The journey to the centre of the earth is a voyage like no other we can imagine. Over 3,000 km below the earth's surface an extraordinary inner world the size of Mars awaits us. Dive through the molten iron of the outer core and eventually you will reach a solid sphere - an iron-clad world held within a metal sea and unattached to anything above. At the earth's core is the history of our planet written in temperature and pressure, crystals and minerals . . . Our planet appears tranquil from outer space. And yet the arcs of volcanoes, the earthquake zones and the auroral glow rippling above our heads are testimony to something remarkable happening inside . . . For thousands of years these phenomena were explained in legend and myth. Only in recent times has the brave new science of seismology emerged. One hundred and fifty years after the extraordinary, imaginative feat of Jules Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, David Whitehouse embarks on a voyage of scientific discovery into the heart of our world.

The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth’s very core. In his quest to penetrate the planet’s primordial secrets, the geologist—together with his quaking nephew Axel and their devoted guide, Hans—discovers an astonishing subterranean menagerie of prehistoric proportions. Verne’s imaginative tale is at once the ultimate science fiction adventure and a reflection on the perfectibility of human understanding and the psychology of the questor. As David Brin notes in his Introduction, though Verne never knew the term “science fiction,” Journey to the Centre of the Earth is “inarguably one of the wellsprings from which it all began.”

The story begins in Hamburg, 1863. The brilliant Professor Lidenbrock, inspired by an ancient, encoded manuscript, decides to take his reluctant nephew Axel on a seemingly insane mission: to travel down volcanic tunnels to the very center of the earth. With Hans, their intrepid Icelandic guide, they descend deeper and deeper, encountering terrifying prehistoric animals and passing through unimaginably beautiful landscapes. Will Axel ever again see his beloved fiancee Grauben?