On March 12, 1888, hurricane-force winds and unrelenting snow began to bring the region of Virginia to Maine to its knees. During the next three days, the Great Blizzard raged out of control, devastating every community in its path. Through the eyes and words of survivors and victims alike, as well as the careful research for which Newbery Honor Award author Jim Murphy is known, listeners will experience one of the most devastating natural disasters...

Become an eyewitness to nature’s most extreme weather phenomena. See inside the eye of a cyclone, witness hailstones the size of tennis balls, and learn how a gentle mountain stream can become a raging surge within a few minutes. Discover a bridge that collapsed due to severe gusts of wind, and learn about a tree species in southwest Africa that can survive several years of drought. Along the way, you’ll uncover historical items that reveal...

June 4, 1958, was a muggy and breezy day in western Wisconsin. Across central Minnesota, severe weather was brewing. In the early afternoon, the Minnesota storms crossed the border into Wisconsin. As farmers were tending to milking chores and families were wrapping up the workday and sitting down to supper, one of the worst tornadoes in Wisconsin's history touched down. At 7:07 p.m., what had been multiple, smaller tornadoes combined into one massive...

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 consumed nearly 800,000 acres-36 percent of the park. In the years following, spectacular wildflowers rose from the ashes and trees rapidly reclaimed the landscape. In this twenty-five-year look back at the fires, author and photographer Jeff Henry recalls not only the summer of 1988, when he witnessed and photographed nearly every aspect of the fires, but also the years since as nature healed the charred landscape. A...

"An amazing journey into the fire and beyond!" "A story of heartbreak and resilience, with a few bad guys thrown in for good measure." "This may be fiction, but it tells a very 'real' story of disaster and heroism" When a small, paradisiacal mountain town is, faced with a wildfire of historic proportions, survival is only the beginning. Once the fire is out, the chase to find answers begins. James Augustine woke on that fateful Thursday morning, optimistic...

On the 11th March 2011, a massive earthquake hit the Pacific Ocean near to North-Eastern Japan. Soon afterwards, a devestating tsunami followed. This quick-read guide written by Paul Andrews gives the reader an overview an explanation of the events in easy-to-understand plain English. With sections including the nuclear crisis, the effect of the disaster on Japan's - and the global - economy, and information about what causes an earthquake and a tsunami,...

This book answers 1001 questions about all kinds of natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides, floods, droughts, fires, and animal plagues. A very informative, readable book. 18 photographs, 23 line drawings.

When John Hale's parents moved from Chicago to a farm in the Dakota Territory in the late 1880s, he was not happy (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and that is just the beginning); but after a year, and now eleven, he has settled in and made some friends at school--but when a sunny day in January 1888 turns abruptly into a deadly blizzard he will need all his strength and courage to survive what became known to history as The Children's Blizzard....

As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends...

Laki is Iceland's largest volcano. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history's great, untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe. Island on Fire is the story not only of a single eruption but the people whose lives it...