Prof Bob White, Fellow, Member of the Faraday Institute, and his seismology group had one of the exhibits at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. The occasion showcases some of the best of British scientific research and Bob White’s group contribution revolved around the 2014 Holuhraun eruption in Iceland that they are studying.

For a week in early July the halls of The Royal Society in London resounded to the thuds of 2,000 people as they jumped as high and as hard as possible. Amongst them were children, their parents, Professors, Fellows of the Royal Society and at least one Ambassador. They were trying to get to the top of the Royal Society’s ‘Make a Quake’ leader board. The average jump was equivalent to a magnitude -0.3 earthquake. That’s 100 million million times less energy than the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan that generated a Tsunami that flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The week in London was the culmination of 5 months of preparation by a group of 27 folk who helped to build and man the exhibit in rotation. Some 15,000 people passed through the exhibition. Even more popular than ‘make a quake’ was an arcade-style reaction-time game showing how earthquakes are located: by pressing buttons to record the time that waves from a randomly generated earthquake passed by each virtual seismometer, the location could be calculated and compared to the actual position using similar software to that used on real earthquakes.