In the Beginning...: Older Than Dirt--A Wild But True History of Earth by Don Brown and Dr. Mike Perfit

This hole in the earth is my home, such as it is.

Earth is your home, too, and its story is deeper and older than the dirt I'm digging in.

Hey! Earth is older than dirt!

Who's better at getting down and dirty than a groundhog? And this woodchuck wastes no time chucking wood! His job is to guide young readers through the history of our favorite planet--from the Big Bang until today. Groundhog is assisted by his subterranean straight man, an earthworm with a surprisingly expressive face (despite his sole features being two nondescript eyes) who knows all the right questions to ask his dirt-moving docent as he sightsees through geologic time.

Graphic artist and storyteller Don Brown provides the wisecrack-studded narration and engaging cartoons to take the reader way back in his comic time machine to make sense of Earth's 14.5-billion year (but who's counting?) history, pointing out that our home sphere is a spinoff from space dust shaped by gravity.

Our familiar globe was once a cloud of rock, dust and gas. The rock and dust collided to make clumps. The clumps swirled around to make our solar system and sun. About 4.5 billion years ago, some of the clumps joined together to make Earth. Groundhog begins at the beginning, with molten Earth slowly cooled by galactic winds to form a core, surrounded by red-hot magma mantle which slowly hardened into the rocky lithosphere at the surface. But Earth has also had its "baby bang," when a smaller loose planet careened into it, leaving behind some of its mass, with the rest bouncing off to form Earth's Moon.

Groundhog faithfully relates the story, unfortunately choosing the wrong metaphor for his wormy student:

"THWACK! Some scientists say it was a punch to the gut and others say it was a slap to the shoulder."

"What's a shoulder?" asks Earthworm.

But our trusty narrator digs in, describing the changes wrought by volcanic action and a multitude of meteor strikes on the neophyte planet by which Earth acquires minerals and gases which combine eventually to form an atmospheric and watery oceans. Groundhog describes the transition from a primordial water world to solid land beset by erosion and tectonic forces which create a changing world of continents and oceans teeming with life forms, from snowball earth to tropical earth to the great die-offs after big asteroid strikes and the slow rise of good old dirt that makes animal and human life possible.

It's a dramatic story that lends itself well to the graphic novel style, in Don Brown's and Mike Perfit's Older Than Dirt: A Wild but True History of Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), which tells Planet Earth's tale with plenty of facts laced with wise and witty repartee between his two, ahem! well-grounded characters.

A winner of the American Library Association's Sibert Award for nonfiction, with the aid of noted geologist Dr. Mike Perfit, author-illustrator Brown skillfully uses paneled pages and speech balloons to provide the earth science education delivered by his earthy narrators in a storyographic format just right for this introduction to the geologic backstory of our favorite planet. Middle readers will love this chance to dig down deep into our Earth's history and will surface with a deeper understanding and valuation of the planet that is our place in space.

Picture Earth! Planet Earth by Jon Richards

CHANGING FACE

As the tectonic plates move about
they carry pieces of land with them.
Over millions of years, this has
changed the shape of our land from
a single mass to the continents
we know today.

Earth (and we earthlings with it) is always on the move, with tectonic plates always shifting, imperceptibly but surely, as author Jon Richards makes sure we understand in the second book in the publisher's new series, Planet Earth (The World in Infographics) (Owlkids Books, 2013).

Making certain we get it that our seemingly stable and solid earth is a dynamic force, Richards begins his latest with Inside the Earth, with a cross section of the showing its molten, hot-as-the-sun core upon which the mantle and the crust (to which we cling hopefully) is free to float. Richards introduces the concept of the proto-continents coming apart--from Pangaea to Laurasia and Gondawanaland millions of years ago right down to our current (but temporary) arrangement of lands. following with two-page spreads covering Restless Earth (earthquakes), The Rock Cycle, and Violent Volcanoes.

Richards then moves on to earth's prominent landforms--Towering Peaks, Habitats, The Oceans, and Raging Rivers, as well as those welcome features that keep us alive--The Air We Breathe, The Water Cycle, and Water World, and concluding not far from where he started, with Changing Earth (climate).

This second book in the The World in Infographics series makes use of its unique icons, pictograms, and occasional fact boxes to convey information difficult to organize in a readable narrative: the world's highest mountains are shown scaled to size as peaks in one distant mountain range, from Everest (at 29,029 feet) down to the Vinson Massif (16,066 feet) and the under-ocean Carstensz Pyramid in the Pacific. Likewise, the double-page chapter on Habitats offers a pyramid which combines climate and the relative extent of habitats from polar to tropical regions, and the spread on Raging Rivers boasts a very clever pictogram which offers a listing of earth's major rivers, largest to smallest, their source, destination, countries crossed, and length in miles and kilometers, all in one easy-to-understand graphic image.

Great for inquisitive kids who like to browse through its eye-catching page design and clever graphics, courtesy of illustrator Ed Simkins, Planet Earth (The World in Infographics) offers both dedicated autodidacts and casual readers concepts and some memorable facts to take away with them.

An appended glossary does double duty, serving also as a review of science vocabulary introduced in the text.

The Friz Goes Green: The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge by Joanna Cole

When Ms. Frizzle (a.k.a "The Friz") turns up at school with a big old book called Our Wonderful World, the kids are slightly intrigued when she tells them it was her book when she was their age. The idea of their teacher as little nine-year-old Valerie Frizzle catches their interest, but when she opens her book, they see the usual ho-hum geography layouts--snow-covered mountains, waterfalls, glacier fields--good to use to paint the scenery for their grade's play on energy, but nothing as exciting as their teacher's usual startling openers.

But then, Ms. Frizzle comes out with one of her famous portentous remarks:

"LET'S GET REALLY UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION!" SHE SAYS

"I HATE IT WHEN SHE SAYS STUFF LIKE THAT," ARNOLD GROANS.

And the class is off on one of their fabulous field trips, which not surprisingly revisits some of the scenes shown in Ms. Frizzle's childhood book. Except--are they really the same? Flying over the Arctic Ocean, Dorothy Ann notices something.

Dorothy Ann opened Ms. Frizzle's old book. The pictures showed ice everywhere.

There was still plenty of ice in the Arctic, but a lot had melted, and more was melting all the time.

And retracing all the sections in Our Wonderful World shows the same remarkable changes. The permafrost on the northern steppes is turning the region into a muddy mess; former farmland looks like a desert from the air, and rising oceans are causing their inhabitants to move away from the coast. The kids are struck by the difference in HOW IT LOOKED THEN and HOW IT LOOKS NOW. What happened?

Ms. Frizzle explains that although there are lots of variations in weather from day to day and year to year, the climate has shown steady changes since her childhood, with warming temperatures in the polar regions and in the oceans which have had remarkable effects all over the globe. As the students learn about the changes in climate caused by greenhouse gases--water, carbon dioxide and methane, for example--they begin to have an appreciation of the uses of renewable, non-polluting means of energy production such as solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. Back in the classroom the kids have a new appreciation of what they can do to conserve, right down to using energy strips to take their electronics off the grid when not in use. The class and The Friz renew their pledge together.

"I'M GOING GREEN! THEY PROCLAIM.

"I'VE ALWAYS BEEN GREEN," NOTES LIZ (THE LIZARD.)

The winning team of author Joanna Cole and illustrator Bruce Degen have carried off one of their most ambitious science expeditions in their latest, The Magic School Bus And The Climate Challenge (Scholastic, 2010). Deftly working in early elementary curriculum concepts and vocabulary, the all-pro co-creators provide plenty of fun in the form of humorous asides from the students and thrilling maneuvers from bush pilot Frizzle at the throttle as they cover some new territory in science education. This one should be a staple of environmental education, Earth Day units, weather and climate study, and a fine motivator for school projects as well as big changes at home.