A central question of communicating science to a wider audience often boils down to this: can you take a complex scientific topic and explain it in a way that someone unfamiliar with the field can understand?
The death toll from Sunday's magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the Van Province in eastern Turkey has now risen to over 500 people, and will undoubtedly continue to rise as rescuers continue to search the hundreds of buildings that collapsed during the shaking.
Around 3 P.M. local time on Friday, there was a massive earthquake about 100 miles off the east coast of northern Honshu Island, Japan. Initially calculated to be a magnitude 8.9, it has since been upgraded to at least a magnitude 9.0, which means that this earthquake released around 8,000 times more energy than the magnitude 6.3 shock that rocked Christchurch last month.
