The Herons take to the high seas to fend off pirates and rescue the heir to an empire in the newest adventure from John Flanagan, author of the worldwide bestselling Ranger's Apprentice! Includes BONUS content--a brand-new Ranger's Apprentice short story featuring fan-favorites Will and Maddie! In Hallasholm, Stig is contesting the annual Maktig competition to decide Skandia’s greatest warrior. But a late-night knock on the door brings someone Stig never expected to see again, along with a request the Herons are hard-pressed to refuse: a rescue mission of epic proportions. Across the ocean, the southern city-state of Byzantos is plagued by a crew of pirates who’ve kidnapped the son of Empress Justina. Slipping out of Hallasholm under the cover of darkness, the brotherband sets sail to recover the boy from his kidnappers, heading south to the island of Santorillos where a near-impenetrable fortress stands atop a cliff, surrounded by a lagoon—a caldera—formed by the crater of a volcano. In this explosive seventh book in the action-packed Brotherband Chronicles, the Herons battle pirates amid stormy seas as the fate of an empire rests on their shoulders.

Thirty-four years have passed since Kevin Reynolds perpetrated the most heinous crime the citizens of Carver, Montana had ever witnessed in their small, alpine community. Now, Kevin's cousin, Mitch, has found a bundle of old letters written by Kevin to his father in 2001, the year of Kevin's execution. His curiosity peaked, Mitch has recruited two of his good friends to hike up to the Blind Valley caldera and scout out the scene of the crimes of 1969 and to try to find the hidden cave where the old mountain man, Sam Elliott, once lived. As far as the boys are concerned their trip to Blind Valley is supposed to be a six-day expedition filled with the sights and smells of the wilderness. What they expect to find is a sugar bowl valley Mitch's cousin Kevin referred to as Short Pines. So what do they find? A seemingly peaceful valley, the floor of which is thickly forested with stunted evergreens and ringed with high granite cliffs. The three friends find that the Blind Valley caldera is a place of great beauty, yet it is someplace very much more unworldly than they ever could have imagined...

The Nördlinger Ries and Steinheim Basin, two conspicuous geological structures in southern Germany, were traditionally viewed as somewhat enigmatic but nevertheless definitely volcanic edifices until they were finally recognized as impact craters in the 1960s. The changing views about the origin of the craters mark an important paradigm shift in the Earth sciences, from an Earth-centric approach to a planetary perspective that acknowledged Earth’s place in the wider cosmos. Drawing on a range of printed sources, detailed archival material, letters, personal notes, and interviews with veterans of Ries research, Martina Kölbl-Ebert provides a detailed reconstruction, not only of the historical sequence of events throughout the twentieth century, but also of the personal thoughts, emotions and motives of the scientists involved and the social context of their research. She shows that there was a sudden reconnection of German researchers with the international scientific community, particularly with more progressive American researchers, after some twenty-five years of scientific isolation during the build-up to WWII and its aftermath. This reconnection brought about not only a new view of geoscience, but also saved German geology from self-sufficiency and patriotic arrogance by integrating it in an interdisciplinary and international framework. In so doing this book sheds much valuable light on an under-explored but crucial development in the way we understand Earth’s history, as well as the way that science functioned during times of conflict.

Scientific notes and summaries of investigations in geology, hydrology, and related fields.