WE are remarkably fortunate to live in the north western part of Europe, as it's millions of years since there was any significant sudden earthquake movement. Locally Giggleswick Scar and Malham Cove were caused by such ancient, violent upheavals on the Pennine Craven Fault system.

Apart from the occasional shaking of tea cups, and clocks stopping, we are now exempt from the worst horrors of our constantly changing planet, despite the attempts of some fracking companies to increase the risk by pumping waste water back into the ground.

Mind you it was all a bit different and more destructive in the past, with the Pennine mountain building period 300 million years ago raising limestone, formed in the sea, to the heights of the Peak District and Malham Cove.

Another impressive example is the triangular shape of the north of Scotland, where the North West Highlands slid 65 miles north east past the Grampians along the Great Glen fault line that runs from Fort William to Inverness, and all that happened even further back in time.

However this constant change is still happening globally wherever the crustal plates that carry the land masses collide or dip under each other and ruffle up the land into mountains, causing earthquakes and volcanoes in the process.

Africa has been moving north for millions of years, at about one inch a year, so the Mediterranean will eventually disappear, as the Alps continue to rise, and volcanoes such as Vesuvius and Stromboli let off steam and much else.

India's doing the same, but faster, at two inches a year, hence the higher Himalayas and the recent devastating Nepal earthquake, measured at nearly eight on the Richter scale.

That's big as it's a logarithmic scale, so that an eight is ten times as severe as a seven, a hundred times as strong as a six, and a thousand times more violent than a five. The Indian Ocean earthquake that caused the Indonesian tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, was over nine, but in the UK we just get tiddlers, mainly around three or less.

We can't do much about any of them though, so should just realise that we are often too precious about where we live, and who owns what, as we are irrelevant in the greater scheme, just a temporary passing specie. However it might help if we didn't make matters worse.

There's some evidence that by causing climate change to melt the Antarctic Peninsula ice, we are adding to the volume of local sea water, at a tonne per cubic metre, so destabilising southern Chile and causing more earthquakes and severe volcanic activity.

Currently the Calbucco volcano is spewing ash all over the region.