Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

And so. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 125 earthquakes. I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to talk about, well, you guessed it, earthquakes. And this is a kind of a follow-up to the previous episode of volcanoes, although that's not a prerequisite, they're related but largely distinct phenomenon.

And in this episode we're going to look at, obviously, the causes of earthquakes and

sort of key ideas surrounding that and words to describe them. We're going to look at some of the

different types of earthquakes and how they differ in terms of cause and effects. We're going

to talk about seismic waves, how earthquakes are measured, and there's size magnitude as described, we're going to talk about

the different forms of damage that earthquakes cause, and a little bit at the end about

prediction of earthquakes. Recommended pre-listing is episode 111 on plate tectonics, and that's

a fairly strong recommendation because I will talk a bit about plate tectonics and And that's a fairly strong recommendation because I will talk a bit about

plate tectonics and use terminology now and then to explain faults and how earthquakes occur. So

some background there would be quite helpful. Right, let's jump in and start talking about

earthquakes. So, what is an earthquake? An earthquake is defined as the perceptible shaking of the surface of the

earth, which can be violent enough to destroy major buildings and potentially kill large numbers of

people. Now, note that that is defined as something that is perceptible, that is you can sort of

detect it using, you know, the senses you can tell that it shakes. Most earthquakes

are actually not perceptible. They are so small that we can only detect them using the most

sophisticated instruments. But obviously there's a much more of an interest in the perceptible,

so significant larger earthquakes. Also there can be a distinction apart from whether there has to be

perceptible or not in terms of whether an earthquake is defined as a seismic event, that is something that's caused by the operation of tectonic plates, or whether an earthquake is any type of shaking of the ground on a large scale, regardless of the cause.

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