The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

Richards suddenly recalled the work of his UC Berkeley colleague Michael Manga, who had worked on the hypothesis that earthquakes could trigger distant volcanoes. It wasn’t exactly a new idea, but it was one that was beginning to gain the force of statistical validation. In 1960 the largest earthquake in recorded history struck Chile. Thirty-eight hours later, the Cordón Caulle volcano blew its top 150 miles away. More than a century earlier, Charles Darwin experienced a similar earthquake in Valdivia, Chile, and within a day came the eruptions of Minchinmávida and Cerro Yanteles. Darwin sensibly imputed a causal connection between the phenomena, but struggled to come up with a convincing mechanism. For many years, this suggestive evidence for the intuitive link between earthquakes and volcanoes was only anecdotal. But recently the application of statistics has revealed it to be a real phenomenon. It seems there is a relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake and the distance at which it can trigger volcanoes. It was this relationship that Richards’s colleague Manga was sketching out. Scaling up to a preposterous magnitude 11 earthquake, of the sort caused by Chicxulub, Manga calculated that the triggering distance is effectively global. That is, a magnitude 11 earthquake should be capable of setting off volcanoes all around the world. An earthquake of the size induced by the Chicxulub impact—Richards realized in his witching-hour revelation—could have turned the ...