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Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizieliński (@hipopotam) started a revolution here in the UK, with the publication by Big Picture Press back in 2013 of their now famous Maps. With that beautifully produced book we started to see something of new departure for children’s non-fiction, with publishers realising that there was an appetite for gorgeously illustrated and finely produced information books which didn’t look or feel like school textbooks.

Since then we’ve seen several new non-fiction imprints established, dedicated to bringing us eye-catching, unusual and sumptuous non-fiction for children and young people, such as Wide Eyed Editions and 360 Degrees. This is great news, especially for younger children who report choosing to read non-fiction (42% of 7-11 year olds) almost as much as they do fiction (48.2% of 7-11 year olds, source), though you’d never guess this from the imbalance in titles published and reviewed.

It’s wonderful to see the return of the founders of the non-fiction revolution with a new title, Under Earth, Under Water, a substantial and wide-ranging exploration of what lies beneath the surface of the globe.

Split into two halves, allowing you to start from either end of the book by turning it around to explore either what lies beneath the earth, or under the oceans, this compendium of startling facts and quirky, fresh illustrations makes the most of its large format (a double page spread almost extends to A2), with great visual and verbal detail to pour over and a real sense of going down, down, down across the expanse of the pages.

The Earth pages cover everything from burrowing creatures to plant life in the soil, via extracting natural resources to industrial underground infrastructure. Tunnels, caves, digging up fossils and plate tectonics are all included in this rich and varied buffet brought together though a simple concept – simply exploring what is underneath our feet.

The Water pages explore aquatic life right from the surface down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, ocean geography, human exploration with the aid of diving equipment, the history of submarines and even shipwrecks.

Lavishly produced, with gorgeously thick paper it is a delight to hold this book in your hands. Wonderful design, featuring lots of natural reds and browns in the Earth section and soothing shades of blues and green in the Water section, ensures exploring the diverse content is a visual treat as much as it is a spark for thinking about the world around us in new ways.

My only question mark over Under Earth, Under Water is the lack of an index. Maybe this makes it more like a box of treasures to rummage in and linger over, the sort of space where you can’t be sure what gems you’ll dig up. Although perhaps not a resource from which to clinically extract information, Under Earth, Under Water offers a great deal to explore and a very enjoyable journey to the centre of the earth.

There’s so much we could have “played” in Under Earth, Under Water. We toyed with making submarines, visiting caves, planting seeds to watch roots grow, but in the end the animal burrows won out, and we decided it was time to make our own. This began with papier mache and balloons…

…which when dry were set into a cardboard box frame, and surrounded by layers of “soil” i.e. different coloured felt, to recreate the layering of different soil and rock types.

Then the burrows needed filling! Sylvanian families came to the rescue, along with nature treasures gathered from the garden.

And soon we had a dollshouse with a difference! (Can you spot the bones and other archaeological finds waiting to be dug up from the soil??)

Whilst making our underground burrow we listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside reading Under Earth, Under Water include:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher, Big Picture Press. The book was translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones although she is not credited in the book.

Which five words best describe The Slowest Book Ever? April Pulley Sayre: Chewy science for wondrous pondering.

In July 1867 the British historian Edward Augustus Freeman was in the thick of writing his epic History of the Norman Conquest. Ever a stickler for detail, he wrote to the geologist William Boyd Dawkins asking for help establishing where exactly in Pevensey soon-to-be King Harold disembarked in 1052.

The post Time and tide (and mammoths) appeared first on OUPblog.

Title: DIRTMEISTERS, Nitty Gritty Planet Earth Written by: Geologist Steve Tomecek Illustrated by: Fred Harper Published by: National Geographic Kids, 2015 Themes/Topics: geology, the Earth, rocks, earthquakes, fossils, evolution, experiments, scientists Suitable for ages: 8-14   Opening: Dirtmeister is a nickname I picked up a long time ago because … Continue reading →

The relationship between wine and the vineyard earth has long been held as very special, especially in Europe. Tradition has it that back in the Middle Ages the Burgundian monks tasted the soils in order to gauge which ones would give the best tasting wine, and over the centuries this kind of thinking was to become entrenched. The vines were manifestly taking up water from the soil.

The post On the unstoppable rise of vineyard geology appeared first on OUPblog.

Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth: All About Rocks, Minerals, Fossils, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, & Even DIRT!

Written by Steve Tomecek
Illustrated by Fred Harper
National Geographic Society      6/09/2015
978-1-4263-1903-7
128 pages      Age 8—12

“Geologist Steve Tomecek, aka The Dirtmeister, and his sidekick Digger unearth all kinds of amazing information in this comprehensive book about geology. Clear explanations of geologic processes will teach future geoscientists the fascinating topics while fun facts and simple experiments reinforce the concepts. So grab your shovel and get ready to play IN THE DIRT.” [back cover]

Review
Divided into ten relatively short, but in-depth, color-coded chapters, (such as “The Dynamics of Soil,” “How it (Earth) All Began,” and “Digging Old Dead Things”), Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth will teach kids a lot about geology and how it helps answer many questions. While very educational—teachers will love it—the kid-friendly book is equally entertaining. Kids are at the center of Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth. In fact, each chapter begins with a question put forth by a middle-grade-aged kid:

“Is that you down there, Dirtmeister?
I thought I recognized your dirtmobile.
My name is Richie and I have a quick
question . . . How did the Grand Canyon
get to be, you know, so grand?”
(Richie, in chapter 6, “What Goes Up Must Come Down”)

Other kids ask questions about such things as volcanoes, earthquakes, the shape of the continents, if can rocks make other rocks, and if dinosaurs are really extinct. The questions are interesting and the answers fascinating and fun. The Dirtmeister adds “cool” facts he calls “Dirtmeister’s Nuggets,” short biographies of important people, and simple experiments that let kids see geology at work. The illustrations are cartoonish and the images of Dirtmeister and his sidekick Digger are quite expressive. The art, especially the first spread of each chapter and its graphic novel layout, help draw in the reader and make the book feel personal, as if Dirtmeister is talking directly to the you. The remaining of the book is filled with photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and text that answers each question and then digs a bit deeper.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth from cover-to-cover. Being a National Geographic Kids publication I should have realized, even before turning to page 1, that I was in for a humorous, engaging, and educational read with incredible illustrations by Fred Harper. Geology, heck science of any kind, was never this easy to understand or could grab me from start to finish. I was amazed at geology’s reach. Topics included not just how to find Earth’s age, but how she came into existence.

The variety of subjects, tied into the Earth’s soil and its importance to humans, makes Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth ideal as an adjunct middle grade science text. I think elementary teachers could also find ways to utilize this book in their science classrooms. The entire book is kid-friendly and larger words are defined (in context). Home-schoolers should not miss a page of Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Earth. The author has correlated each chapter with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)* and STEM** Science Standards, both for grades 3 to 8. These follow the final chapter. There is also an extensive Index.

From volcanoes spewing hot lava and earthquakes splitting open Mother Earth, plus experiments such as designing rocks, building sediments, and simulating the Big Chill, Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth is probably the dirtiest middle grade book ever written—parents and teachers will approve. Oh, yeah, so will kids!

*NGSS was developed by the National Research Council and are based on the Framework for K—12 Science Education.  Website:  http://nextgenscience.org/

**STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. Teachers can find relevant information on STEM at the National Education Association (NEA), PBS, and at Teach.com.

DIRTMEISTER’S NITTY GRITTY PLANET EARTH:  ALL ABOUT ROCKS, MINERALS, FOSSILS, EARTHQUAKES, VOLCANOES, & EVEN DIRT! Text copyright (C) 2015 by Steve Tomecek. Illustrations copyright (C) 2015 by Fred Harper. Photographs copyrights vary and are listed in the book. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, National Geographic Society, Washington, DC.

You can buy Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth at Amazon—Book Depository—IndieBound Books—National Geography.

Learn more about Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth HERE.
Information for Teachers and Librarians HERE and HERE.
National Geographic + Common Core is HERE.
More for Kids from National Geographic Kids HERE. 

Meet the author, Steve Tomecek, at his website:  http://www.dirtmeister.com/
Meet the illustrator, Fred Harper, at his website:  http://www.fredharper.com/
Find more books at the National Geographic Kids website:  http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/

ALSO BY STEVE TOMECEK
Dirt (Jump Into Science®)
Moon (Jump Into Science®)
Sun (Jump Into Science®)
Rocks and Minerals (Jump Into Science®)
Stars (Jump Into Science®)
Rocks and Minerals (National Geographic Kids Everything)

Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

Full Disclosure: Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth: All About Rocks, Minerals, Fossils, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Even DIRT! by Steve Tomecek & Fred Harper, and received from National Geographic Society, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Within a year, we have been able to see our solar system as never before. In November 2014, the Philae Probe of the Rosetta spacecraft landed on the halter-shaped Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In April 2015, the Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the largest of the asteroids, Ceres (590 miles in diameter), orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. And in July, the New Horizons mission made the first flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto, making it the most distant solar-system object to be visited. Other spacecraft continue to investigate other planets.

The post What makes Earth ‘just right’ for life? appeared first on OUPblog.

If you like your prophecies pin sharp then look away now. The 16th century celebrity seer Nostradamus excelled at the exact opposite, couching his predictions in terms so vague as to be largely meaningless. This has not, however, prevented his soothsayings attracting enormous and unending interest, and his book – Les Propheties – has rarely been out of print since it was first published 460 years ago. Uniquely, for a renaissance augur, the writings of Nostradamus are perhaps as popular today as they were four and a half centuries ago.

The post Look away now: The prophecies of Nostradamus appeared first on OUPblog.

Living with Thunder is a stunning coffee table book that doubles as a serious geology study. Gorgeous color photographs of regional landscapes and rock formations are accompanied by accessible, detailed histories, often illustrated with maps and figures. Anyone with an interest in the Pacific Northwest's scenery, history, or geology will thrill to turn the pages [...]

Want a sure-fire way to make your summer rock this year? Think geology and food! As the weeks of summer stretch by, one way to keep kids engaged (and learning) is to head to the kitchen and cook up some science! Not only is this a fun way to tap into a child’s curiosity, but it maintains the momentum of learning that often stalagmites—I mean stagnates—during the summer.

Illustration copyright © 2014 by Leeza Hernandez.

1. With an adult’s help, cook the ground meat in a frying pan until it is brown. Drain off any fat. Add the pizza sauce and mix well. 
2. Spread about 1/2 cup of the meat sauce on the bottom of the rectangular pan. Top with oven-ready lasagna noodles, overlapping slightly to cover the whole pan. Top with more sauce—about 1/2 cup. 
3. Crack and beat the egg, then mix thoroughly with ricotta cheese. Spread half this mixture over the noodles.
4. Arrange a layer of pepperoni next, followed by a sprinkling of cheese. Top with a layer of lasagna noodles.
5. Repeat the layers. Cover the final layer of lasagna noodles with the remaining meat sauce and a generous amount of mozzarella cheese.
6. Cover the pan with heavy-duty foil. Bake in a 375°F oven for 35 minutes. Uncover and bake for another 10 minutes. Can you still identify the individual ingredients?

By Ellen Wohl

The 1960s are famous for many reasons: the civil rights movement, the first moon walk, the Cuban missile crisis, rock and roll. The 1960s were also a period when awareness of environmental degradation spread to society at large. Events such as the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s expose of pesticides, the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, and the regular occurrence of smog in many of the world’s large cities helped to convince people that pollution and environmental degradation were pervasive and needed to be addressed.

John McConnell proposed a day to honor Earth at a UNESCO conference in 1969, and the first Earth Day was celebrated on 21 March 1970, the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. This was definitely an idea whose time had come. A month later, another Earth Day was started by US Senator Gaylord Nelson. The second Earth Day took the form of a teach-in first held on 22 April 1970. Earth Day went international in 1990 when US Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes organized activities in 141 countries. Nearly 200 countries now celebrate Earth Day, and some have expanded the observance to Earth Week. Thinking of this makes me want to paraphrase the standard answer parents give to children when they ask why we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but no children’s day: Every day is (or should be) Earth Day.

Students pick up trash along roadside. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Earth Day has without question helped to increase visibility of environmental issues and promote governmental and citizen responses to these issues. One indication of this response is the increasing breadth and depth of Environmental Science. Environmental science means different things to different people. Some interpret it as the systematic study of the total environment, a broadly interdisciplinary approach that draws on knowledge from diverse disciplines. Others interpret environmental science as a collection of subdisciplines that explicitly focus on the environmental component within their discipline, typically in an attempt to minimize environmental impacts. Environmental architecture, for example, focuses on green building technology using recycled and sustainable building materials and reduced energy use within buildings. Environmental history examines the development of societies within the context of environmental constraints imposed on human actions and human attitudes toward the environment. The commonality among diverse approaches to environmental science is an explicit recognition that individuals and societies exist within an environmental context defined by the weather, topography, soils, water, and plant and animal communities that interact to create an ecosystem.

Loch Vale by Drew Parker. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Environmental degradation was pervasive and obvious during the early observances of Earth Day. Publication of the now-famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth taken during the 1972 Apollo mission created a stunning reminder of the limited area of the universe habitable by life. More than 40 years on, many of the issues that environmental science addresses today are much less obvious, and may therefore be more difficult to bring to public attention. One of my personal reminders of this is Loch Vale, a stunningly beautiful, high-elevation lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Visitors to the national park have to work to reach Loch Vale. The trail to the lake winds over 5.7 miles and gains more than a thousand feet in elevation. When you arrive, you feel that you have reached someplace special, a pristine mountain lake far from the noise and crowding of the urban areas at the base of the mountains. Yet, research by many scientists over the past two decades indicates that the soil and waters of the lake ecosystem are becoming acidic, largely as the result of atmospheric nitrate deposition. These nitrates originate from the feedlots and agricultural lands, industries, and tailpipes of the millions of people living at the base of the mountains, who are out of sight at Loch Vale, but not out of reach. Without the dedicated, ongoing efforts of environmental scientists such as Jill Baron of the US Geological Survey, who has led much of the research at Loch Vale, we would never be aware of the invisible but continuing acidification of this ecosystem.

For me, the lessons of Loch Vale are threefold. First, there is more to environmental degradation than meets the eye. Some of the most thorough and persistent changes are largely hidden from casual view. Second, the efforts of environmental scientists are critical to documenting environmental changes. We can only act to mitigate environmental degradation if we are aware of it. And third, we need Earth Day more than ever. Whatever form your observance of this day takes, I hope that it includes the recognition that every day is lived on Earth.

Ellen Wohl is Professor of Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Colorado State University. She is Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental Science, Associate Editor of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. She has published several books on rivers and environmental issues, including Virtual Rivers, Disconnected Rivers, A World of Rivers, Island of Grass, Of Rock and Rivers, and Wide Rivers Crossed.

Developed cooperatively with scholars worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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Image: Students pick up trash along roadside

The post Earth Day, 44 years on appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Jamie Woodward

On 23 September 1840 the wonderfully eccentric Oxford geologist William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1809–1873) left Glasgow by stagecoach on a tour of the Scottish Highlands. The old postcard below provides a charming hint of what their horse-drawn jaunt through a tranquil Scottish landscape might have been like in the autumn of 1840. It shows the narrow highway snaking through a rock-strewn Hell’s Glen not far from Loch Fyne. This was the first glacial fieldtrip in Britain. These geological giants were searching for signs of glacial action in the mountains of Scotland and they were not disappointed.

Image from edinphoto.org.uk. Used with permission.

This tour was an especially important milestone in the history of geology because, for the first time, the work of ancient glaciers was reported in a country where glaciers were absent. Agassiz wasted no time in communicating these findings to the geological establishment. The following is an extract from his famous letter that was published in The Scotsman on 7 October 1840 and in The Manchester Guardian a week later:

“… at the foot of Ben Nevis, and in the principal valleys, I discovered the most distinct morains and polished rocky surfaces, just as in the valleys of the Swiss Alps, in the region of existing glaciers ; so that the existence of glaciers in Scotland at earlier periods can no longer be doubted.”

These discoveries initiated new debates about climate change and the extent to which the actions of glaciers had been important in shaping the British landscape. These arguments continued for the rest of the century. In 1840 Buckland and Agassiz had no means of establishing the age of the glaciation because the scientific dating of landscapes and geological deposits only became possible in the next century. They could only state that glaciers had existed at “earlier periods”.

At the end of the previous century, in his Theory of the Earth (1795), Scotsman James Hutton became the first British geologist to suggest that the glaciers of the Alps had once been much more extensive. He set out his ideas on the power of glaciers and proposed that the great granite blocks strewn across the foothills of the Jura had been dumped there by glaciers. This was several decades before Agassiz put forward his own grand glacial theory. Hutton did not speculate about the possibility of glaciers having once been present in the mountains of his homeland.

Following the widespread use of radiocarbon dating in the decades after the Second World War, it was established that the last Scottish glaciers disappeared about 11,000 years ago at the close of the last glacial period. Many of the cirques of upland Britain are now occupied by lakes and peat bogs which began to form soon after the ice disappeared. By radiocarbon dating the oldest organic deposits in these basins, it was possible to establish a minimum age for the last phase of glaciation. A good deal of this work was carried out by Brian Sissons at the University of Edinburgh who published The Evolution of Scotland’s Scenery in 1967.

Geologists now have an array of scientific dating methods to construct timescales for the growth and decay of glaciers. The most recent work in some of the high cirques of the Cairngorms led by Martin Kirkbride of Dundee University has argued that small glaciers may have been present in the Highlands of Scotland during the Little Ice Age – perhaps even as recently as the 18th century. These findings are hot off the press — published in January 2014. Kirkbride’s team employed a relatively new geological dating technique that makes use of the build-up of cosmogenic isotopes in boulders and bedrock exposed at the Earth’s surface.

Photograph from Tarmachan Mountaineering. Used with permission.

So in 2014 we have a new interpretation of parts of the glacial landscape and a debate about the climate of the Scottish mountains during The Little Ice Age. This latest chapter in the study of Scottish glaciation puts glacial ice in some of the highest mountains about 11,000 years later than previously thought. The Scottish uplands receive very heavy snowfalls – the superb photograph of the Cairngorms shows this very clearly – and many snow patches survive until late summer. But could small glaciers have formed in these mountains as recently as The Little Ice Age? Some climate models with cooler summers suggest that they could.

This latest work is controversial and, like the findings of Agassiz and Buckland in 1840, it will be contested in the academic literature. Whatever the outcome of this new glacial debate, it is undoubtedly a delightful notion that only a century or so before Buckland and Agassiz made their famous tour, and when a young James Hutton, the father of modern geology, was beginning to form his ideas about the history of the Earth, a few tiny glaciers may well have been present in his own backyard.

Jamie Woodward is Professor Physical Geography at The University of Manchester. He has published extensively on landscape change and ice age environments. He is especially interested in the mountain landscapes of the Mediterranean and published The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean for OUP in 2009. He is the author of The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction. He tweets @Jamie_Woodward_ providing a colourful digital companion to The Ice Age VSI.

Jamie Woodward will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 29 March 2014 at 1:15 p.m. in the Blackwell’s Marquee to provide a very short introduction to The Ice Age. The event is free to attend.

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Image credits: (1) With permission from edinphoto.org.uk (2) With permission from Tarmachan Mountaineering

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This book contains fascinating scientific research, brilliant historical detection, and inspiring tales of prior tsunami and earthquake survivors. It may not happen in our lifetime, but in geological terms, the rupture of this fault is imminent. Knowledge is power. Be ready. Books mentioned in this post Cascadia's Fault: The Coming... Jerry Thompson New Trade Paper [...]

When, not if. It has been over 300 years since the Pacific Northwest last endured a megaquake (in 1700, the region was struck by a temblor considerably more powerful than the one that devastated San Francisco in 1906). With the Cascadia subduction zone (stretching from northern California into British Columbia) (over)due for a magnitude 9 [...]

Writing Apocalyptic Planet, I traveled to some of the most severe landscapes on earth. I relied on these places to tell the story of dramatic changes, revealing what this world is capable of. The first chapter was a multiweek foot trek across a sand-dune sea in Sonora, Mexico, in the heart of a seven-year drought. [...]