John Edwards watched an interview of a well-known scientist who offered expert opinion that in the first year after the meteor struck, the world would endure from six to eight hundred volcanic eruptions, from the approximately fifteen hundred potentially active volcanoes worldwide. The scientist stated that almost three-quarters of the active cones were located along the juncture of the Pacific Plate and the tectonic plates that bordered it. The presence of these volcanoes in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, the West Coast of America, Alaska, Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia had reinforced the popular term, “The Ring of Fire.”

The scientist briefly described the relationship between earthquakes and volcanoes. Earthquakes, he said, were caused by the shifting of the earth’s giant continental and ocean crusts, which floated on a fiery hot core of molten rock and metal called magma. The cohesive force of gravity and the centrifugal force of the earth’s spinning motion through space served to hold the molten portions of the earth’s core in place. Nevertheless, the sheer weight of the earth’s crust with its continents and oceans created enormous pressure on the core. That intense pressure, coupled with intense heat, created the potential for extraordinary explosions all over the globe wherever cracks developed in the earth’s mantle.

John Edwards copied a portion of the man’s words on his yellow pad: “Over time, molten magma seeps through the cracks in the tectonic plates to form large domes. These domes are like balloons being filled with volatile liquid. The pressure builds and builds until they finally erupt.” In the margin, he wrote, “The force of a volcanic eruption is beyond anything that has ever been created by any device known to man.”

But, John Edwards knew that volcanoes did not erupt only on land. Far more eruptions occur unnoticed under the floor of the Pacific Ocean. A National Geographic special he had once seen described the vast eruptions of lava from under the ocean floor that brought into being the islands and island chains dotting the Pacific Ocean. According to the documentary, islands could appear out of the depths of the water, then blow apart and sink once again beneath the sea from whence they came. But the earth remained volatile and alive beneath them.

Rolling his chair back to the computer in the corner, John Edwards slipped an encyclopedia on CD-ROM into the drive and searched for information on the dates and places that he remembered in part. The most famous volcanic eruption, he noted, took place in 1883 when Mount Krakatoa—which lay eighty-seven miles west of Jakarta, Indonesia, in the Sundra Strait between Java and Sumatra—erupted. The explosion could be heard twenty-five hundred miles away. Reports indicated that atmospheric shock waves from Krakatoa traveled around the planet three times. Skies all over the world were darkened for months because of the cloud of thick ash thrown up by the explosion.