By Domenica Di Piazza, Editorial Director, TFCB

My father is on an Atlantic cruise. He just landed at Ponta Delgada in the Azores and is scheduled to fly home on Sunday from Barcelona. But, there’s this Icelandic volcano that keeps erupting, and it’s unclear if his flight will be cancelled, like so many others have been. He’s upbeat about the whole thing, since Barcelona isn’t a bad city to be stranded in.

Lerner Publishing Group has done some great books about volcanoes, including Volcanoes (cover above) in the Lerner imprint series Disasters Up Close. In my TFCB imprint, we’ve done a couple of very informative titles about plate tectonics—the force that drives most volcanic eruptions–in our Great Ideas of Science series (right) and in our Science Concepts series (below).

The Icelandic volcano is caused by plates pulling apart along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This ridge separates the North and South American plates from the Eurasian and African plates. And as you can see from the map below (click on it to see the whole map), Iceland sits smack-dab on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it’s a very volcanically active spot. (On the map below, Iceland is the island covered in red spots–for volcanoes–just to the left of the pinkish Eurasian Plate label.)

Check in next week for more from TFCB—and to see if my father made it home!

(Map credit: CC/Wikimedia Commons)