 experience I know what a crucial point in my life it was....I realized that the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists...was worthy of a life work."
In 1906 he became head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of geology. The next 10 years of Jaggar's life brought expeditions to the scenes of great earthquakes and eruptions in Italy, the Aleutians, Central America, and Japan. With each trip, Jaggar became increasingly concerned that his field studies were but brief, inadequate snapshots of long-term, dynamic, earth processes. After the 1908 Messina earthquake killed 125,000 people near Mt. Etna in Italy, Jaggar declared that "something must be done" to support systematic, ongoing studies of volcanic and seismic activity. He traveled to Hawaii in 1909 at his own expense, and determined that Kilauea was to be the home of the first American volcano observatory. He would work on that project the rest of his life.
Hawaiian Volcano ObservatoryEdit
After a lecture on his Martinique expedition in Honolulu, Jaggar was approached by Lorrin A. Thurston a prominent Honolulu lawyer and businessman. Thurston, like Jaggar, believed that Kilauea was a prime site for a permanent volcano observatory and inquired of Jaggar, "Is it then a question of money?". Within a year of this conversation, Thurston and other businessmen raised financial backing for the Hawaii Volcano Research Association. A small observing station was set up on the rim of Halemaʻumaʻu crater (a pit crater within Kilauea's summit caldera). In 1912, support was forthcoming from an MIT alumnus and construction of the new Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) began. The first instruments were in a cellar called the Whitney (for the donor) vault adjacent to the Volcano House Hotel.
During his early years as Director, Jaggar struggled after private endowments with the hope of eventually securing sponsorship by the Federal Government. In 1919, Jaggar convinced the National Weather Service to fund HVO. The United States Geological Survey took over its operation in 1924, with the exception of a brief hiatus during the Great Depression when HVO was run by the National Park Service.
In 1922, volcanologist Thomas Jaggar suggested using Kilauea’s heat for geothermal energy:
“Volcano power for human use is a possibility, for heat is power, and volcanoes generate heat. … Cracks near Halemaumau have opened from time to time which sometimes get hotter and hotter until they become glowing furnaces, emitting apparently merely hot air. If a boring will start such a furnace, then twenty holes at such a place will run a respectable engine.”
- "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter J" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 22 April 2011.
- Thomas Augustus Jaggar (1956). My experiments with volcanoes. Hawaiian Volcano Research Association, Honolulu.
- Russell A. Apple (1987). "Thomas A. Jaggar, Jr. and the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory". Volcanism in Hawaii, USGS Professional Paper 1350.
- John Dvorak (2011). "The origin of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory". Physics Today. 64: 32. doi:10.1063/1.3592003. Archived from the original on 2013-02-24.
- "Thomas Jaggar returns to the Whitney Vault". USGS Volcano Watch. 2006. Retrieved 2009-06-22.
- "Whitney Laboratory of Seismology (1912)". Retrieved 2009-06-21.
- "Thomas Jaggar, HVO's founder". Hawaiian Volcano Observatory's Volcano Watch. March 21, 1997. Retrieved 2009-06-20.
- "The Mid-Pacific Magazine (1922)". Retrieved 2018-07-09.
- "Jaggar Museum". National Park Service. Retrieved 2009-06-20.