For years, when any part of the earth shook, the media called Jones, who holds a doctorate in geophysics. "Why talk to a seismologist after an earthquake anyway? "But I give it a name and I give it a number and I give it a fault and I make it understandable. There's that deep, desperate need" to quell our fear of randomness, she says, to find pattern and meaning in events — to find story. "It gives it a narrative," a fundamentally human way of understanding the world.

Source: Los Angeles Times April 11, 2018 16:41 UTC