Question: It says on your profile that as well as causing chaos, earthquakes can create opportunities for people. how so?

Tim Craig answered on 13 Jun 2018:

Each individual earthquake doesn’t really create much in the way of opportunities, but accumulated earthquakes over time, as part of tectonic processes, help to shape our planet, opening oceans, forming mountain ranges, etc, and understanding these helps us explain our world.

Understanding seismic risk is also critical in some places for making the most of our world – planning for how to reduce the impact of earthquakes.

Lastly, a lot of resources that we depend upon (oil, metals, etc), are extracted from within the upper sections of the Earths crust, in regions where their distribution is controlled by the location of fault systems – breaks in the earth that produced earthquakes in the past. By understanding more about earthquakes now, we can understand more about how these fault move, evolved, and grew in the past, and that helps us work out where some of the resources we need are located in the ground.