Tag: Wendell Duffield
A Must-Have Book for Lava Loving Kids: What’s So Hot About Volcanoes?
Having enjoyed Wendell A. Duffield’s Chasing Lava immensely, I was beyond delighted to discover that Wendell had written a book for younger people. I couldn’t order it fast enough.
What’s So Hot About Volcanoes is a fantastic choice for anyone looking for a book about volcanoes for older kids and tweens, or even adults who want an authoritative but not too technical introduction to how volcanoes work. Younger readers should be able to handle it, too, with assistance from older kids and adults. And it’s got a hook absolutely no one can resist: what happened to Wendell when he was standing on a fresh Kilauea lava field and the seismologist at Hawaiian Volcano Observatory told him the pattern of seismicity right underneath him suggested he should probably run away immediately!
Chasing Lava: A Fun and Fascinating Memoir of Hawaiian Volcanology
If you’re looking for a light, breezy, but informative book about volcanoes from a genuine volcanologist, I’ve got it right here for you. Chasing Lava: A Geologist’s Adventures at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory by Wendell Duffield is a delightful memoir of his years working at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. There’s a wonderful sense of adventure infusing the whole book, and he gets us up close and personal with Madame Pele’s handiwork.
Newly-hatched USGS geologist Wendell, his wife Anne, and their pets were stationed on the Big Island from 1969-1972. He worked on Kilauea Volcano at a time when the theory of plate tectonics was still brand new, our instruments were still bulky and somewhat primative, and volcanoes were much less understood than they are now.