The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1901-07-15

lllpe. west Is our familiar sRunchDoWl
and a little farther the Salt Lake era
ter, all built up of this soft-laminated
tuff, which was shot out of the bowels
of the earth as hot mud
The tuff-fountain escaping from it's
confinement, at once expanded and
spread out like a vast tree. Here at
Diamond Head, which is one mile in
diameter, the bulk of the mud spread
out half mile in all directions before
ending it's fall. Thus very exact cir
cular ring was piled up of one mile in
diameter. There was, however, anoth-
er influence, that of a violent easterly
| wind which DETECTED the entire foun-
tain westward, throwing the circular
run about 1,500 feet west of where it
would have been.
The wind also acted with especial
force upon the highest part of the
fountain, fiinging and piling it up on
the western side of the crater in lofty
cone. A large part of that cone has
been weathered away by the impact of
transforms upon the soft rock: but 1t
still stands in peak some 200 feet high
| er than the main run. The vent or
point of issue of the tuff-fountain must
have been at the lowest point of the in
| lci III, Nicie lies Tie present. DODQ u
water
Your attention has necessarily been
attracted to the immense quantity of
| limery or calcareous incrustation per-
vading the tuff. 1t lies thickly around
our feet. Whence came it? 1t came
from the ancient coral reefs, one or
more thousand feet in thickness
through which the explosion of tuff
/ fore IFS fn fha a ell nd
slowly subsidized through the ages the
coral reefs which fringed it's shores
continued to build upwards upon the
top of their predecessors, so that a con-
tinuous mass of reef exists of great
depth, as was shown by the boring of
the Campbell well of 1900 feet at the
outer base of Diamond Head
] AS the stream of tuff shot to the
surface with the velocity of a cannon
ball, it tore away the sides of the f1s-
tsure, and carried up tens of thousands
of tons of the coral reef The intense
heat of the water dissolved the lime
and on expansion precipitated 1t as
white incrustation intermingled with
the brown tuff. Very little trace of
organic coral structure seems to have
been left.
Not only coral but quantities of an
cient lava rock were also torn from
the sides of the vent. You will doubt
less find blocks of black and vascular
lava embedded in the tuff which are
thus accounted for. At Moanalua enor-
nous masses of pebbles and boulders
are to be seen. which were elected from
Salt Lake crater, mile away They
were torn from ancient pebble beaches,
now sunk thousands of feet below.
A quite simple calculation may show
that less than an hour at most was oc-
cupied in the building of Diamond
Head.A velocity of not less than 1000 feet
in a second would suffice to eject the
tuff-fountain to the necessary height of
two or three miles. The vent must have
had a sectional area Of more than 5000
square feet (note the size of the Punch
bowl VENT. Therefore five million cubic
feet of tuff were elected every second
or 300,000,OO0 cubic feet in a minute. But
the entire mass of Diamond Head tuff
could not have exceeded twelve billions
or IL, 600, 900 900 Of cubic feet This would
allow only forty minutes for the election
of the entire mass. 1t is probable, how
ever that the vent was several times
as large as the 5000 square feet allow
ed, and the time of election proportion
ally shorter. I do not believe that the
whole job took twenty minutes.
The "Argonaut'' sneers at Hawaii as
a group of volcanic pustules.' These
tuff-cones are a sort of volcanic pus-
tules