🧠 Volcanoes Quiz

The word volcano comes from Vulcan, whose forge the ancient Romans believed lay beneath the island of Vulcano.

An extinct volcano is distinguished from a dormant one — dormant volcanoes are merely sleeping and could still erupt, while extinct ones are considered permanently inactive.

The Ring of Fire stretches roughly 40,000 kilometres and is home to around 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.

Vesuvius overlooks the Bay of Naples and is infamous for burying Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79.

The sound of Krakatoa's 1883 eruption was heard as far away as Australia and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius — nearly 5,000 kilometres from the volcano.

The Hawaiian islands are classic examples of shield volcanoes — Mauna Loa is so broad and gently sloping that from a distance it resembles a warrior's shield lying on the ground, which is exactly how it got its name.

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010 caused the largest disruption to European airspace since World War II, stranding around 10 million passengers and costing airlines an estimated £1.3 billion.

Pyroclastic flows can travel at speeds exceeding 700 km/h and reach temperatures of over 1,000°C, making them virtually impossible to outrun and one of the deadliest volcanic hazards known.

The Yellowstone supervolcano has had three major caldera-forming eruptions in the last 2.1 million years, and the vast caldera it created is so large it can only be fully appreciated from the air.

The 1991 Pinatubo eruption ejected so much sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere that it lowered global temperatures by about 0.5°C for the following two years.