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203 free Earthquakes trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
12 free Earthquakes trivia questions with answers. Earthquakes are one of Earth's most powerful natural phenomena, shaping our planet's geology and affecting millions of people worldwide. Test your understanding of seismic activity, plate tectonics, and earthquake science with this engaging 203-question trivia quiz. See how well you know the forces beneath our feet!
30 of 203 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scale, introduced in 1979, became the standard measure of total earthquake energy?
Moment magnitude
The moment magnitude scale, introduced in 1979, is computed from the seismic moment of the rupture and does not saturate for the largest quakes, which is why it replaced the older amplitude-based scales for reporting great earthquakes.
Q 02What is the geological term for the point within the Earth where an earthquake rupture first occurs?
Hypocenter
The hypocenter, also called the focus, is the point where the rupture starts; plotting many hypocentres maps a fault plane in three dimensions.
Q 03Which type of plate boundary is most commonly associated with the deepest and most powerful earthquakes?
Convergent
Convergent boundaries, where one plate subducts beneath another, host the deepest and largest earthquakes; their hypocentres trace a sloping plane that reaches hundreds of kilometres down.
Q 04Which seismic wave travels fastest and reaches a recording station first?
P-waves
The P can stand for 'primary' or 'pressure', since the wave is a train of alternating compressions and rarefactions; the slower S-wave is usually the more destructive.
Q 05Which earthquake hazard turns saturated, loose soil into a slurry that cannot bear weight?
Liquefaction
Liquefaction happens when shaking raises pore-water pressure in saturated loose sand until it flows; it tilted apartment blocks in Niigata, Japan, in 1964 and wrecked suburbs of Christchurch in 2011.
Q 06Roughly what share of the world's earthquakes, including most of the largest, occur along the Pacific Ring of Fire?
90%
90% of quakes sit in the belt also called the Girdle of Fire, and plate tectonics has explained its layout since the early 1960s.
Q 07Which instrument records ground motion during an earthquake, classically a weight on a spring with a pen tracing a rotating drum?
Seismograph
The seismograph's trace is a seismogram, once inked onto paper by a pen on the swinging weight and now recorded digitally.
Q 08Which seismologist, working with Beno Gutenberg on a Southern California network, gave his name to the magnitude scale in his 1935 paper?
Charles Richter
Charles Richter had been hired to measure seismograms from instruments strung across Southern California, and called his creation simply a magnitude scale.
Q 09Which country was devastated by the largest earthquake ever recorded, on 22 May 1960?
Chile
Chile's 1960 Valdivia earthquake, magnitude 9.5, is the largest ever instrumentally recorded; its tsunami crossed the Pacific and killed people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.
Q 10What property of secondary seismic waves stops them passing through liquid?
They are transverse, restored by shear stress
Particles move at right angles to the direction of travel, and liquids and gases cannot sustain the shear stress that restores them.
Q 11The San Andreas Fault runs along the boundary between the North American plate and which other?
Pacific
The San Andreas separates the Pacific plate from the North American plate; it is a right-lateral strike-slip transform fault whose two sides grind past each other horizontally rather than one diving beneath the other.
Q 12What does the Japanese word tsunami literally mean?
Harbour wave
Tsunami means 'harbour wave', from tsu (harbour) and nami (wave): fishermen at sea felt nothing pass beneath them and came home to find their harbours wrecked.
Q 13What is the term for the point on the ground surface directly above where an earthquake begins?
Epicenter
Q 21Intensity scales such as the Modified Mercalli rate an earthquake by what?
Observed effects at a given place
Intensity scales like the Modified Mercalli rate observed effects at a given place, from I (not felt) to XII (total destruction), so one quake has many intensities but a single magnitude.
Q 22The law stating that aftershock frequency falls off with the reciprocal of time is named after which seismologist?
Fusakichi Omori
Fusakichi Omori published the law in 1894 from his aftershock studies in Japan; Tokuji Utsu's 1961 modification, which adds an exponent p, is the version used today.
Q 23Roughly how long is the Ring of Fire tectonic belt that surrounds most of the Pacific Ocean?
News reports usually give this surface point, while the actual rupture starts kilometres below it.
Q 14If an aftershock is larger than the main shock, what is the original quake redesignated as?
A foreshock
The earlier quake becomes a foreshock: seismologists promote the larger later event to mainshock, as happened with the magnitude 7.3 shock two days before Japan's 2011 Tohoku earthquake.
Q 15In Japanese mythology, earthquakes are caused by Namazu, a giant example of which animal?
Catfish
Namazu is a giant catfish said to lie beneath Japan, pinned down by the god Kashima with a stone; when Kashima's guard slips, the catfish thrashes and the earth shakes.
Q 16In Greek mythology, which god was held responsible for causing earthquakes?
Poseidon
Poseidon, god of the sea, was also the earth-shaker; Homer calls him Ennosigaios, and Greeks pictured his trident striking the ground to cause earthquakes.
Q 17On the Richter scale, each whole-number step corresponds to roughly how much more energy released?
About 31.6 times
Each whole magnitude step means about 31.6 times (10 to the power 1.5) more energy, so a magnitude 7 releases roughly 1,000 times the energy of a magnitude 5.
Q 18The AD 132 seismoscope dropped bronze balls from dragons' mouths into the mouths of which creatures?
Toads
Zhang Heng's device supposedly indicated the direction of a distant quake by which of eight dragons released its ball.
Q 19Which Han dynasty scholar is credited with inventing the first seismoscope?
Zhang Heng
Zhang Heng built his bronze seismoscope in AD 132; he was also an astronomer and mathematician who catalogued around 2,500 stars.
Q 20In December 2018, which mission became the first to place a seismometer on the surface of another planet?
InSight
InSight set its SEIS seismometer directly on the Martian ground on 19 December 2018, and the mission ended in December 2022 when dust smothered its solar panels.
About 40,000 km
The Ring of Fire is about 40,000 km long, a horseshoe of subduction zones running from New Zealand up through Japan and the Aleutians and down the Americas to southern Chile.
Q 24Thomas C. Hanks and which Caltech seismologist defined the moment magnitude scale in 1979?
Hiroo Kanamori
Hiroo Kanamori co-wrote the 1979 paper with Hanks; in 1977 he had already proposed an energy-based Mw for great earthquakes, which the 1979 scale generalised to all sizes.
Q 25The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck at what time of day?
Just after 5 a.m.
Fires that followed burned for days and caused most of the destruction, and the event remains the deadliest quake in US history.
Q 26What caused most of the destruction in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, levelling some 25,000 buildings within three days?
Gas-main fires
Gas-main fires did the damage: ruptured mains fed more than 30 blazes that destroyed roughly 25,000 buildings on 490 city blocks within three days.
Q 27The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake struck off the west coast of which Indonesian province?
Aceh
The epicentre lay off the west coast of Aceh, at Sumatra's northern tip; its capital Banda Aceh was the worst-hit city, and the tsunami killed about 228,000 people in 14 countries.
Q 28Roughly how long was the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake's fault rupture, the longest ever observed?
1,200 to 1,300 km
The 2004 rupture ran some 1,200 to 1,300 km along the Sunda subduction zone; the faulting lasted between eight and ten minutes and set the whole planet vibrating by up to 10 mm.
Q 29Ten-year-old Tilly Smith recognised the 2004 tsunami's warning signs on a Thai beach thanks to what?
A geography lesson at school
She noticed the receding sea and frothing water and warned people to leave the beach.
Q 30How long did the shaking of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake last?
10 minutes
The Valdivia shaking lasted about 10 minutes; the magnitude 9.5 rupture ran some 1,000 km along the Chilean coast, and its tsunami reached Japan, 17,000 km away, killing more than 100 people there.