January 17, 2024 marks 30 years since a magnitude 6.7 earthquake rocked Northridge, California. The quake, caused by a sudden rupture of a previously undocumented blind thrust fault, damaged the Santa Monica Freeway, started almost 500 fires, killed more than 60 people and destroyed 50,000 housing units. In an intervie

On February 6, at about 4am, the ground in southern Turkey and northern Syria shook for more than a minute, while most people slept. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake - with its epicentre 32km (20 miles) west of the Turkish city of Gaziantep - had struck the region, cracking the ground open and causing extensive damage. And n

When last week’s 5.1 magnitude earthquake hit near San Jose, more than two million people received an alert — up to 19 seconds before they felt shaking. But how do earthquake early warning systems work, exactly? And what should we do when we get an alert? From how to “drop, cover, and hold on” to how to evaluate your h

Dr. Lucy Jones is a seismologist, who has a talent for translating the scary uncertainties of earthquakes into a language the rest of us can relate to. She is now putting her communication skills to work not only to help communities prepare for the inevitability of future earthquakes in her home state of California, bu

In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara sits down with Dr. Lucy Jones, founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society and author of the new book, “The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)”. They just so happened to record on the morning of July 5, 2019, between the ma