Super Volcanoes Quotes

“A trip there would be about as enjoyable as fending off a pack of hippos with a piece of cauliflower while someone pours scorching coffee into your ears”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Fossils, like preserved bones, tell you about form. Trace fossils, like these footprints, tell you a little about form and a lot about behavior. It was clear that this was a big group of people. For some reason, a very tall man was running on the peripheries. One person had a big deformed toe, while another tiny-footed person walked a bit like a duck, with feet splayed outward. The mix of individuals in the group—mostly women and adolescents, with just a few men—suggests this may have been a party of foragers, looking for food and resources along the lake’s shore. This group has echoes in the behavior of the region’s still-extant Hadza people.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“As long as there is water and some chemical compounds that can be used to make energy, certain species of microbes—extremophiles—can make Dallol their domicile.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Lava is just magma aboveground, and the ingredients for that magma and the gases trapped inside it come from a source. If that source is identified, then you know what made the volcano. So grab some lava and its gases, and you can solve the puzzle.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“The immensity of these explosions beggars belief. In the summer of 1962, America buried a nuclear device eight times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima below the arid sandy surface of the Nevada desert. It carved out the largest artificial crater in America, a bowl 1,280 feet across.31 The caldera mostly excavated by Toba’s 74,000-year-old kaboom is 256 times longer. It’s like comparing a firecracker to the Holy Hand Grenade.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“But nothing would ever come close to matching that elongated moment in time 2.1 million years ago, when a schism in the continent burned the earth and blackened the sky, leaving behind nothing but ghosts of ash.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Grand Prismatic Spring may as well be the poster child for the entire park. Larger than a soccer field, it takes on the appearance of an interdimensional oasis. An ethereal, deep-blue hue paints its pupil, while adventurous bacteria thriving in the piquant waters fleck its iris in shades of yellow, orange, and green. In the winter, the snow sizzles into steam as it drifts onto the spring’s rocky eyelid.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Lava does not flow like water. It forms its own channels, tunnels, dams, and waterfalls. It rapidly carves out its own topography.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Her eyes lit up. She excitedly waxed lyrical about the remarkable nature of the eruption—the geology, the physics driving it. In that moment, she says, she felt like she was doing the very thing she had been building up to do throughout her entire adult life.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“They chose a mantra inspired by Jaggar’s guiding motivation—to understand volcanoes so that future disasters, like the apocalypse at Mount Pelée, could be avoided: Ne plus haustae aut obrutae urbes—“No more shall the cities be destroyed.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“was this tale that convinced him to dedicate his research at Harvard to the embryonic science of volcanology. In his autobiography,4 he wrote that “the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists . . . was worthy of a life work.”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond

“Just before noon, a terrifying explosion rocked the isle, 30 miles behind them. A wave rushed from the isle and onto the nearby land, rising up dozens of feet as the water crashed onto the coast and rocketed upslope. Watching the devastation unfold, the sailors couldn’t believe their luck: the wave coming from the exploding isle passed under their ship without being felt, seemingly sparing them from death. But the”
― Robin George Andrews, Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond