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The map above shows the past century of known earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 5. (There are actually nearly a million earthquakes per year, but most of them are not felt. A earthquake of magnitude 5 might cause damage to buildings.) Each white dot is a quake, of which there were about 72,000, and as you'd expect, you get a sense of plates tectonic boundaries.

An interactive map that shows the location of all the earthquakes that have happened in the last day. From the USGS survey.

The distance from the surface of the Earth to its center is 3,959 miles. The thickness of the ocean lithosphere or the relatively solid skin of the earth under oceans is only 41 miles, which in relative terms is much thinner than the skin of an apple.

Interesting video on earthquake locations around the world and connections to fracking.

When a 7.1 earthquake explodes with the force of 2,000 kilotons of TNT across San Francisco, citizens become heroes to save lives.

Have you ever found yourself in the path of molten lava? Has the volcano you're climbing suddenly erupted and you don't know what to do? Well keep watching because Huw James has all you need to know.

The earth is built on tectonic plates that move around on the mantle. Sometimes these plates move around and come together to form mountain chains like the Himalayas, some rub together and set off earthquakes, and some like Mount Etna, interact and one plate goes underneath the other.

We have known for some time that Bárðarbunga was going to do something-we just didn't know what. Because it is covered in ice, we rely on instruments to reveal its behavior.

Now that it has stirred, it is giving us clues about what it is about to do. The clues from the patterns of earthquakes and earth movements reveal two clusters where magma is moving toward the surface, and if it gets there, it will erupt. But whether this will be a gentle or a violent eruption is uncertain at the time of writing.

There is no way to predict when the eruption may happen, but we should get a few hours' notice. The good news for air travel is that both clusters are away from the heart of the main volcano, which makes it less likely that an eruption will produce the fine ash that causes disruption.

ere's a crack in California. It stretches for 800 miles, from the Salton Sea in the south, to Cape Mendocino in the north. It runs through vineyards and subway stations, power lines and water mains. Millions live and work alongside the crack, many passing over it (966 roads cross the line) every day. For most, it warrants hardly a thought. Yet in an instant, that crack, the San Andreas fault, could ruin lives and cripple the national economy.