Another is that the book is surprisingly light on geology. For example, Dvorak discusses the use of seismographs to measure both vibrations and tilt of volcanoes, and I kept waiting for him to explain harmonic tremor; but the phrase does not appear even once in the book. I expected more discussion of the origin of magma; there is none at all, and only a superficial discussion of how dissolved gases power volcanic explosions.

Perhaps the problem is that, with Earthquake Storms, the main character was the San Andreas fault, whereas with The Last Volcano, the main character was the geologist Thomas Jagger.

Look, it’s a very readable book; it’s just not up to the high standard set by Earthquake Storms. I can only give it one thumb up.… (altro)

Fascinating book for anyone who loves earth science, geology, and the study of earthquakes. Dvorak relates a detailed history of earthquakes, relating how the individuals who devoted their lives to this study brought us to this day. The theory of earthquake storms is a relatively new one so this was really interesting. Finally, he goes into the future of the San Andreas fault and discusses scientists continued attempts to predict earthquakes in the future. I was enthralled and highlighted many passages for further study.… (altro)