How Mountains Are Made (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: Delightful! "How Mountains Are Made" makes an excellent supplement to any elementary-school earth science unit. Its good-humored, user-friendly pages engage classes' attention and stimulate the students to ask questions. A clear, accurate, and accessible introduction to a complex subject - this will certainly put budding young geologists on firm footing. A wonderful addition to the venerable "Let's Read and Find Out Science" series!

Rating:
Summary: Accurately presents current theory
Review: This book pretty accurately presents a simplified version of the current theory on mountain formation. According to the UC Berkeley department of Geology, the asthenosphere is fluid: "These observations, along with many other studies of our planet, support the theory that underneath the Earth's crust (the lithosphere: a solid array of plates) is a malleable layer of heated rock known as the asthenosphere which is heated by radioactive decay of elements such as Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium. Because the radioactive source of heat is deep within the mantle, the fluid asthenosphere circulates as convection currents underneath the solid lithosphere."

Rating:
Summary: Fictitious Geophysics
Review: Unfortunately, and unusually for this series, this book is complete fiction. We got it for our daughter, and had to throw it away. The geophysics presented in this book is completely imaginary (and I should know, I'm an earth scientist). The basic premise is that the plates of the Earth's crust ride on a layer of magma. That is false. The plates move on top of the aesthenosphere, which is quite solid. The enormous stresses over large distances allow it to flow, so that the plates move a few cm/year. Magma does exist here and there in small pockets. From the erroneous notion of a magma layer, a complete, and entirely fictional geophysics is constructed to explain various things about mountains -- much as the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic systems explained the cosmos from the false premise of geocentrism. There are numerous other errors also, and the volcano book in the series uses the same magma layer fiction.