On the 2021 Green Earth Book Award Long List! For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a mythic framing of climate change and one little girl’s response. Alya and Atik are stars. Their job is to twinkle in the night sky over Earth, and for billions of years they do it well. Plants stretch toward them. Animals look up at them. And, eventually, humans gaze up at them and marvel. But then humans invent powerplants, factories, and cars, and smog pours into Earth’s atmosphere. It becomes harder and harder for Alya and Atik to do their jobs—until, finally, the stars yell at Earth, and Earth feels sick and begins to shake, and things look pretty dire. The clueless king’s response is to command Earth to stop shaking. But a little girl named Axiom tells the king to hush, then tells humans what they must do to make the Earth feel better. When the Earth Shook provides a mythical framing for kids to understand that it will be their job to help save the Earth. Bravo, Axiom! Keep using that huge megaphone until the earth no longer shakes! Axiom’s list of instructions to humans—some well-known and others new but critically important—appears in the back of the book.

"When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot" by H. Rider Haggard deals with the adventures of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot as they travel to the south sea island of Orofena. The story begins as the main character, Humphrey Arbuthnot is married to his wife, Natalie. Shortly thereafter, she claims that she is going to die soon even though she has been given a clean bill of health from their doctor, Bickley. Right as Natalie dies, she tells Arbuthnot that soon he will want to travel somewhere, and that is where the two shall meet again.

Out-of-print for many years, When the World Shook is a classic text which tells of the terror of a ghost town. The streets were empty, and so were the buildings, this city could not have been more dead had it been on the moon.

What does it take for a volcanic eruption to really shake the world? Did volcanic eruptions extinguish the dinosaurs, or help humans to evolve, only to decimate their populations with a super-eruption 73,000 years ago? Did they contribute to the ebb and flow of ancient empires, the French Revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe in the 19th century? These are some of the claims made for volcanic cataclysm. Volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer explores rich geological, historical, archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records (such as ice cores and tree rings) to tell the stories behind some of the greatest volcanic events of the past quarter of a billion years. He shows how a forensic approach to volcanology reveals the richness and complexity behind cause and effect, and argues that important lessons for future catastrophe risk management can be drawn from understanding events that took place even at the dawn of human origins.

Depicts the adventure of three Englishmen who uncover a pair of 250,000 year old super-humans in suspended animation. The super-humans, awakened, view Europe in the midst of the First World War and decide that human civilization must be destroyed.

When the World Shook tells the story of Humphrey Arbuthnot, a writer of adventure stories, and the deathbed promise of his wife that the two would meet again. Arbuthnot, along with his friends Bickley and Bastin, set sail for the Pacific where they promptly encounter a storm and abandon ship. When they awaken they find themselves on the island of Orofena, where they anger the island natives and are soon forced to flee after making an astounding discovery. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.