Question: How come there are tons of tornados and hurricanes and earthquakes etc. in the USA, but in the UK, we dont?

Vince Hall answered on 17 Jun 2013:

The US has a lot of flat, low-lying land. It also has a climate that causes a lot of thunderstorms. Tornadoes are a more likely in these intense thunderstorms. The UK has some tornadoes, but relatively few.

Hurricanes are caused by warm water, when the temperature of the water in a sea reaches about 28 degrees Celsius, a hurricane can happen. The US is usually warmer than the UK, so that makes it more likely. The flat land helps with the spread of the storm, just like tornadoes.
The US is warmer in summer, and parts are colder in winter partially because it is far more continental than the UK; there is a lot more land. More land means more extreme temperatures and usually less rain.

Earthquakes are usually around fault lines in the Earth’s crust. The crust is the thin layer of rock and soil etc that sits on the top of the hot, magma that is inside the Earth. The crust is about 30-50 km, while the Earth is 6 371 km.

The crust has fault lines in it, these define the boundaries of plates, tectonic plates. The US is on the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate. There is a very active fault line called the San Andreas Fault, that runs through California. This is responsible for many of the earthquakes. The UK is quite far from any plate boundaries, so we have very few earthquakes that we can feel. We’re on the Eurasian Plate.

Another reason is that the size of the USA is 9.16 million square km, while the UK is 242 thousand square km. So there is a lot more of the USA than there is of the UK.