106 



The Ohio Journal of Science [Vol. XIX, No. 2, 



temperatures should be in the neighborhood of the boiling 

 point. As a matter of fact, however, all of the more active 

 vents are much hotter than that. They are so hot that when 

 we poked our walking sticks into them they came out blackened 

 and charred from the heat. Once, before we were alive to the 

 situation, we tried to take their temperature with a thermometer 



Photograph by R. F. Griggs 



TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF A HOT ONE. 



Many of the vents were so hot as to be beyond the range of the thermometers we 

 carried the first year; so hot that the steam would char a piece of wood and 

 did not begin to condense for some distance from the orifice. The expedition 

 of 1918 measured temperatures up to 430 C. 



tied to a stick. When we took it out, after momentarily 

 plunging it into the hot steam, the string was burned in two, 

 so that we almost lost our thermometer. The smoke emerges 

 at so high a temperature that it is altogether invisible as it 

 leaves the vent, and condenses only after it has travelled some 

 distance through the cold air. (See pictures above). The 



