A new volcano! It didn't seem possible! Only yesterday that had been a rocky corn field. Now rocks and cinders shooting out of the ground had piled up in a cone as tall as a tree. Great black clouds belched out and the ground rumbled and roared. By night the rocks glowed like coals and the fragments shooting into the air looked like fireworks.

That was in 1943 in Mexico. The new volcano was called Paricutin for the tiny village near by. But soon that village was buried in cinders and "bombs" from the volcano. Scientists from all parts of the world gathered to watch Paricutin in action.

For thousands of years men have tried to understand volcanoes and how they work. What causes a new volcano to start right in a man's corn field? What made the volcano Krakatoa almost disappear in to the Pacific Ocean and then build itself up as an island many years later? What makes the ground rumble and shake so hard that houses collapse?

Scientists who watched the new volcano in Mexico had been working on these questions and many more. Now one of them, Dr. Frederick H. Pough, has brought the answers together in an exciting story with maps, charts and pictures that tell "all about volcanoes and earthquakes."

From the dust jacket