Extreme Earth — where the planet gets fierce
Volcanoes, Mount Everest, the Sahara, the Amazon and Antarctica: what makes each place extreme, who survives there, and why it matters. Ages 11–13.
Ages 11–13
What's inside
Volcanoes — the planet venting
A volcano is a crack in the Earth’s crust where molten rock from deep below finds a way to the surface. About 1350 of them have erupted in the last 10000 years and could erupt again. Roughly three quarters of them sit in a horseshoe around the Pacific Ocean known as the Ring of Fire.
Mount Everest — the top of the world
Mount Everest, on the border between Nepal and Tibet, is the highest point on Earth’s surface: 8848.86 metres above sea level, a figure Nepal and China finally agreed on together in 2020. Its Nepali name is Sagarmāthā and its Tibetan name is Chomolungma. A cruising airliner flies only a couple of kilometres higher than its summit.
The Sahara — the great hot desert
The Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth: about 9.2 million square kilometres of North Africa, roughly the area of China or of the United States. Eleven countries hold a piece of it. And despite the postcards, only around a quarter of it is sand dunes — most is bare rock, gravel plain and mountain.
The Amazon — the forest that makes rain
The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on the planet, about 6.7 million square kilometres spread across nine countries. Running through it is the Amazon River, which carries more water than the next seven biggest rivers put together. Roughly one in ten of all known species on Earth lives here.
Antarctica — a continent under ice
Antarctica is a continent buried under ice: 14 million square kilometres of land beneath an ice sheet averaging more than 2 kilometres thick. It holds about 90% of all the ice on Earth and roughly 70% of the planet’s fresh water. Nobody is from there — every single person on the continent is a visitor.
Earthquakes — when the ground shakes
An earthquake is the ground suddenly lurching as rock breaks and slips deep below. Instruments pick up around half a million of them every year, though only a few hundred are strong enough to do damage. The biggest ever measured struck Chile in 1960 at magnitude 9.5.
Tsunamis — walls of water
A tsunami is not one big wave but a series of them, usually set off when an undersea earthquake suddenly shoves the whole ocean upward. In deep water it races along at the speed of a jet plane, yet it is barely a bump you could sail over without noticing. It only rears up into a killer when it reaches the shallows near a coast.
Hurricanes — engines of storm
A hurricane is a giant spinning storm that grows over warm tropical seas and can stretch wider than a whole country. The same storm is called a typhoon in the western Pacific and a cyclone in the Indian Ocean — one weather machine, three names. At its centre sits a strange pocket of calm, clear sky called the eye.
Tornadoes — the spinning column
A tornado is a violently spinning column of air that reaches from a thunderstorm down to the ground. It is far smaller than a hurricane — often only a couple of hundred metres across — but it packs the fastest winds on the planet into that narrow space. Most last just a few minutes, yet in that time they can flatten a house and lift a car.
Lightning — a spark from the sky
Lightning is a giant electric spark that jumps between a cloud and the ground, or between two clouds. For a fraction of a second its narrow channel heats the air to around 30000 °C — five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Somewhere on Earth, roughly forty of these bolts strike every single second.
Glaciers — rivers of ice
A glacier is a slow-moving river made entirely of ice, thick and heavy enough that it flows downhill under its own weight. They form wherever more snow falls each winter than melts each summer, year after year, until the buried snow is squeezed into solid ice. Frozen in that ice is most of the fresh water on the planet.
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