Shawna Vogel Quotes

“As instruments of global climatic change, we humans now rival such cataclysmic events as supercontinent breakups and asteroid impacts.”

“Even in comparison to out sister world [Venus], our home planet is exceptional.”

“The one known fingerprint of a sulfurous volcano is a compound called anhydrite, which dissolves in groundwater. Just a few years after an eruption... all traces of anhydrite are gone. This explains why the substance had pretty much eluded scientists before it was discovered at El Chichón.”

“This nagging dilemma has come to be known as the excess sulfur problem... Just as atmospheric scientists were beginning to grasp the importance of a volcano's sulfur emmisions, solid earth scientists were finding that they had no idea where all this sulfur was coming from.”

“Researchers believed that sulfur dioxide emitted by volcanoes would turn into sulfuric acid in the stratosphere, creating a haze of acid droplets that would block the sun's rays and keep them from warming the air below.”

“In geophysical circles, the question is not so much why the sea is salty, but why it remains just as salty as it is, no more, no less.”

“Like a cracked china cup, the continental crust is still fragile where it has been damaged in the past.”

“Because these earthquakes strike in the strong, unfractured rock of plate interiors, their tremors travel faster than those of border quakes before petering out. ...The possibility of such a mid-plate quake thus carries a much higher risk than one on a plate boundary.”

“Paleoseismology... is science by backhoe. Researchers dig deep, straight-walled ditches and search up and down for signs of shaking.”

“Early in the last century, the most powerful earthquakes ever to strike the stable heart of the continent rattled the Reelfoot Rift.”

“The crust and mantle churn together on both the yearly scale of incremental plate motions and the epochs of supercontinental cycling.”