A beautiful and fascinating portrait of the world’s most extreme wildlife, from the sexiest beast to the smelliest plant.

Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.

Offers facts about lightning, the planets, volcanoes, tornadoes, and sharks.

Colossal and teensy, swift and sluggish, these mammals tend to extremes. Thirty captioned images portray remarkable creatures, from extinct cousins of the rhinoceros to modern kangaroos, bats, and elephants.

Lovers of marine life and connoisseurs of photography will delight in this beautifully produced book dedicated to the surprising elements of the "unseen." In Extreme Nature, National Geographic photographer Bill Curtsinger takes us to locations around the globe, from the North to the South Poles, where he reveals in amazing detail the lives of elusive water creatures-some never before photographed-and those that are ubiquitous but rarely observed close up. These images represent some of the best of his thirty-year career, and here he reflects on the subtle elements that make his art so powerful.The splendid photography in Extreme Nature is the result of a profound sensitivity to the aquatic environment. "I worship the single-minded effort that still photography embodies," Curtsinger says, "the challenge, the solitary immersion in an animal's world and the rewards that are often found in such an adventure." The reader accompanies him on these adventures, plumbing the depths around icebergs and volcanoes, meeting sharks, sea turtles, seals, narwhals, whales, and many others along the way. As he shares his wondrous visions, the author also explains his approach to the photographic artistry. "My goal," he says, "is to immerse myself in an animal's world so that I can extract from those moments a new image, or a new insight into behavior heretofore unseen. I become the creature I pursue, in theory anyway . . ." This elegant book becomes a journey not only into aquatic wildlife but also into the art of photography itself.

Readers learn about strange and unique plants.

Profiles three extreme scientists who risk their lives to conduct research in some of the world's most intense environments, describing the experiences of scientists studying hurricanes, cave microbes, and forest canopies.