Volcanoes, Earthquakes & Tectonics Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the point underground where an earthquake actually begins, the spot on a fault at which the rock first ruptures and the seismic waves radiate outward from?

Question 2

What is the name for the kind of fault produced where the crust is being squeezed together, so that the block of rock above the sloping fracture is pushed up and over the block below it, shortening and thickening the crust?

Question 3

What is the name for the smaller earthquakes that follow a large one, sometimes for months or years, as the crust around the ruptured fault adjusts to its new stresses?

Question 4

What is the name for the fastest type of seismic wave, the first to arrive after an earthquake, which travels by squeezing and stretching the rock in the same direction it is moving, and can pass through solids and liquids alike?

Question 5

Which American geologist and cartographer spent the 1950s and 60s hand-drawing the first detailed maps of the world's ocean floors from sounding data, revealing a continuous mid-ocean mountain range with a deep rift valley running along its crest?

Question 6

What is the name for the sharp 60-degree kink, about 47 million years old, in the long chain of volcanoes and drowned seamounts running north-west from Hawaii across the Pacific floor?

Question 7

Which series of powerful earthquakes struck the central United States, far from any plate edge, over the winter of 1811 to 1812, ringing church bells in Boston, toppling chimneys in Cincinnati, and briefly making the Mississippi River appear to flow backwards?

Question 8

What is the name for the process in which violently shaken, water-saturated sandy soil temporarily loses its strength and behaves like a liquid, so that buildings tilt or sink, buried tanks float up, and jets of watery sand erupt at the surface?

Question 9

Which 6,000-kilometre system of valleys, faults and volcanoes, running from the Afar region south through Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, is a continent in the early stages of splitting into two, a process that may open a new ocean in tens of millions of years?

Question 10

What is the name for the long, narrow, steep-sided depression in the seafloor, the deepest feature on the planet, that forms where one plate bends downward to slide beneath another?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.