A sudden release of energy and the snapping of the Earth’s crust can literally knock us off our feet. Earthquakes can also be responsible for landslides, tsunamis and sometimes volcanic activity. Thankfully, for most of us, quakes are likely to be the stuff of disaster movies, but around the world their effects can have devastating results.

EwF scientist John Elliott discusses recent earthquakes with a live audience at the Natural History Museum in London. He talks through his work as a scientist who uses satellites to study the very contortions of the Earth that occur in these events, exploring the cause, effect and difficulty in predicting future episodes. The Natural History Museum has regular talks from scientists to museum goers as part of their Nature Live series (of which this video was one, recorded in March 2014): http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/nature-live/index.html.

Video copyright: Natural History Museum.