THE ISLAND THAT MOVED

Despite some evident seams, this case study in plate tectonics is valuable for its unusual approach. Hooper traces the origin and history of an imaginary Antarctic island. First, its molten material wells up on a primeval ocean floor. Fast forward to 200 million years ago, and it’s a shoreline where dinosaurs roam amid lush greenery—then so on, in stages, as it slowly pulls away from the mainland supercontinent, and today, still moving “at the speed a fingernail grows,” makes a ruggedly rocky home for mosses, lichens, insects, birds, and penguins. The author describes that supercontinent’s breakup, but deLeiris’s matching map doesn’t show up until much later on—after island scenes abruptly give way to spreads on fault lines, earthquakes, and continental drift in general. A good supplementary purchase, but with staid-looking art and haphazard organization, it’s not going to drift past Helen Roney Sattler’s Our Patchwork Planet (1995). (Nonfiction. 8-10)