A mix of memoir, travel and popular science, charting journeys across deserts, through jungles and up ice caps, to some of the world's most important volcanoes, showing how these mountains of fire have and continue to shape our planet and its future
 
When Tamsin Mather first visited the Amalfi coast on a family trip at 10 years old, she had no idea that the majestic double-humped peak of Mount Vesuvius was a site of such great importance for volcanology, nor that its mystifying and looming presence would spark her life-long obsession with volcanoes. These geological mammoths have fascinated humans for millennia, their eruptions studied throughout history, showing us how the Earth is living, breathing and changing and has been doing so for billions of years.
 
In this captivating book from an ever-curious volcanologist, Tamsin Mather takes us along on her globe-spanning excursions and discusses some of the most important volcanoes in the field, including:
 
Santorini in Greece
Masaya in Nicaragua
Krakatau in Indonesia
St. Helens in Washington State
Mount Meager in Canada
 
With warmth and lyricism, Tamsin explores the cultural roles volcanoes play at different times throughout history, and the growing and evolving science behind their formation and eruptions. Adventures in Volcanoland is an urgent and poetic exploration into the world's most mysterious geological mountains and how they make and shape our world, for readers of Robert MacFarlane and Hope Jahren.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Tamsin Mather is an award-winning Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining the faculty at Oxford in 2006, she was a research council fellow at the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and a Royal Society research fellow. She has published over 145 scientific papers and won numerous prizes including the 2018 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture.