Volcanoes and How They Form

Volcanoes and How They Form

Volcanoes and How They Form
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 3 to 4
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	4.66

Vocabulary

challenging words:

basalt, fiftieth, granite, molten, origin, tends, understand, core, underground, lower, layer, meets, pools, form, lava, eruption

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Volcanoes and How They Form
By Brenda B. Covert

¹     To understand how volcanoes form, you need to know about the layers within the Earth. The outer crust is made up of two layers. The upper layer is granite, which is light-colored rock with large crystals. The lower level is basalt. Earth's most common rock, it is a very hard, black rock. The Earth's crust is about 25 miles thick beneath the continents and 4 miles thick under the oceans.

²     Beneath the crust is the mantle. The deeper we go into the Earth, the hotter it gets. The mantle is where we find melted rock, called magma. No one has ever been there; they couldn't survive the heat!

³     Beneath the mantle is the Earth's core. Scientists believe that it is made up of iron, some molten (melted) and some solid. There is no way to know for sure. It would be even hotter than the magma in the mantle!

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