50 free Tsunami trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'tsunami' is Japanese. What does it literally mean?
Harbour wave
Fishermen would sail out, notice nothing unusual at sea, and return to find their harbour village destroyed.
Q 02What fundamentally causes a tsunami?
The displacement of a large volume of water
Earthquakes are the usual trigger, but landslides, eruptions, glacier calving and even meteorites can do it.
Q 03Why do scientists dislike the term 'tidal wave' for a tsunami?
Tsunamis have nothing to do with tides
The name stuck because an arriving tsunami often looks like an extraordinarily high tidal bore rather than a breaking wave.
Q 04Which ancient Greek historian first argued that tsunamis were caused by undersea earthquakes?
Thucydides
He made the case in his History of the Peloponnesian War around 426 BC; real understanding did not arrive until the 20th century.
Q 05The oldest human record of a tsunami, from 479 BC, comes from which Greek colony?
Potidaea
The wave may have saved the colony from an invasion by the Achaemenid Persians.
Q 06Which Roman historian described the classic tsunami sequence after the 365 AD wave devastated Alexandria?
Ammianus Marcellinus
He recorded the earthquake, the sudden retreat of the sea and the gigantic wave that followed.
Q 07Which country has the longest recorded history of tsunamis?
Japan
Tsunami science and response measures began there after a disaster in 1896.
Q 08Roughly what proportion of tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean?
About 80%
They can happen wherever there is a large body of water, including lakes.
Q 09Roughly how fast does a tsunami travel across the deep ocean?
Well over 800 km/h
Speed depends on water depth: over a 5,000-metre-deep Pacific it works out at about 806 km/h, roughly jet-airliner speed.
Q 10Roughly how tall is a tsunami in the deep ocean?
About 1 metre
With a wavelength of up to 200 km, ships cannot feel one pass; it only rears up as it reaches shallow water.
Q 11What is a tsunami's deep-ocean wavelength, compared with about 100 metres for wind waves?
Up to 200 kilometres
That enormous length is why even the deep ocean counts as 'shallow water' in the wave physics.
Q 12What is the process called that makes a tsunami grow taller and slower as it enters shallow water?
Wave shoaling
Speed drops below 80 km/h and the amplitude grows enormously, following Green's law.
Q 13What is the temporary rise in sea level called when a tsunami's peak reaches the shore?
Run-up
It is measured in metres above a reference sea level, and the first wave is not always the highest.
Q 21The 2018 collapse of which volcano killed 426 people with a tsunami that arrived without warning?
Anak Krakatoa
Volcanic tsunamis are less understood than seismic ones, which makes warning much harder.
Q 22What is a meteotsunami caused by?
Rapid changes in barometric pressure
They lack transoceanic reach but can be amplified by resonance; the Balearic Islands call them 'rissaga'.
Q 23What is a tsunami called when it cannot be linked to any known earthquake?
Orphan
Before international communications, a wave in Japan might have come from a quake in the Americas nobody had heard about.
Q 14What is 'drawback'?
The sea receding dramatically before a wave arrives
It happens when the trough arrives first, exposing the seabed; curious people who go out to collect stranded fish are in mortal danger.
Q 15What is a typical wave period for a damaging tsunami?
About twelve minutes
The sea recedes for about three minutes, floods in over the next six, then drains back out for six more, and repeats.
Q 16Where did a 1958 landslide cause the highest wave ever recorded, at 524 metres?
Lituya Bay, Alaska
The wave sank two of three boats anchored in the bay but struck land almost at once and did not travel far.
Q 17What triggered the record 1958 megatsunami in an Alaskan inlet?
An earthquake shook a huge rockslide into the bay
About 30 million cubic metres of rock crashed into the narrow inlet; the impact was heard 80 km away.
Q 18In 1963 a landslide from Monte Toc sent a wave over which Italian dam, killing around 2,000 people?
The Vajont Dam
The wave overtopped the 262-metre dam by 250 metres; scientists coined the term megatsunami for such events.
Q 19Which La Palma volcano is at the centre of a disputed claim that a landslide could cause an Atlantic megatsunami?
Cumbre Vieja
No landslide big enough to cause a transoceanic tsunami has occurred in recorded history, and many geologists doubt the danger.
Q 20A tsunami around 1600 BC from which volcano is often blamed for the decline of Minoan civilisation?
Santorini
The 1883 Krakatoa and 2022 Hunga Tonga eruptions also raised deadly waves; over 20% of volcanic deaths in 250 years came from tsunamis.
Q 24The accidental 1917 explosion in which Canadian harbour triggered an 18-metre tsunami?
Halifax, Nova Scotia
It remains one of the few clear examples of a human-made tsunami.
Q 25Which country's military tried to create tsunamis with explosives in World War II's failed "Project Seal"?
New Zealand
The tests were run at the tip of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula near Auckland.
Q 26Why do underwater nuclear explosions make poor tsunami weapons, as the 1946 Bikini Atoll tests showed?
Most of the energy goes into steam and vertical fountains
Waves from the 20-kilotonne bombs were only 3 to 4 metres high by the time they reached shore.
Q 27On what date did the great Indian Ocean tsunami strike?
26 December 2004
British and Commonwealth media dubbed it the Boxing Day tsunami.
Q 28Roughly how many people were killed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami?
About 230,000
Deaths came in 14 countries, worst of all in Aceh, Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and Khao Lak.
Q 29Off which Indonesian province was the epicentre of the 2004 earthquake?
Aceh
The Sumatra-Andaman quake ruptured 1,200 to 1,300 km of fault, the longest rupture ever observed.
Q 30How long did the faulting of the 2004 earthquake last, the longest ever observed?
At least ten minutes
It made the whole planet vibrate by as much as 10 mm and triggered quakes as far away as Alaska.