But earthquakes, which happen 1,500 times a year in a country that sits on huge continental plates, can be catastrophic.

Enthusiasts can explore directly in the crack between two continental plates, which are drifting apart at a rate of about 2cm a year.

Near some boundaries between the land and sea, the slightly denser oceanic plates slide beneath the continental plates and more subduction trenches are formed.

As the continental plates moved apart, they ruptured, and blocks subsided along fault lines forming the rift valleys that became sedimentary basins.

Continental plates have periodically collided and assembled in geologic periods of orogenesis (mountain building) to form supercontinents.