A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [250]
32 “our missiles are not designed for space work . . .” Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 215.
33 “even a year's warning would probably be insufficient . . .” New York Times magazine, “The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!” July 28, 1996, pp. 17–19.
34 “Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 168.
CHAPTER 14 THE FIRE BELOW
1 “It was a dumb place to look for bones . . .” Mike Voorhies, interview by author, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park, Nebraska, June 13, 2001.
2 “At first they thought the animals were buried alive . . .” National Geographic, “Ancient Ashfall Creates Pompeii of Prehistoric Animals,” January 1981, p. 66.
3 “far better than we understand the interior of the earth.” Feynman, p. 60.
4 “The distance from the surface of Earth . . .” Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p. 78.
5 “A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale . . .” Ozima, The Earth, p. 49.
6 “It rises exponentially . . .” Officer and Page, Tales of the Earth, p. 33.
7 “sixty thousand people were dead . . .” Officer and Page, p. 52.
8 “the city waiting to die . . .” McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p. 21.
9 “the potential economic cost . . .” McGuire, p. 130.
10 “collapsed scaffolding erected around the Capitol Building . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 158.
11 “became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole . . .” Vogel, p. 37.
12 “using a strand of spaghetti . . .” Valley News, “Drilling the Ocean Floor for Earth's Deep Secrets,” August 21, 1995.
13 “about 0.3 percent of the planet's volume . . .” Schopf, Cradle of Life, p. 73.
14 “We also know a little bit about the mantle . . .” McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, pp. 16–18.
15 “Scientists are generally agreed . . .” Scientific American, “Sculpting the Earth from Inside Out,” March 2001, pp. 40–47; and New Scientist, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” supplement, October 14, 2000, p. 1.
16 “By all the laws of geophysics . . .” Earth, “Mystery in the High Sierra,” June 1996, p. 16.
17 “The rocks are viscous . . .” Vogel, p. 31.
18 “The movements occur not just laterally . . .” Science, “Much About Motion in the Mantle,” February 1, 2002, p. 982.
19 “an English vicar named Osmond Fisher presciently suggested . . .” Tudge, The Time Before History, p. 43.
20 “then had suddenly found out about wind.” Vogel, p. 53.
21 “there are two sets of data . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 146.
22 “82 percent of the Earth's volume . . .” Nature, “The Earth's Mantle,” August 2, 2001, pp. 501–6.
23 “something over three million times . . .” Drury, p. 50.
24 “during the age of the dinosaurs . . .” New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” March 10, 2001, p. 27.
25 “37 million years appears to be the longest stretch . . .” New Scientist, “Dynamo Support,” March 10, 2001, p. 27.
26 “the greatest unanswered question . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 150.
27 “Geologists and geophysicists rarely go . . .” Vogel, p. 139.
28 “The seismologists resolutely based their conclusions . . .” Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p. 24.
29 “It was the biggest landslide in human history . . .” Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p. 118.
30 “the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs,” Williams and Montaigne, p. 7.
31 “Fifty-seven people were killed.” Fisher et al., p. 12.
32 “only shake my head in wonder . . .” Williams and Montaigne, p. 151.
33 “An airliner . . . reported being pelted with rocks.” Thompson, p. 123.
34 “Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures.” Fisher et al., p. 16.
CHAPTER 15 DANGEROUS BEAUTY
1 “In 1943, at Parícutin in Mexico . . .” Smith, The Weather, p. 112.
2 “you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometers . . .” BBC Horizon documentary “Crater of Death,” first broadcast May 6, 2001.
3 “a bang that reverberated around the world