Why Hawaii's volcano is so UNUSUAL

I'm glad you had such an interesting time looking at history through a geologist's point of view of the earth, and I would imagine if our race actually survives a couple of centuries from now, we'd be able to track a sigificant perspective of what he describes in actual continental drift with the volcanic eruptions and their magnetudes to help predict earthquakes in the future; making maps much more detailed and realistic than anything we could imagine, just because I'd expect our ability to read and re-read the mantle composition through earthquakes and magnetic fluctuations to guage the rock-types and viscocities of different rocks at different temperatures to predict eruption events much more accurately than we could try today.

We have temperature maps of the planet, but we rarely keep temperature maps to grade geologic temperatures over time; how hot was the mantle around Mt. St.Helens before she erupted? Honestly, I don't think that would be very possible unless there was a global temperature taking system that negated the seasons and just figured on a mean or an average temperature.

Unfortunately, as we've seen with Venus, atmosphere can have a drastic effect on the temperature of the planet's surface and the composition of the rocks.