Quotes from Greg Breining

The Deccan Traps volcanoes spilled as much as a half million cubic miles of basalt over an area equal to half of present-day India. In places, the basalt lies more than a mile deep.

It proved a wet, ungenial summer," the future Mary Shelley wrote, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." To entertain themselves, they wrote ghost stories. Mary Shelley's would become Frankenstein.

The effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilisation.