Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Fascinating wonders Chapter 2 Let's learn more: mountains are amazing Chapter 3 Fun mountain facts Conclusion Learning is an adventure Author Bio Introduction "Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing." Barry Finlay *** Mountains make the world more beautiful and a very interesting place to live. Some mountains are big and others are small. Did you know planet earth is full of mountains? Many animals live on mountains and many people love to hike them just for fun or adventure. How about you? How do you feel about mountains? If someone asked you what is a mountain... what would you say? The dictionary defines a mountain as "a large natural elevation of the earth's surface rising abruptly from the surrounding level; a large steep hill." Does that sound too complicated? Let's try another way. Let say...a mountain comes up from the ground and is higher than everything else around it. They are not hills because they are bigger than hills. And mountains don't like to be alone. They like to be with other mountains! How can we tell a mountain and hill apart? The difference is the height. A mountain has to rise more than 1,000 feet above the things around it to be called a mountain. Mountains come from different places and one of them is tectonic plates. In our book Beautiful Volcanoes, we talked about these plates. "If you dig all the way inside the earth, you will find something that looks like a giant puzzle with lots of different parts. The parts we want to discover are called: "tectonic plates." There are eight important plates on the planet and there are some smaller ones too. These big plates move around all the time and soon pressure starts to build. Geography4kids.com says to think of the plates like the skin of planet earth." But how does it work? Easy science for kids says to think of it like this: When two cars run into each other head on, what happens? Did you think of how much the car crumples up in the front? This what scientist says happens to the mountain and that's why they looked so crumpled up! Scientists also say some mountains are born because of volcanic eruptions. When rocks melt inside the earth, it pushes up to the surface and turns into lava. Then the lava and the hot dust from the volcano cooled down and soon mountains start to grow. This takes a very long time. How long? Millions of years long! What else can we learn? Mountains are everywhere on planet earth and even in the ocean. Did you know some of the highest mountains are at the bottom of the sea? Some islands are even at the tops of mountains! Do you think it might be hard to climb a mountain in the ocean? I think it might be very hard! Mountains come in different types like: -Volcanic -Fold -Fault-block -Dome -Plateau Do you know what these words mean? Not to worry! We will talk about them in Chapter 1 of this book. Remember: Mountains are very special places and we learn lots of amazing things about them. They are also beautiful to watch and fun to explore. Please join me to on this quest to discover more on the wonderful world of ... Beautiful Mountains!