Buried Sunlight: How Fossil Fuels Have Changed the Earth

Great resource for introducing fossil fuels

I loved this book as a read aloud for my classroom!

Awesome! My son, who will turn 5 in two months, now comments as soon as he notices a down or a cut tree or fumes coming out of a car. He understands how we should be careful to help keep the balance.

This is a very well written and engaging resource for elementary students and teachers.

Delightful and educational series for adults for young citizen scientists. Please check out Penny and Molly's other titles as well!

Spot on!! It will nicely compliment my Ecosystem unit!

I'm a huge fan of this series, and this book in particular.Instead of reviewing the entire book, I'm going to talk about one page, because I think it exemplifies what makes the entire Sunlight series so groundbreaking.There's a two page spread that shows atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last 400,000 years. Under the line graph are the little CO2 molecules that will be so familiar to any reader of the Sunlight books. What's significant though is that under the parts of the graph where CO2 concentrations were relatively low, there's correspondingly less CO2 molecules than under the regions of high concentration, and the higher the concentration the more densely the CO2 molecules are packed. In addition, there's a little landscape scene running along the bottom of the page. The landscape displays known ice ages and inter-glacial periods so you can really clearly see how ice ages correspond to period of low CO2 concentration.This is amazing in a few ways. The density of the CO2 molecules, subtly supports the information in the graph, while the illustrations of the climate at the time make it easy to connect ice ages to atmospheric CO2 levels. This data visualization helps teach non-technical readers - especially children - to interpret data.This kind of attention to detail, depth and clarity and thoughtfulness is on literally every page of this book. It's a frankly astounding work that can be understood on one level by young children while still offering insights to older kids and adults.

This book is an informative, engaging picture book on fossil fuels and climate change. It is a valuable addition to classroom and library collections.