Shawna Vogel

"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."

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

"Oceanographer Edward Baker and his colleagues... came across a startling anomaly. ...something peculiar: a football-shaped mass of warm water some twelve miles across and nearly half a mile from top to bottom. ...a half a degree warmer than the surrounding sea water. ...18 billion kilowatt-hours of energy ...The researchers dubbed this feature a megaplume."

"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."

"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."