...

The Mummy MEGAPACK™

...

Also see The Margery Allingham Society.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Survivors of the Chancellor

... "jangada" in the French title is a traditional fishing boat in Brazil ...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon

...

...

Also see The Connie Willis . Net Blog.

...

...

Also see "#interview: Gregory Scott Katsoulis, Author of All Rights Reserved".

...

...

...

Word of the book: billennia refers to units of a billion years, much the way millennia refers to units of a milli—a thousand years.

Although magma today is far less fizzy than it used to be, this billennia-old cycle of pressure building up underground and then exploding upward continues today.

Word of the book: refulgent - "shine brightly".

Within ten milliseconds, the center of the lagoon lit up like a diamond, refulgent with light, and three million cubic feet of water vaporized into steam. (James Watt would have been agog.)

...

Word of the book: acceleration - is, in physics, any change in an object's velocity (which itself is a combination of speed and direction). Kakaes uses the term correctly, but it leads to some awkward sentences that are counterintuitive to a layperson's understanding of the word as "go faster". I'm familiar with the physics usage of the word, but sometimes I felt like I was trying to decipher double-negatives. For example, "the anomalous sunward acceleration of the Pioneers" means the spacecraft are slowing down as they fly out of the solar system; i.e., forces aimed back at the sun are causing the spacecraft to "decelerate".

...

...

...

...

Also see:

• Bill Stone (Wikipedia)
• United States Deep Caving Team

• "Alexander Klimchouk oral history interview with Dr. Bogdan Onac, January 23, 2007" (The "Download" button near the top of the page downloads a PDF transcript of the interview; the A/V link at the bottom, I assume for the MP3 sound file, didn't work for me.)

• Wondermondo's Krubera Cave (Voronya Cave) provides a good, short introduction to the cave. What is really outstanding on this page is the beautiful and educational side-view plan of the cave at the beginning of the article, going all the way down to the -2,197-meter depth record set in 2012. At the bottom of the page is a link to a 9-page, somewhat technical report on reaching the -1710-meter depth in 2001: "In a search for the route to 2000 meters depth: The Deepest Cave in the World in the Arabika Massif, Western Caucasus", by Alexander Klimchouk and Yury Kasjan, at Cavediggers.com. (The paper puts the -1,710-meter location at 530 meters above sea level; I assume the later -2,197-meter depth would then be 43 meters above sea level.)

• Wikipedia's Krubera Cave entry takes a much more in-depth (pun realized after the fact) look at the cave's geology, etc. and, more importantly for purposes relating to the book, the history of its exploration.

... Hawadax Island (formerly "Rat Island", renamed in 2012) is an island in the Rat Islands archipelago, one of the groups of islands in the far west of the Aleutian Islands ...

Word of the book: insessorial - "adapted for perching, as a bird's foot or claw: also said of birds that frequently perch". Quoting from ornithologist Walter Buller's 1872-1873 book, A History of the Birds of New Zealand (page 93, second paragraph):

"[The introduced rat] is very abundant in all our woods, and the wonder rather is that any of our insessorial birds are able to bear their broods in safety."

(The word is still in current use!)

...

Another big question: comma or no comma? The book, the English version at least, says Big World Small Planet in the text as well as on the cover. The book's single-page website, Big World Small Planet also has no comma. However, the book's original, Swedish publisher, Max Ström, lists the book as:

Big World, Small Planet: Välfärd inom planetens gränser

A comma. And the Stockholm Resilience Center, where author Johan Rockström is a professor, also uses a comma on its publication page for the book:

Full reference: Rockström, J., M. Klum. 2015. Big World, Small Planet: Abundance within Planetary Boundaries. Bokförlaget Max Ström, Stockholm.