The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System

The extreme events that we hear about daily€”hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions€”are extreme in purely human terms, in the devastation they do. But this book moves our understanding of the extreme into extraterrestrial dimensions and gives us an awe-inspiring sense of what our solar system at its utmost can do. Martian dust devils taller than Mount Everest. A hurricane that lasts over 340 years. Volcanoes with ";lava"; colder than Antarctica. Hail made of diamonds. Here, as the authors say, the ";WOW"; factor is restored to our understanding of scientific discovery, as we witness the grandeur and the weirdness that inspire researchers to dig deeper and go ever farther into the mysteries of the universe. The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System combines a fascination with natural disasters and the mesmerizing allure of outer space to take readers on a journey that will forever change the way they view our solar

David Baker is the Chairman of the Physics Department at Austin College.

Todd Ratcliff is a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.