In his autobiography published in 1956 , Jaggar recounts , " It was hard to distinguish where the streets had been . Everything was buried under fallen walls of cobblestone and pink plaster and tiles , including 20,000 bodies .... As I look back on the Martinique 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
1908 Messina earthquake
1908 Messina earthquake
Thomas Jaggar