A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  28 It was the biggest landslide in human history: Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p.118.

  29 with the force of five hundred Hiroshimasized atomic bombs: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.7.

  30 Fifty-seven people were killed: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.12.

  31 “only shake my head in wonder”: Williams and Montaigne, Surviving Galeras, p.151.

  32 An airliner … reported being pelted with rocks: Thompson, Volcano Cowboys, p.123.

  33 Yet Yakima had no volcano emergency procedures: Fisher et al., Volcanoes, p.16.

  Chapter 15: Dangerous Beauty

  1 In 1943 at Paricutín in Mexico: Smith, The Weather, p.112.

  2 “you wouldn’t be able to get within a thousand kilometres of it”: BBC Horizon documentary, “Crater of Death,” first broadcast 6 May 2001.

  3 a bang that reverberated around the world for nine days: Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p.152.

  4 The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.104.

  5 there is some evidence to suggest that for the next twenty thousand years the total number of people on Earth was never more than a few thousand: McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World, p.107.

  6 “It may not feel like it, but you’re standing on the largest active volcano in the world”: interview with Paul Doss, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 16 June 2001.

  7 as was made devastatingly evident on the night of 17 August 1959, at a place called Hebgen Lake: Smith and Siegel, Windows into the Earth, pp.5–6.

  8 as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions: Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, p.12.

  9 Meanwhile, scientists were finding even hardier microbes: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.275.

  10 As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it: PBC NewsHour transcript, 20 Aug. 2002.

  Chapter 16: Lonely Planet

  1 no less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume: New York Times Book Review, “Where Leviathan Lives,” 20 April 1997, p.9.

  2 water is about 1,300 times heavier than air: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.51.

  3 your veins would collapse and your lungs would compress to the approximate dimensions of a Coke can: New Scientist, “Into the Abyss,” 31 March 2001.

  4 the pressure is equivalent to being squashed beneath a stack of fourteen loaded cement trucks: New Yorker, “The Pictures,” 15 Feb. 2000, p.47.

  5 Because we are made largely of water ourselves: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.68.

  6 “humans may be more like whales and dolphins than had been expected”: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.69.

  7 “all that is left in the suit are his bones and some rags of flesh”: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.188.

  8 Ashcroft relates a story concerning the directors of a new tunnel under the Thames who held a celebratory banquet: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.59.

  9 When roused, Haldane explained that he had found himself disrobing and assumed it was bedtime: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.111.

  10 Haldane’s gift to diving was to work out the rest intervals necessary to manage an ascent from the depths without getting the bends: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.202.

  11 his blood saturation level had reached 56 per cent: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.105.

  12 “But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin?”: quoted in Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.121.

  13 called him “the cleverest man I ever knew”: Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, p.305.

  14 the younger Haldane found the First World War “a very enjoyable experience”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.124.

  15 “Almost every experiment … ended with someone having a seizure, bleeding or vomiting”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.133.

  16 Perforated eardrums were quite common: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.192.

  17 left Haldane without feeling in his buttocks and lower spine for six years: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.202.

  18 It also produced wild mood swings: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.78.

  19 “the tester was usually as intoxicated as the testee”: Haldane, What Is Life?, p.197.

  20 The cause of the inebriation is even now a mystery: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.79.

  21 Even in quite mild weather half the calories you burn go to keep your body warm: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.39.

  22 the portions of the Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: Smith, The Weather, p.40.

  23 Had our sun been ten times as massive, it would have exhausted itself after ten million years instead of ten billion: Ferris, The Whole Shebang, p.81.

  24 The Sun’s warmth reaches it just two minutes before it touches us: Grinspoon, Venus Revealed, p.9.

  25 It appears that during the early years of the solar system Venus was only slightly warmer than the Earth and probably had oceans: National Geographic, “The Planets,” Jan. 1985, p.40.

  26 the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety times that of Earth: McSween, Stardust to Planets, p.200.

  27 The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 4 centimetres a year: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.33.

  28 The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium: Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, p.28.

  29 discarded the state silver dinner service and replaced it with an aluminium one: Bodanis, The Secret House, p.13.

  30 accounting for a very modest 0.048 per cent of the Earth’s crust: Krebs, The History and Use of our Earth’s Chemical Elements, p.148.

  31 “If it wasn’t for carbon, life as we know it would be impossible”: Davies, The Fifth Miracle, p.126.

  32 Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon: Snyder, The Etraordínary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, p.24.

  33 The degree to which organisms require or tolerate certain elements is a relic of their evolution: Parker, Inscrutable Earth, p.100.

  34 Drop a small lump of pure sodium into ordinary water and it will explode with enough force to kill: Snyder, The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, p.42.

  35 The Romans also flavoured their wine with lead: Parker, Inscrutable Earth, p.103.

  36 The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke: Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p.xix.

  Chapter 17: Into the Troposphere

  1 Without it, Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.7. p.319 and was discovered in 1902 by a Frenchman in a balloon, Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.56; Nature, “1902 and All That,” 3 Jan. 2002, p.15.

  2 it’s from the same Greek root as menopause: Smith, The Weather, p.52.

  3 would, at the very least, result in severe cerebral and pulmonary oedemas: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.7.

  4 The temperature 10 kilometres up can be minus 57 degrees Celsius: Smith, The Weather, p.25.

  5 about eight-millionths of a centimetre, to be precise: Allen, Atmosphere, p.58.

  6 if an incoming vehicle hit the thermosphere at too shallow an angle, it could well bounce back into space: Allen, Atmosphere, p.57.

  7 Dickinson records how Howard Somervell … “found himself choking to death after a piece of infected flesh came loose and blocked his windpipe”: Dickinson, The Other Side of Everest, p.86.

  8 The absolute limit of human tolerance for continuous living appears to be about 5,500 metres: Ashcroft, Life at the Extremes, p.8.

  9 above 5,500 metres even the most well-adapted women cannot provide a growing foetus with enough oxygen: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.18.

  10 “nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us during the night”: quoted by Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep, p.177.

  11 a typical weather front may consist of 750 million tonnes of cold air pinned beneath a billion tonnes of warmer air: Smith, The Weather, p.50.

  12 an amount of energy equivalent to four days’ use of
electricity for the whole United States: Junger, The Perfect Storm, p.102.

  13 At any one moment 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress around the globe: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.55.

  14 Much of our knowledge of what goes on up there is surprisingly recent: Biddle, A Field Guide to the Invisible, p.161.

  15 a wind blowing at 300 kilometres an hour is not simply ten times stronger than a wind blowing at 30 kilometres an hour, but a hundred times stronger: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.68.

  16 as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation … uses in a year: Ball, H2O, p.51.

  17 The impulse of the atmosphere to seek equilibrium was first suspected by Edmond Halley: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.300.

  18 Coriolis’s other distinction at the school was to introduce water coolers, which are still known there as Corios: Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p.24.

  19 gives weather systems their curl and sends hurricanes spinning off like tops: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.25.

  20 Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 100: Trefil, The Unexpected Vista, p.107.

  21 Howard is chiefly remembered now for giving cloud types their names in 1803: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, pp.51–2.

  22 Howard’s system has been much added to over the years: Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p.62.

  23 That seems to have been the source of the expression “to be on cloud nine”: Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, p.252.

  24 A fluffy summer cumulus several hundred metres to a side may contain no more than 100–150 litres of water: Trefil, Meditations at Sunset, p.66.

  25 Only about 0.035 per cent of the Earth’s fresh water is floating around above us at any moment: Ball, H2O, p.57.

  26 Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.8.

  27 Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.123.

  28 Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago: New Scientist, “Vanished,” 7 Aug. 1999.

  29 equivalent to the world’s output of coal for ten years: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.122.

  30 For that reason there tends to be a lag in the official, astronomical start of a season and the actual feeling that that season has started: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.111.

  31 As for the question of how anyone could possibly figure out how long it takes a drop of water to get from one ocean to another: National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” Oct. 2000, p.101.

  32 Altogether there is about twenty thousand times as much carbon locked away in the Earth’s rocks as in the atmosphere: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.7.

  33 the “natural” level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: Science, “The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences,” 13 Oct. 2000, p.303.

  Chapter 18: The Bounding Main

  1 Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.100.

  2 A potato is 80 per cent water, a cow 74 per cent, a bacterium 75 per cent: Schopf, Cradle of Life, p.107.

  3 Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable predictions about the properties of other liquids: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.29; Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.174.

  4 By the time it is solid, it is almost a tenth more voluminous than it was before: Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet, p.121.

  5 “an utterly bizarre property”: Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.174.

  6 like the ever-changing partners in a quadrille: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p.8.

  7 At any given moment only 15 per cent of them are actually touching: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.152.

  8 Within days, the lips vanish “as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length”: Economist, 13 May 2000, p.4.

  9 A typical litre of sea water will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.248.

  10 we sweat and cry sea water: Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos, p.184.

  11 There are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on Earth and that is all we’re ever going to get: Green, Water, Ice and Stone, p.25.

  12 By 3.8 billion years ago, the oceans had (at least more or less) achieved their present volumes: Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, p.360.

  13 Altogether the Pacific holds just over half of all the ocean water: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.226.

  14 we would better call our planet not Earth but Water: Ball, H2O, p.21.

  15 Of the 3 per cent of Earth’s water that is fresh: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.6; Scientific American, “On Thin Ice,” Dec. 2002, pp.100–5.

  16 Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on over 2 miles of ice, at the North Pole just 15 feet of it: Smith, The Weather, p.62.

  17 enough to raise the oceans by a height of 200 feet if it all melted: Schultz, Ice Age Lost, p.75.

  18 “driven to distraction by the mind-numbing routine of years of dredging”: Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p.34.

  19 But they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea: Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep, p.178.

  20 female assistants whose jobs were inventively described as “historian and technicist” or “assistant in fish problems”: Norton, Stars beneath the Sea, p.57.

  21 Soon afterwards he teamed up with Barton, who came from an even wealthier family: Ballard, The Eternal Darkness, pp.14–15.

  22 The sphere had no manoeuvrability … and only the most primitive breathing system: Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p.158; Ballard, The Eternal Darkness, p.17.

  23 Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen by anyone since: Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time, p.159.

  24 In 1958, they did a deal with the US Navy: Broad, The Universe Below, p.54.

  25 “We didn’t learn a hell of a lot from it, other than that we could do it”: quoted in Underwater magazine, “The Deepest Spot on Earth,” Winter 1999.

  26 There was just one problem: the designers couldn’t find anyone willing to build it: Broad, The Universe Below, p.56.

  27 In 1994, 34,000 ice hockey gloves were swept overboard from a Korean cargo ship during a storm in the Pacific: National Geographic, “New Eyes on the Oceans,” Oct. 2000, p.93.

  28 humans may have scrutinized “perhaps a millionth or a billionth of the sea’s darkness”: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, p.47.

  29 tube worms over 3 metres long, clams 30 centimetres wide, shrimps and mussels in profusion: Attenborough, The Living Planet, p.30.

  30 Before this it had been thought that no complex organisms could survive in water warmer than about 54 degrees Celsius: National Geographic, “Deep Sea Vents,” Oct. 2000, p.123.

  31 enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about 150 metres: Dennis, The Bird in the Waterfall, p.248.

  32 it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean: Vogel, Naked Earth, p.182.

  33 Perhaps nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths: Engel, The Sea, p.183.

  34 When they failed to sink, which was usually, navy gunners riddled them with bullets to let water in: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, pp.294–305.

  35 Blue whales will sometimes break off a song, then pick it up again at exactly the same spot six months later: Sagan, Cosmos, p.271.

  36 Consider … the fabled giant squid: Good Weekend, “Armed and Dangerous,” 15 July 2000, p.35.

  37 there could be as many as 30 million species of animals living in the sea, most still undiscovered: Time, “Call of the Sea,” 5 Oct. 1998, p.60.

  38 Even at a depth of nearly 5 kilometres, they found some 3,700 creatures: Kunzig, The Restless Sea, pp.104–5.

  39 Altogether less than a tenth of the ocean is considered naturally productive: Economist survey, “The Sea,” 23 May 1998, p.4.

  40 it doesn’t even make
it into the top fifty among fishing nations: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.104.

  41 Many fishermen “fin” sharks: Audubon, May-June 1998, p.54.

  42 and haul behind them nets big enough to hold a dozen jumbo jets: Time, “The Fish Crisis,” 11 Aug. 1997, p.66.