UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 12 | Dec. 4, 2003

A Good Read

By Michelle Cook

With the holiday season approaching, those with young ones on their gift lists might want to consider a remarkable children’s book with an interesting UBC link.

Dancing Elephants and Floating Continents (Key Porter Books, 2003, $24.95) tells the story of how the earth was formed. Complete with continents that crash and crush, oceans that vanish and reappear and mountain ranges that rise and crumble, it’s an adventure story sure to thrill budding geologists that was written using data from the Lithoprobe project, Canada’s largest and longest-lived national earth sciences research project. Since 1984, more than 800 university, government and industry scientists have been studying and probing the earth’s crust to understand the geological evolution of Canada.

And the UBC link? Lithoprobe’s director is Prof. Ron Clowes, a geophysicist and professor in the Earth and Ocean Sciences Dept. who helped author John Wilson with the book’s content and illustrations.