Tsunami Trivia
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49 free Tsunami trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This tsunami trivia quiz covers the most powerful waves on Earth. The easy questions handle the basics: what the Japanese name means, what actually causes a tsunami, why 'tidal wave' is the wrong term, how fast one crosses the deep ocean, and which ocean sees most of them. The harder end goes into the science and the history: why a tsunami is barely a ripple at sea and a wall of water at the shore, the drawback that lures people onto the seabed, Thucydides working out the earthquake link in 426 BC, the 524-metre wave in Lituya Bay, the Vajont Dam disaster, meteotsunamis, the failed New Zealand experiments to weaponise them, the Boxing Day 2004 disaster and the 2011 Tohoku wave that overtopped Japan's sea walls, and the schoolgirl whose geography lesson saved dozens of lives. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our earthquakes, natural disasters, volcanoes and oceans quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the Japanese word 'tsunami' literally mean?
Harbour wave
Harbour wave joins tsu (harbour) and nami (wave). English adopted the word in 1896, after a tsunami devastated Japan's Sanriku coast.
Q 02What fundamentally causes a tsunami?
The displacement of a large volume of water
The displacement of a large volume of water is all it takes, so a landslide can raise a tsunami in a lake just as an undersea earthquake can in an ocean.
Q 03Which popular name for a tsunami do scientists avoid because the Moon and Sun play no part in causing one?
Tidal wave
Tidal wave suits the look of one, since a tsunami rushes ashore like a fast-rising tide and not a breaking wave, but real tides come from the pull of the Moon and Sun.
Q 04Which Athenian historian argued that earthquakes cause tsunamis?
Thucydides
Thucydides was describing 426 BC, when the same run of earthquakes that flooded Greek coastal towns also made a Peloponnesian army abandon its invasion of Attica.
Q 05In 479 BC, a tsunami drowned soldiers of which power as they besieged the Greek town of Potidaea?
Persia
Persia's soldiers set out across the seabed at an unusually low ebb, and Herodotus says the returning flood drowned those who could not swim.
Q 06An earthquake near Crete in 365 AD sent a tsunami that flung ships onto rooftops in which great port city?
Alexandria
Alexandria's stranded ships were recorded by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who also saw a vessel rotting nearly two miles inland in Greece.
Q 07Which Pacific island nation's undersea volcano exploded in January 2022, sending tsunami waves across the ocean?
Tonga
Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption wiped away the young island that had risen in 2015 and joined two older ones.
Q 08About four in five of the world's tsunamis strike around which zone?
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire volcanoes and faults rim the Pacific, where ocean plates dive beneath their neighbours. Those subduction zones produce the giant undersea earthquakes behind most tsunamis.
Q 09A tsunami crosses the deep ocean about as fast as which of these?
A jet airliner
A jet airliner cruises at roughly the same 800 km/h. Near land the wave slows to the speed of a car and grows in height instead.
Q 10Roughly how tall is a tsunami in the deep ocean?
About 1 metre
About 1 metre is as tall as a tsunami usually gets in the deep ocean, so ships cannot feel one pass beneath them. It rears up only when it reaches shallow water.
Q 11The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a print often taken to show a tsunami, is by which Japanese artist?
Hokusai
Hokusai more likely drew a storm wave than a tsunami: researchers who sized it against the boats it threatens put it at about 10 metres tall, breaking out in the bay.
Q 12Which process slows a tsunami and makes it taller near shore?
Wave shoaling
Wave shoaling, named for a shoal, a shallow stretch of water, compresses a tsunami as the shallows slow it down, so its waves bunch together and grow in height.
Q 13What do scientists call the vertical distance a tsunami climbs up the land above sea level?
Run-up
Run-up is read after the wave has gone, from the highest line of debris and stripped vegetation that the water left on the land.
Q 21The 2018 collapse of which volcano killed more than 400 people with a tsunami that arrived without warning?
Anak Krakatoa
Anak Krakatoa, 'child of Krakatoa', had grown in the crater left by the 1883 eruption. The 2018 landslide that raised the wave cut the island's height from 338 metres to about 110.
Q 22What is a tsunami called when it cannot be linked to any known earthquake?
Orphan
Orphan fits a wave that struck Japan in January 1700 with no earthquake felt there. Its parent was later traced to a giant quake off North America's Pacific Northwest.
Q 23The accidental 1917 explosion of a munitions ship triggered a tsunami in which North American harbour?
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Q 14Why does the sea often pull far back just before a tsunami strikes?
The wave's trough arrives first
The wave's trough arrives first in many tsunamis, sucking water seaward and baring the seabed minutes before the crest floods in, so a vanishing sea is a signal to run for high ground.
Q 15What do scientists call the series of waves that makes up a tsunami?
A wave train
A wave train can keep arriving for hours, and the first wave may not be the biggest, which is why people are told to stay away from the shore long after it hits.
Q 16In 1958 a wave surged 524 metres up a mountainside beside a remote bay in which US state?
Alaska
Alaska's Lituya Bay wave stripped the forest from the slope, yet Howard Ulrich and his seven-year-old son, anchored in the bay in a fishing boat, rode over it and lived.
Q 17What set off the giant 1958 wave in Lituya Bay?
An earthquake shook a huge rockslide into the bay
An earthquake shook a huge rockslide into the bay: about 30 million cubic metres of rock fell some 900 metres into the water, and the splash tore the forest off the facing slope.
Q 18In 1963 a landslide from Monte Toc sent a wave over the Vajont Dam, killing about 2,000 people in which country?
Italy
Italy's Vajont Dam, then among the tallest in the world, was left almost intact: the wave leapt over it and wiped out the town of Longarone in the valley below.
Q 19Which Canary Islands volcano, which erupted in 2021, is at the centre of a disputed Atlantic megatsunami theory?
Cumbre Vieja
Cumbre Vieja's flank, a 2001 paper warned, could collapse and send giant waves to the Americas, but later research found it would crumble piece by piece and raise waves there no higher than a common storm surge.
Q 20A tsunami around 1600 BC from which volcano is often blamed for the decline of Minoan civilisation?
Santorini
Santorini's eruption buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri in ash and sent waves onto Crete, though whether that really brought down the Minoans is still debated.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, lost nearly 2,000 people when the ship blew up after a collision in the harbour, one of the largest human-made explosions before the atomic bomb.
Q 24Which country's military tested a 'tsunami bomb' off its own coast in World War II's Project Seal?
New Zealand
New Zealand's military set off test blasts in the sea near Auckland to see whether explosives could raise a destructive wave, but the bomb was never tried at full scale.
Q 25An underwater bomb test at which Pacific atoll in 1946 showed that nuclear blasts make poor tsunami weapons?
Bikini Atoll
Bikini Atoll's Baker shot, the first underwater test of an atomic bomb, threw up a vast column of spray, yet the waves reaching the nearest island a few kilometres away were only a few metres high.
Q 26British and Commonwealth media named the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami after which holiday?
Boxing Day
Boxing Day, 26 December, brought no alert because the Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning system, so nearly all the victims were taken by surprise, some of them hours after the earthquake.
Q 27Roughly how many people were killed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami?
About 230,000
About 230,000 people died or went missing, the most in any tsunami on record, and the toll spurred the ocean's governments to start building a warning system within months.
Q 28Off which Indonesian province was the epicentre of the 2004 earthquake?
Aceh
Aceh had been at war with Indonesia's government for almost 30 years. The disaster pushed both sides into a peace deal, signed eight months later, that cites the tsunami.
Q 29NASA calculated that the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake shifted enough rock to speed up what, very slightly?
The Earth's rotation
The Earth's rotation quickened as mass moved closer to the planet's axis, like a skater pulling in her arms, shortening each day by about three millionths of a second.
Q 30Where had ten-year-old Tilly Smith learned the tsunami warning signs she recognised on a Thai beach in 2004?
In a school geography lesson
In a school geography lesson two weeks earlier, her teacher Andrew Kearney had shown a film of an earlier tsunami. After her family raised the alarm, no one was killed on that beach.