Arctic Ocean Trivia
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49 free Arctic Ocean trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Arctic is the ocean that breaks the rules. It is the smallest and shallowest of the five, the only one smaller than Russia, the least salty because so many great rivers pour into it, and the only one that spends most of the year under a lid of ice. Some oceanographers will not even call it an ocean, preferring 'Arctic Mediterranean Sea'. This quiz covers all of that, plus the Lomonosov Ridge that splits its floor, the Fram Strait through which its water escapes, the Beaufort Gyre and the reasons its ice is vanishing. Then it turns to the people and animals: Pytheas and his 'congealed sea', the myth of the Open Polar Sea, Nansen freezing the Fram into the pack, the airship Norge over the Pole, USS Nautilus beneath it, Wally Herbert's dog sleds, Amundsen's Northwest Passage, the ghost ship Baychimo, polar bears, narwhals, walruses and the seed vault buried in Svalbard. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Arctic Ocean and its features, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Antarctica, Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How does the Arctic rank among the world's five oceans by size?
Smallest
Smallest. It is still about one and a half times the size of the United States, but because it is also the shallowest ocean it holds little more than 1 per cent of the world's seawater.
Q 02North of the Arctic Circle, what happens on at least one day every summer?
The sun never sets
The sun never sets. The Arctic Circle is drawn where this midnight sun lasts a single day, and the effect grows northward until, at the Pole itself, daylight lasts about six months.
Q 03Which sea's name do some oceanographers borrow for the nearly landlocked Arctic Ocean, calling it the 'Arctic ___ Sea'?
Mediterranean
Mediterranean. To oceanographers a mediterranean sea is any basin almost enclosed by land that swaps little water with the wider ocean, which is why the label is also given to the Arctic.
Q 04What is the main prey of polar bears hunting on the Arctic sea ice?
Seals
Seals. A polar bear will wait beside a breathing hole in the ice to seize a ringed seal as it surfaces, which is why the bears struggle to feed when the sea ice retreats.
Q 05Which pole has been drifting for decades from Arctic Canada toward Siberia?
North Magnetic Pole
North Magnetic Pole. It wanders tens of kilometres a year as Earth's field shifts, so the magnetic model behind ship, aircraft and phone navigation has to be reissued every five years.
Q 06The Arctic is the shallowest ocean because much of its floor is what?
Continental shelf
Continental shelf. Off Siberia it runs as far as 1,500 km out to sea, the widest on Earth, which helps hold the Arctic's average depth to about a kilometre against roughly four for the Pacific.
Q 07Which slow-swimming shark of Arctic waters is the longest-lived vertebrate known, surviving for centuries?
Greenland shark
Greenland shark. Carbon dating of its eye lenses points to a lifespan of at least 250 years, a life so slow that it may not be ready to breed until it is about 150.
Q 08Which undersea ridge, named after an 18th-century polymath, splits the deep Arctic basin in two?
Lomonosov Ridge
Lomonosov Ridge. Rival countries each argue it is an extension of their own landmass, because proving it would win them seabed rights that reach all the way to the North Pole.
Q 09Antique harpoon tips found in which Arctic whales suggest they can outlive every other mammal?
Bowhead whale
Bowhead whale. Studies suggest it can pass 200 years, and it takes its name from the huge bow-shaped skull it uses to smash breathing holes through the sea ice.
Q 10What is the name of the great clockwise current that turns in the Arctic Ocean north of Canada?
Beaufort Gyre
Beaufort Gyre. It hoards fresh water from rivers and melting ice near the surface, and scientists warn that a sudden release into the Atlantic could cool the climate of Western Europe.
Q 11What lets Arctic surface water stay liquid at about -1.8 °C?
Its salt
Its salt. Dissolved salt lowers the freezing point, and when the sea does freeze the ice crystals leave most of the salt behind, so sea ice can be melted down for drinking water.
Q 12Arctic sea ice usually shrinks to its yearly minimum in which month?
September
September. The ice goes on melting right through the summer and only regrows once the sun sinks, and its yearly peak is just as late, arriving in March instead of midwinter.
Q 13What struck the central Arctic weeks before sea ice hit its 2012 record low?
Cyclone
Cyclone. Storms that strong are rare in the Arctic summer, and it broke up the thin ice, though researchers judged that it only hastened a record the ice was already heading for.
Q 21The polar ship Fram was built with a rounded hull so that squeezing pack ice would do what?
Push it up on top
Push it up on top. The smooth hull with almost no keel let the ice lift the ship instead of crushing it, at a price: in heavy seas it rolled more than most ships.
Q 22Which submarine made the first transit under the North Pole in 1958?
USS Nautilus
USS Nautilus. As the world's first nuclear-powered submarine it had no need to come up for air, so it could pass beneath the entire ice cap from the Pacific side and surface in the Atlantic.
Q 23British explorer Wally Herbert led the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1968-69, travelling by what?
Dog sled
Q 14Why does losing sea ice make the Arctic warm faster?
Dark seawater absorbs more sunlight
Dark seawater absorbs more sunlight. White ice bounces most of it back into space, so every loss feeds the next, and many projections now put a first ice-free summer before 2050.
Q 15Since 1979 the Arctic has warmed nearly four times as fast as the globe, a pattern scientists call what?
Arctic amplification
Arctic amplification. For years the standard line was that the region was warming twice as fast as the planet, until a 2022 study of the satellite era roughly doubled that figure.
Q 16Which four great rivers feed the fresh, low-salinity top layer of the Arctic Ocean?
Ob, Yenisei, Lena and Mackenzie
Ob, Yenisei, Lena and Mackenzie. Their fresh water floats on the denser salt water below, forming a lid that stops warmer Atlantic water underneath from rising to melt the sea ice.
Q 17Which Arctic whale is nicknamed the 'canary of the sea' for its chirps, whistles and clicks?
Beluga
Beluga. Calves are born grey and turn white as they mature, and an adult can change the shape of the bulging 'melon' on its forehead to focus the sounds it makes.
Q 18Which Greek explorer sailed north around 325 BC and reported a frozen sea beyond a land he called Thule?
Pytheas
Pytheas. His own book is lost, and the later writers who preserve his report often did so to mock it: Strabo dismissed the whole voyage as fiction.
Q 19Which persistent 19th-century myth held that warm, ice-free water surrounded the North Pole?
Open Polar Sea
British Admiralty secretary John Barrow promoted expeditions in search of it from 1818 to 1845; it was disproven by the early 1900s.
Q 20Who froze his ship into the Arctic pack ice in 1893, hoping to drift to the North Pole?
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen. After 18 months in the ice he left the ship with a single companion and got closer to the Pole than anyone before him before turning back.
Dog sled. The 3,800-mile trek to Svalbard took more than a year, because the four men had to sit out a whole polar winter camped on the drifting ice before they could go on.
Q 24The first undisputed expedition to reach the North Pole did so in 1926 aboard what?
An airship
An airship. The Norge floated over the Pole on a flight from Svalbard to North America, and it ranks as first because the earlier claims of Cook, Peary and Byrd are all doubted.
Q 25Robert Peary claimed to reach the North Pole on 6 April 1909 accompanied by four Inuit men and whom?
Matthew Henson
Matthew Henson. He went north with Peary seven times, yet as a Black American he waited until 1937 to be admitted to the Explorers Club and until 1944 for the expedition's medal.
Q 26Which explorer completed the first passage of the Northwest Passage entirely by ship, in 1903-1906?
Roald Amundsen
Roald Amundsen. Where big naval expeditions had failed, he slipped through with a handful of men in a small fishing sloop, the Gjøa, five years before he beat everyone to the South Pole.
Q 27Whose Northwest Passage expedition vanished with the ships Erebus and Terror?
John Franklin
John Franklin. None of his men came home, and it took a search sent by his widow, Lady Jane Franklin, to find skeletons and a last written message on King William Island.
Q 28Which European airline opened the first scheduled passenger route over the Arctic in 1954, flying from Los Angeles?
Scandinavian Airlines
Scandinavian Airlines. Its propeller airliners hopped across the top of the world with fuel stops in Winnipeg and Greenland, three years before Pan Am and TWA followed them over the ice.
Q 29From 1937, which country began monitoring the Arctic from manned stations on drifting ice floes?
Soviet Union
Soviet Union. Its first station was set down beside the Pole in May 1937, and the four men aboard rode their floe south until icebreakers lifted them off the following February.
Q 30Which fur-trading company's abandoned steamer drifted crewless around the Arctic for decades?
Hudson's Bay Company
Hudson's Bay Company. Its steamer Baychimo was given up for lost when it vanished from the pack ice in a blizzard, yet the empty ship kept turning up, the last time in 1969.