In 1815, when Mount Tambora on the island of Java in Indonesia erupted, it threw fifteen square miles of ash and debris into the atmosphere. Vast portions of the Pacific islands were coated with two feet of thick volcanic ash. The atmosphere was said to be so clouded from volcanic debris that sunlight did not break through. The weather patterns were so disrupted in the American northeast that ten inches of snow fell in June and ice was said to be one inch thick in August.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in June of 1991, gas and aerosols spewed up eighteen miles into the air. Ash from the explosion fell in Vietnam and Cambodia and even as far away as Singapore and Malaysia. The explosion caused the ground to tremble in Manila. People in the vicinity of the Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base were terrified as red-hot molten lava poured down the mountainside and streams turned into raging muddy torrents.

In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, a thousand-mile chain of volcanoes called the Cascade Range extends from northern California to British Columbia. The last eruption occurred at Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington in 1980.

“Volcanoes,” he scrawled in the margin, “kill by what is called nuee ardente—the glowing cloud of blistering hot ash, gas, and solid debris; by hot and cold blasts; by hot lava flow; and by mud flows known as lahars. They spread sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, which creates natural aerosols that wreak havoc on the ozone layer. They send ash and gas into the stratosphere, where they can block out the sunlight for months—even years.”

In the year 2000, fully five hundred million people lived in areas directly at risk from volcanic explosions. The thought was staggering.

“IT STARTED SATURDAY EVENING and continued into Sunday morning,” John Edwards wrote in longhand, “on what Christians call the Lord’s Day. It seems that hell itself has visited earth.” He noted that the hideous booms began in Guatemala as a roar from the bowels of the earth, then blew the top off a long-dormant volcano, and launched a plume of fire, steam, and ash twenty miles into the sky. “Then,” he wrote, “as if some giant conductor were leading a symphony of evil, a second volcano, more powerful than the first, answered from Mexico.

“In quick succession,” he scribbled as fast as his hand would move, “Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, and Mount Rainier rose up and expelled their fury. Then, on and on around the Ring of Fire, one after another, the world’s most powerful mountains erupted in a concerto from hell, flinging death and destruction high into the air.”