Professor Bob White FRS, Fellow of St Edmund’s College and Director of The Faraday Institute, leads a research group which has had a paper published in the August edition of Nature Geoscience, one of the pre-eminent international science journals. This shows that earthquakes triggered by a dyke intrusion at an Icelandic volcano unambiguously demonstrates that stress changes can cause abundant seismicity many tens of kilometres away.

Closer to home, this research is relevant to fracking as it shows that very minor stress changes from injecting fluids, in this case molten rock, can cause abundant earthquakes at considerable distances. It is possible that fracking might well do something similar.

The cover image, taken by Bob White, shows the Holuhraun fissure eruption in Iceland on 2 September 2014, which was first seen by several of his PhD students in the field deploying seismic instruments close by.