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Good Reads  Earth System Sciences  Geosphere  Volcanology

Fire & Ice The Volcanoes of the Solar System

Popular Science
By: Natalie Starkey(Author)
328 pages, 8 plates with colour & b/w photos and colour illustrations
NHBS
Fire & Ice is both a fascinating Solar-System tour of volcanoes and a primer on volcanism on Earth and beyond.
Fire & Ice
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  • Fire & Ice ISBN: 9781472960405 Paperback Jun 2023 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 5 days
    £12.99
    #260011
  • Fire & Ice ISBN: 9781472960368 Hardback Sep 2021 In stock
    £16.99
    #253986
Selected version: £16.99
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About this book

The volcano – among the most familiar and perhaps the most terrifying of all geological phenomena. However, Earth isn't the only planet to harbour volcanoes. In fact, the Solar System, and probably the entire Universe, is littered with them. Our own Moon, which is now a dormant piece of rock, had lava flowing across its surface billions of years ago, while Mars can be credited with the largest volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, which stands 25 km high. While Mars's volcanoes are long dead, volcanic activity continues in almost every other corner of the Solar System, in the most unexpected of locations.

We tend to think of Earth volcanoes as erupting hot, molten lava and emitting huge, billowing clouds of incandescent ash. However, it isn't necessarily the same across the rest of the Solar System. For a start, some volcanoes aren't even particularly hot. Those on Pluto, for example, erupt an icy slush of substances such as water, methane, nitrogen or ammonia, that freeze to form ice mountains as hard as rock. While others, like the volcanoes on one of Jupiter's moons, Io, erupt the hottest lavas in the Solar System onto a surface covered in a frosty coating of sulphur.

Whether they are formed of fire or ice, volcanoes are of huge importance for scientists trying to picture the inner workings of a planet or moon. Volcanoes dredge up materials from the otherwise inaccessible depths and helpfully deliver them to the surface. The way in which they erupt, and the products they generate, can even help scientists ponder bigger questions on the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System.

Fire & Ice is an exploration of the Solar System's volcanoes, from the highest peaks of Mars to the intensely inhospitable surface of Venus and the red-hot summits of Io, to the coldest, seemingly dormant icy carapaces of Enceladus and Europa, an unusual look at how these cosmic features are made, and whether such active planetary systems might host life.

Customer Reviews (1)

  • Fascinating tour of volcanoes and volcanism
    By Leon (NHBS Catalogue Editor) 26 Dec 2021 Written for Hardback


    What could be more awe-inspiring than volcanoes? How about volcanoes in space? Having previously raved about asteroids, geologist and cosmochemist Natalie Starkey returns to Bloomsbury Sigma for her second book. Here, she takes readers not just on a Solar System tour of volcanoes, but also walks them through the processes that make a volcano and how these processes play out in extraterrestrial settings.

    Fire & Ice is really a book in three parts. The subtitle leads you to believe this book is a tour of Solar System volcanoes, and it delivers this in the last three chapters. But it is as much about volcanism – about the process – as it is about volcanoes, with four chapters dealing with the nuts and bolts of how volcanoes work, and another three on the effects volcanoes have.

    At its most basic, volcanism is a way for planetary bodies to cool down. Two chapters in the middle of this book tell you how this heat is generated (some of it is primordial, some of it is generated during a body's lifetime) and how it is lost through conduction (always) and convection (only if the thermal gradient is large enough). Another chapter deals with magma, discussing some examples of relatively liquid (basaltic) and stickier (silica-rich) magmas. One important misconception Starkey corrects is that the magma chamber is a simple subterranean liquid pool. Rather, magmatic plumbing systems are a complex series of lens-shaped bodies interconnected by pipes that have tendrils and dead ends. A fourth chapter answers how we can know what is inside of a planetary body using direct and indirect evidence. Examples of the latter are a magnetic field or a fresh-looking surface with suspiciously few craters – both strong hints that a planet or moon has an active interior.

    Next to these nuts-and-bolts chapters, three further chapters discuss all the things volcanoes have done for us. A number of famous historical eruptions illustrate the many destructive effects. Plate tectonics illustrates the flipside: volcanoes create new land and conditions favourable to life by releasing carbon dioxide and water into the atmosphere. But to make oceans you need just the right conditions. Venus, for example, probably had water once, though it is now a lifeless world characterised by a runaway greenhouse effect. One possibility Starkey sketches here is that Venus's surface remained too hot for too long for oceans to form through condensation, water instead being lost to space.

    One of the more interesting things that Starkey highlights is that our knowledge of volcanoes is, obviously, skewed towards Earth. And it still holds many surprises – most volcanoes are submarine and have barely been explored. However, Earth is not typical for volcanism in the Solar System. Ice-spewing volcanoes (cryovolcanism) and nitrogen glaciers might sound otherwordly, but "perhaps Earth is the weird one" (p. 27). Most volcanoes on Earth occur where tectonic plates meet or separate. Hot-spot volcanism, which sees mantle plumes from deep within the planet rise to the surface to form volcanoes, is rarer on Earth, but the predominant mode of volcanism on other Solar System bodies. Hawaii's shield volcanoes are thus a more representative model for most extraterrestrial volcanoes. One further difference is that on Earth the combination of hotspot volcanism with a moving overlying tectonic plate has created the chain of islands making up Hawaii. Mars's gigantic Olympus Mons shows what can happen on a stagnant-lid world without plate tectonics: a single, 624-km diameter, 21.9-km high shield volcano.

    This leads into the final part of Fire & Ice, the Solar System tour of volcanoes that probably sold you on this book. In three chapters, Starkey compares our Moon with Jupiter's moon Io; discusses the evidence of past volcanism on our rocky neighbours Mercury, Venus, and Mars; and looks at cryovolcanism on moons. This is where the book delivers the goods and features some of the most interesting material. For example, Io is the only other place in the Solar System with "hot" volcanism. Venus has a uniformly "young" crust of 300-600 million years old and in lieu of plate tectonics may have seen a planet-wide overturning of its crust in the past when it had become too hot under its stagnant lid. On Mars, we have found a similar pattern of geomagnetic stripes that on Earth was one line of evidence for plate tectonics, though whether this supports past plate tectonics on Mars remains an open question. And then there are the moons.

    Alien Oceans introduced me to the concept of other habitable zones with conditions favourable for life outside of the classic one that is determined by distance to the parent star. On these moons, heat is generated through friction when their insides are squeezed and stretched in response to tidal tugs from the parent planet or other moons. As revealed by various missions over the years, this results in ice-covered moons with liquid subsurface oceans. Here, geysers release plumes of water, salts, and hydrocarbons, while cryovolcanoes erupt magma consisting of e.g. cold slurries of ammonia-water and liquid methane. Starkey discusses Triton (Neptune), Enceladus and Titan (Saturn), and Europa (Jupiter). A surprise entry is Pluto, with a fly-by of the New Horizons mission revealing a fresh surface, though its heat source remains mysterious.

    Fire & Ice is fascinating, but there is something about the writing that did not quite gel for me. I found it hard to put my finger on it exactly, but the book feels a bit lacking in structure, ricocheting between various, sometimes technical topics without a clear central message. One small error that escaped proofing is the consistent use of superscripts rather than subscripts for chemical formulae. Another question is how Fire & Ice compares to the 2008 Alien Volcanoes, of which I recently bought a copy. To my knowledge, it is the only other popular book on the subject. It spends only two chapters on past eruptions and the process of volcanism, quickly focusing on the Solar System tour. It is illustrated throughout with photos from NASA and artwork from Michael W. Carroll, versus an 8-page plate section in Fire & Ice. Starkey's work is, of course, fully up-to-date, covering missions and planetary bodies not mentioned in Alien Volcanoes, but I also noticed topics not covered by Fire & Ice. My quick impression is that these books can comfortably exist side-by-side and Alien Volcanoes remains worth seeking out if you do not already have a copy.

    Despite some minor quibbles, Fire & Ice is a fascinating book for astronomy and volcano aficionados that is both a Solar-System tour of volcanoes and a primer on how the process of volcanism plays out on Earth and beyond.
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Biography

Natalie Starkey is a geologist and cosmochemist. Over the course of her doctorate at Edinburgh University, studying the geochemistry of Arctic volcanoes, Natalie travelled to the volcanic fields of Iceland, the ancient volcanoes of northern Scotland and spent three months as a volcanologist on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. Later, her postdoctoral research expanded to include the analysis of rock samples from space, which led to her first popular science book, Catching Stardust (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018). Natalie received a British Science Association Media Fellowship in 2013 and regularly appears on television and radio internationally, as well as being a science host with Neil deGrasse Tyson's popular StarTalk Radio.

Popular Science
By: Natalie Starkey(Author)
328 pages, 8 plates with colour & b/w photos and colour illustrations
NHBS
Fire & Ice is both a fascinating Solar-System tour of volcanoes and a primer on volcanism on Earth and beyond.
Media reviews

"Fire & Ice is an assured, essential read on everything you could hope to know about volcanoes on both our world and others. It captures the intrigue, mystery and wonder of space, and underscores just how much we have to thank volcanoes for on Earth."
New Scientist

"Starkey's excellent book is the first to examine these extra-terrestrial volcanoes of our Solar System . It's an explosive read in more ways than one."
Forbes

"In Fire & Ice, geologist and solar system maven Natalie Starkey reveals to us that Earth is not the only host for active volcanoes. You can find them in places not previously imagined, like the surfaces of other planets and their moons. And you think you've seen everything? Some of these volcanoes even spew ice. Read all about it in this mind-expanding book."
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist American Museum of Natural History

"[Starkey] masterfully weaves the latest information we have about volcanoes throughout the Solar System into a broader narrative about planets and moons themselves. The result is a book about volcanoes – and so much more [...] entertaining and informative."
– Nature

"A FANTASTIC exploration of the hidden workings of the planets, and a timely reminder of what a fascinating and dramatic place our solar system is."
– Dallas Campbell, Science television presenter and author

"Fire & Ice explores a unique blend of space volcanoes – from the inner workings to the outer landscapes. Natalie journeys into the weird nature of volcanism and dives into current outstanding questions that we are still exploring."
– Dr Caitlin Ahrens, NASA / USRA

"Natalie Starkey leads us on an incredible journey across our Solar System, revealing a wonderful variety of volcanic geology. A fascinating look at volcanoes and the space science that enables us to study them."
– Rebecca Williams, Volcanologist

"Starkey takes readers on NASA's expeditions, onto islands, and between tectonic plates undersea with vivid, immersive descriptions. The result is a thoroughly accessible look at a lesser-known part of the universe."
Publisher's Weekly

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