In terms of their impact on humans, earthquakes are rightly considered to be threatening and destructive events. In principle, however, something useful could come out of the Earth’s shaking – the generation of electricity using a magnet inside a coil. As the coil flexes with the shaking of tectonic plates, it is subjected to a changing magnetic field, which generates a current in the coil.

In this video, Elliott Spender, a research assistant at the University of Leicester, calculates how much energy could have been generated in this way during the Kobe earthquake of 1995, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale (or 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale). He then speculates how this energy could be put to use in a city such as San Francisco.

This is one of a collection of videos based on student projects from the University of Leicester’s “Physics Special Topics” course, in which students use their physics knowledge to define and answer a quirky or unusual research question. The videos are part of our 100 Second Science series.