Natural Disaster Trivia
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164 free Natural Disaster trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free natural disaster trivia questions with answers. From Pompeii to Fukushima, natural disasters have redrawn maps, toppled governments and given us the vocabulary of catastrophe. This quiz covers the record-setters: the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, the loudest sound in history, the deadliest tornado, the deadliest tropical cyclone, the deadliest US natural disaster and the eruption that caused the Year Without a Summer. It also covers the science, from the Richter and moment magnitude scales to Saffir-Simpson and Enhanced Fujita. The easy questions ask which city Katrina flooded and which volcano buried Pompeii. The hard ones want the town wiped out by Mount Pelée with three survivors, the length of the Tri-State tornado's track, the private club whose dam caused the Johnstown Flood and how far away Krakatoa was heard. Written for science classes, pub quizzes and disaster-documentary addicts. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the events and scales, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 164 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1755 Lisbon earthquake struck on the morning of which religious feast?
All Saints' Day
All Saints' Day had filled Lisbon's churches, which collapsed on worshippers at morning Mass; survivors who fled to the open docks were then caught by a tsunami.
Q 02Which 1759 satire sends its naive hero through the Lisbon earthquake?
Candide
Candide's tutor Pangloss insists all is for the best as Lisbon falls, and the Inquisition then hangs him at a ceremony staged to ward off further earthquakes.
Q 03Which fault ruptured in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake?
San Andreas
San Andreas ground shifts measured after 1906 led geologist Harry Reid to the elastic-rebound theory, still the main model of how faults store strain and then snap.
Q 04Which opera star sang Carmen in San Francisco hours before the 1906 earthquake?
Enrico Caruso
Enrico Caruso was shaken awake in his hotel, hired a man with a cart to reach the Oakland ferry, and left the ruined city by train.
Q 05Which country lost the most lives in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, about 170,000?
Indonesia
Indonesia's Aceh province lay closest to the rupture, so waves more than 20 metres high arrived about 20 minutes after the quake, too soon for most people to flee.
Q 06The 2004 Boxing Day disaster holds which grim record?
Deadliest tsunami in history
Deadliest tsunami in history, partly because the Indian Ocean had no warning system: the waves took hours to cross it, yet almost every victim was caught by surprise.
Q 07The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan triggered which nuclear disaster?
Fukushima Daiichi
Fukushima Daiichi survived the shaking, but the tsunami flooded its backup generators and cut the power for cooling, so three reactor cores melted within days.
Q 08Which country suffered the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, in 1960?
Chile
Chile's earthquake sent a tsunami across the whole Pacific that killed 61 people in Hawaii, some 10,000 km away.
Q 09Which Caribbean country was devastated by an earthquake near its capital in January 2010?
Haiti
Haiti lost even the headquarters of the United Nations mission sent to help it: the building collapsed, killing the mission's chief and his deputy.
Q 10Which US city was 80% flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005?
New Orleans
New Orleans flooded because the levees and floodwalls built to protect it gave way in several places; water was still seeping through one breach a month later.
Q 11Katrina peaked at Category 5 over the Gulf, then struck Louisiana in 2005 at which weaker strength?
Category 3
Category 3 by wind at landfall, yet the water Katrina drove ashore rose 25 to 28 feet along the Mississippi coast and pushed miles inland.
Q 12The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?
Galveston
Galveston answered by jacking up more than 2,000 buildings, a 3,000-ton church among them, and pumping in sand to lift the city as much as 17 feet behind a new seawall.
Q 13Which former Beatle organised a 1971 benefit concert after the Bhola cyclone?
George Harrison
George Harrison acted on a plea from his friend Ravi Shankar, filling Madison Square Garden twice in one day with guests including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton.
Q 21Which Caribbean town was wiped out by the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée?
Saint-Pierre
Saint-Pierre was a prosperous city that visitors likened to Paris; it never recovered, and Fort-de-France took its place as the island's commercial centre.
Q 22Mount St. Helens' eruption of 18 May 1980 began with what, the largest in recorded history?
A landslide
A landslide carried off the volcano's bulging north flank, uncorking the pressurised magma inside so that the blast burst out sideways rather than straight up.
Q 23A volcano's mudflows buried the town of Armero in 1985 in which country?
Colombia
Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz produced only a small eruption, but its heat melted snow and ice on the summit, and the meltwater rushed down the river valleys as mudflows.
Q 14Cyclone Nargis killed at least 138,000 people in 2008 in which country?
Myanmar
Myanmar's military rulers at first resisted large-scale foreign help and barred aid workers from the flooded delta, which slowed relief to the survivors.
Q 15Typhoon Haiyan devastated which country in November 2013?
The Philippines
The Philippines' chief delegate to UN climate talks that opened days later began a fast in solidarity with the survivors, and delegates from other countries joined him.
Q 16The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa produced what record?
The loudest known sound in history
The loudest known sound in history crossed the Indian Ocean: people more than 4,500 km away, near Mauritius, took it for the gunfire of a distant ship.
Q 17Dust from Krakatoa's 1883 eruption gave the whole world months of unusually vivid what?
Sunsets
Sunsets glowed blood-red around the world for months; an astronomer has proposed that one over Norway is the sky in Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Q 18Which 1815 eruption is considered the most powerful in recorded history?
Mount Tambora
Mount Tambora blew away about a third of its height, and the haze it threw into the upper air dimmed the sun enough to cool the whole planet.
Q 19Which novel was begun during 1816's rainy 'Year Without a Summer'?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein began when cold rain kept Mary Shelley and her friends indoors at Lord Byron's villa and Byron challenged each of them to write a ghost story.
Q 20Whose two letters give the detailed eyewitness account of the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius?
Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Younger was invited to sail toward the eruption but chose to stay with his studies; his uncle, Pliny the Elder, went with the rescue ships and died on the shore.
Q 24Which great river burst its dikes at Wuhan in China's 1931 floods, among the deadliest disasters ever recorded?
Yangtze
Yangtze floodwater left refugees crowded onto scraps of dry ground with no sanitation, and the diseases that swept through them proved by far the flood's deadliest effect.
Q 25The Johnstown Flood of 1889 was caused by the failure of a dam owned by what?
A private sporting club
A private sporting club of wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists had fitted screens across the dam's spillway to keep its stocked fish in; as the lake rose, workers tried to pull them free.
Q 26The North Sea flood of 1953 killed more than 300 people along the coast of which country?
England
England lost 307 people along its east coast in a single night, and the inquiry that followed recommended the movable flood barrier that now protects London.
Q 27The 1925 Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest in US history, killed most of its 695 victims in which state?
Illinois
Illinois lost more than 500 people, 234 of them in Murphysboro, because the tornado crossed the state at over 60 mph, about twice a typical twister's pace.
Q 28Legend says the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began when which animal kicked over a lantern?
A cow
A cow in Catherine O'Leary's barn took the blame for more than a century, until the city council formally cleared her and the animal in 1997.
Q 29The name 'Dust Bowl' first appeared in news reports the day after which huge dust storm of April 1935?
Black Sunday
Black Sunday overtook an Associated Press reporter on the road; his story the next day spoke of the 'dust bowl', and the name stuck to the whole region.
Q 30Which nickname was given to Dust Bowl migrants heading to California?
Okies
Okies was pinned on any poor migrant from the Southwest, Oklahoman or not: families from Arkansas and Missouri got the label too.