The Waves That Shook the Pacific

What happens when the ground itself becomes a wave? This one-page activity uses a real, current event - the 2025 magnitude-8.8 Kamchatka earthquake, one of the biggest ever recorded - to make seismic waves concrete. When the ground broke, it sent out seismic waves that carried energy through the Earth: longitudinal P-waves that push and pull the rock, and transverse S-waves that shake it side to side. The energy even launched a Pacific tsunami.

What's Included

• 1 student page: a short news story plus four cards (What's the Story? multiple choice with a quick true/false, a fill-in chain with word bank, Cause & Effect matching, and a Why Does It Matter? sentence starter)
• 1 teacher key page with every answer, a sample response, the standards box, clickable links to the source articles, and a science-connection summary
• Letter-size PDF, no prep

How It Helps You Teach

• Shows both wave types - transverse and longitudinal - in one real event
• Makes energy transfer through waves concrete at a planet-sized scale
• The article links support media literacy and let you show students the source

Pair It With

Part of an Energy of Waves set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, the Transverse or Longitudinal? sort, and a Reading in Science. Check out our library for the rest.

Perfect for 6th grade physical science, a current-events science reading and reading comprehension activity, science literacy, and TEKS 6.8C review. Topics include: seismic waves, earthquakes, transverse and longitudinal waves, P-waves, S-waves, and energy transfer.

Standards: TEKS 6.8C; NGSS DCI PS4.A (Wave Properties). Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks.