The Bonkers Book of Volcano Facts

The ground under your feet is not sitting still. This book has 400+ pieces of evidence.

Start with the part nobody mentions: the crust you’re standing on is, proportionally, thinner than the skin of an apple. Under it is rock hot enough to flow. Under that is a ball of iron nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun.

The plates riding on top drift about as fast as your fingernails grow, which sounds harmless right up until two of them stick, let go, and move an entire country. The 2011 Japan earthquake shifted the main island eight feet east and dropped parts of the coastline by two feet, permanently.

The Bonkers Book of Volcano Facts takes a curious kid all the way down to the core and back out through the top of an eruption.

Plenty to dig into

• Over 400 facts and big questions, packed five to a page across full-color comic-style pages built to be flipped through, stared at, and read out of order.
• Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, lava, and plate tectonics, in an order that actually goes somewhere: down through the crust, then back up through the top.
• Straight answers to the big ones: what’s really under the ground, why the plates keep moving, what happened at Pompeii, and whether Yellowstone is going to do that again.
• Written for ages 6–12, with plenty for grown-ups to be unsettled by too.

For the kid who wants to know what’s under the floor

A pyroclastic flow pours down a volcano at up to 450 miles an hour, faster than any vehicle on the road, at temperatures over 1,800 degrees. That’s what finished Pompeii, arriving the morning after the ash had already collapsed the roofs. And when Krakatoa erupted in 1883, people heard it three thousand miles away and assumed it was distant gunfire.

Looking for a volcano book for a child who keeps asking how things work? This illustrated fact book puts their favorite subject at the center of reading and discovery.

Fair warning: you will be asked whether your house is on a fault line.