Volcanoes, Earthquakes & Tectonics Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the informal name for a volcano capable of an eruption rated 8, the top of the explosivity scale, throwing out more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of material and typically leaving a broad collapse basin rather than a peak?

Question 2

What is the name for the second seismic wave to arrive, slower than the first, which shakes the rock from side to side at right angles to its direction of travel and, crucially, cannot pass through liquid?

Question 3

What is the name, from the Japanese for 'harbour wave', for a series of very long ocean waves set off when an undersea earthquake, landslide or eruption suddenly shifts a large volume of water, which cross the open ocean almost unnoticed at jet speed and rear up only on reaching shallow water?

Question 4

Which magnitude 9.1 earthquake off north-east Japan produced a tsunami up to about 40 metres high that overtopped sea walls, killed nearly 20,000 people, and knocked out the cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, causing a triple meltdown?

Question 5

What is the name for the fast, ground-hugging avalanche of scorching gas, ash and rock fragments that rushes down a volcano's flanks at up to several hundred kilometres per hour and hundreds of degrees Celsius, incinerating and burying everything in its path?

Question 6

What is the name for the scale that rates an earthquake not by the energy it releases but by how strongly the shaking was felt and how much damage it did at a particular place, running in Roman numerals from I, barely detectable, to XII, total destruction?

Question 7

Which catastrophe struck on the morning of All Saints' Day, when a massive offshore quake, followed by a tsunami and days of fire, destroyed one of Europe's great capital cities and killed tens of thousands as they attended Mass?

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About Volcanoes, Earthquakes & Tectonics

The ground feels solid, but its outer shell is cracked into a dozen slabs that drift a few centimetres a year, and almost every earthquake, volcano and mountain range on Earth is a by-product of their slow collisions. This quiz tells that story in eighty questions. Each one describes a concept, a feature, an instrument, a famous disaster or one of the scientists who worked it out, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains what it is, how it works, and the history or the surprise attached to it. No formulae and no map-reading are needed: every answer is a single name, and the descriptions are written to stand on their own.

The first pack builds the framework of plate tectonics: continental drift and the ridicule it met; Pangaea; the plates themselves and the rigid and soft layers they ride on; the crust, mantle and core; the boundary called the Moho; seafloor spreading and the magnetic stripes that proved it; subduction, mid-ocean ridges and ocean trenches; the Ring of Fire; hotspots; and the mantle convection that helps drive the whole system. It also clears up common muddles: that the plates are not the same as the continents, that magma and lava are one melt with two names, and that 'continental drift' was the discredited early guess while 'plate tectonics' is the working theory that replaced it.

The second pack goes into volcanoes and earthquakes in detail. On volcanoes: the shield, composite and cinder-cone shapes and the caldera collapse; the lava types pahoehoe and aa and the tubes they build; the hazards, pyroclastic flows, lahars, tephra and eruption columns; the explosivity index; fumaroles and geysers; why silica and gas content decide whether a volcano oozes or explodes; flood basalts and supervolcanoes; and the eruptions of Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Mount St Helens. On earthquakes: the focus and epicentre; normal, reverse and strike-slip faults; the San Andreas and elastic rebound; the P, S and surface waves; the seismometer; the Richter, moment magnitude and Mercalli scales; liquefaction, tsunamis and aftershocks; and mountain building, rift valleys and island arcs.

The third pack is history and people: Wegener, Tuzo Wilson, Inge Lehmann and Marie Tharp; the Lisbon, San Francisco, Valdivia, Indian Ocean, Tohoku and New Madrid earthquakes; the Tambora and Pelee eruptions; the Siberian Traps and the Great Dying; and the tectonic settings of Yellowstone, the Hawaiian-Emperor bend, the East African Rift and the Himalayas. Photographs are used only where they do not simply reveal the answer, so a lava flow, a seismogram or an offset fence may appear, but a portrait or a recognisable peak will not. Every figure has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.