Earthquakes Word Search

Forty earthquake words fill this puzzle: the fault where rock gives way, the focus underground and the epicenter on the surface above it, the seismograph that records the shaking, the Richter and Mercalli scales, and the aftershock, tsunami and liquefaction that can follow.

Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg built the magnitude scale at Caltech in 1935. Each step up the scale means waves ten times taller on the seismograph and roughly 32 times more energy released. The Mercalli scale measures something else: how hard the ground shook in one place and what it damaged, in Roman numerals from I to XII. The largest earthquake ever recorded struck near Valdivia, Chile, on May 22, 1960, at magnitude 9.5.

A quake sends out waves at different speeds. Primary waves push and pull the rock and arrive first; secondary waves shake it side to side and cannot pass through liquid; surface waves come last and do the most harm. The gap between the first two tells a seismologist how far away the quake was. Japan's early warning system uses that gap to send alerts seconds before the strong shaking arrives.

Free Earthquakes Word Search Online Game

Play the Earthquakes word search in your browser, on your own or head to head against a friend in real time. Nothing to install and no account needed – send someone the link and you are both looking at the same grid.

Puzzle Vocabulary Words

Below you can see all possible words that the topic Earthquakes has.
Depends on difficulty level you select in the game amount of words hidden in the puzzle will be different.
In Easy game you have to find up to 5 words, medium game can have up to 15 words and hard puzzle can have up to 23 words.
Every time you start a new game - our word search generator will pick random words to build the puzzle.

  • Aftershock
  • Alaska
  • Bedrock
  • Crack
  • Drill
  • Early Warning
  • Earthquake
  • Epicenter
  • Fault
  • Focus
  • Foreshock
  • Intensity
  • Jolt
  • Kobe
  • Landslide
  • Liquefaction
  • Lisbon
  • Magnitude
  • Mercalli
  • Plates
  • Primary Wave
  • Rattle
  • Retrofit
  • Richter
  • Rubble
  • Rupture
  • Seismic
  • Seismograph
  • Seismologist
  • Sensor
  • Shaking
  • Shelter
  • Strike Slip
  • Surface Wave
  • Sway
  • Thrust
  • Tohoku
  • Tremor
  • Tsunami
  • Valdivia

Collections with Earthquakes Word Search