Volcanoes
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143 free Volcanoes trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
93 free volcanoes trivia questions with answers. From the devastating eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii to the simmering supervolcano beneath Yellowstone, volcanoes have shaped our planet's landscape, climate, and history. This quiz covers 143 questions spanning famous eruptions, volcano types, the Ring of Fire, volcanic hazards, submarine volcanoes, and the geology of how these fiery mountains form and erupt.
30 of 143 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which volcano, one of the most active in the world, towers over the Sicilian city of Catania?
Mount Etna
Mount Etna erupts so often that its height keeps changing; in 1669 its lava destroyed a string of villages and flowed on to Catania itself.
Q 02Which Roman city was buried by a volcanic eruption in 79 AD and unearthed by digs that began in the 18th century?
Pompeii
Pompeii lay under up to six metres of ash and debris; the excavations that began there in the mid-1700s are often counted as the birth of modern archaeology.
Q 03The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped zone of volcanic and seismic activity surrounding which ocean?
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean's rim is where ocean plates dive beneath their neighbours, which lines it with volcanoes and produces about 90% of the world's earthquakes.
Q 04Which volcano towers over the Bay of Naples?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius last erupted in March 1944, during the Second World War; with millions of people living around it, it is ranked among the world's most dangerous volcanoes.
Q 05Which Hawaiian volcano is the largest active volcano on Earth by volume?
Mauna Loa
Mauna Loa covers half of the island of Hawaii and is so massive that it has pressed the sea floor beneath it down by about 8 km.
Q 06Which type of volcano has broad, gently sloping sides built up by runny lava flows, like the Hawaiian volcanoes?
Shield volcano
Shield volcanoes look like a warrior's shield laid on the ground; they are built from fluid basalt that runs far before it cools, which is why the Hawaiian ones are so wide.
Q 07Mount St. Helens blew its top on May 18, 1980, killing 57 people, in which US state?
Washington
Washington's Mount St. Helens lost about 1,300 feet of summit when its bulging north face slid away in the largest landslide in recorded history, uncorking the blast.
Q 08Which 0-to-8 scale rates the size of eruptions much as the Richter scale rates quakes?
Volcanic Explosivity Index
The Volcanic Explosivity Index is logarithmic: each step up marks roughly ten times more erupted material, so a VEI 6 such as Krakatoa in 1883 dwarfs a VEI 5 such as Mount St. Helens.
Q 09Which volcanic rock is so full of gas bubbles that it floats, sometimes forming rafts miles wide at sea?
Pumice
Pumice is frothy lava that froze mid-foam; it is ground into abrasives, and tumbling denim with lumps of it is what gives stonewashed jeans their faded look.
Q 10Measured from its base on the sea floor, which Hawaiian volcano is often called the tallest mountain on Earth?
Mauna Kea
Mauna Kea stands about 4,200 metres above the sea but more than 9,000 metres above its base on the ocean floor, so over half of the mountain is hidden under water.
Q 11Which snow-capped volcano is traditionally named as the resting place of Noah's Ark?
Mount Ararat
Mount Ararat, the highest peak in Turkey, has carried the story since the Middle Ages; Genesis says only that the Ark came to rest on 'the mountains of Ararat', the name of an ancient kingdom.
Q 12What is a fast-moving cloud of hot gas, ash and rock that races down a volcano's flank called?
Pyroclastic flow
A pyroclastic flow hugs the ground like an avalanche; it usually tops 80 km/h at 200 to 700°C, so nobody outruns one and almost nothing in its path survives.
Q 13Iceland sits astride a mid-ocean ridge where which two tectonic plates are pulling apart?
North American and Eurasian
Q 21Crater Lake in Oregon was formed by the collapse of which ancient volcano approximately 7,700 years ago?
Mount Mazama
Mount Mazama's summit collapsed inward after a huge eruption; over the next few centuries rain and snow filled the basin to make the deepest lake in the United States.
Q 22What type of lava has a smooth, ropy surface and is named with a Hawaiian word?
Pahoehoe
Pahoehoe gets its ropes when liquid lava moving beneath a thin, still-soft crust drags and wrinkles the skin into folds; rough, jagged lava goes by another Hawaiian word, a'a.
Q 23By roughly how much did the 1991 Philippine eruption's sulfuric haze lower worldwide temperatures?
0.5°C
It was the second-largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century. In the months that followed, aerosols formed a global haze layer and worldwide temperatures fell by about 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) across 1991 to 1993.
North American and Eurasian plates are slowly splitting Iceland in two; in the Silfra rift at Thingvellir, divers can swim through the water-filled gap between them.
Q 14What steep-sided volcano type, layered from lava and ash, is also called a stratovolcano?
Composite volcano
Composite volcanoes grow steep because their lava cools and hardens before it can travel far from the vent; Mount Fuji and Mount St. Helens are both this type.
Q 15What is a lahar?
A volcanic mudflow
A volcanic mudflow, or lahar, moves like wet concrete down river valleys, so it can bury towns many miles from the summit, sometimes years after an eruption when heavy rain loosens old ash.
Q 16Which tectonic process creates volcanoes when one plate slides beneath another?
Subduction
Subduction occurs when one tectonic plate is forced beneath another. As the descending plate sinks into the mantle, it releases water that lowers the melting point of the overlying rock, creating magma that rises to form volcanoes.
Q 17What is the name for a volcano that has not erupted in a long time but is expected to erupt again?
Dormant
Dormant volcanoes can sleep for a very long time: some go quiet for thousands of years and then reawaken, as Mount St. Helens did in 1980 after more than a century of silence.
Q 18Mount Fuji last erupted in 1707, showering ash on which city about 100 km away?
Tokyo
Tokyo, then the shogun's capital Edo, was dusted with ash from an eruption that followed a huge earthquake by only weeks, with tremors building under the mountain in between.
Q 19Which 1815 Indonesian eruption, the most powerful on record, caused 1816's 'Year Without a Summer'?
Mount Tambora
Mount Tambora's 1815 blast, rated VEI 7, veiled the globe in sulfur haze; the next summer snow fell in New England in June and harvests failed across Europe.
Q 20What is the general term for all solid material ejected from a volcano during an eruption?
Tephra
Tephra from a single eruption settles over a huge area at once, so geologists and archaeologists use each ash layer as a time marker for whatever lies above and below it.
Q 24Which volcano is the most active in Antarctica?
Mount Erebus
Mount Erebus was named in 1841 by James Clark Ross after his ship HMS Erebus, which later vanished in the Arctic with Franklin's lost expedition.
Q 25Which volcanic Mediterranean island may have inspired the legend of Atlantis?
Santorini
Santorini's Bronze Age eruption buried the town of Akrotiri in ash, preserving frescoes and three-storey houses; no bodies have been found, a sign that its people fled in time.
Q 26Hawaii's islands formed in a row as the Pacific Plate drifted over what kind of stationary volcanic source?
Hotspot
Hotspot volcanoes fall silent as the plate carries them away, so the islands age in order: Kauai's oldest rocks are about 5.5 million years old, while the Big Island is still growing.
Q 27What type of small, steep-sided volcano is built from loose lava fragments that pile up around a single vent?
Cinder cone
Cinder cones form when gas-charged lava is blown into the air and shatters into fragments that fall back around the vent; most stand less than 300 metres high.
Q 28Which harmless gas is by far the most abundant in volcanic emissions?
Water vapor
Water vapor and the other gases stay dissolved in magma deep underground; as the magma rises they bubble out and expand, and that expansion is what drives explosive eruptions.
Q 29What is the name of the volcanic phenomenon where lightning occurs within an eruption column?
Dirty thunderstorm
A dirty thunderstorm (also called volcanic lightning) occurs when lightning is produced within a volcanic eruption plume. The phenomenon is caused by the collision of charged ash particles, rock fragments, and ice crystals within the turbulent eruption column.
Q 30Which Caribbean volcano destroyed Saint-Pierre in 1902, killing about 30,000 people in minutes?
Mount Pelée
Mount Pelée's cloud of superheated gas and ash left almost no one alive in Saint-Pierre; a prisoner, Ludger Sylbaris, survived in his thick-walled cell and later toured with Barnum & Bailey's circus.