Canyons of the World Trivia
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59 free Canyons of the World trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This canyons trivia quiz travels the world's great gorges, from Arizona to Tibet, Namibia to Mars. The easy questions are the ones any geography fan can handle: what carves a canyon, which river cut the Grand Canyon, the Spanish origin of the word, and which US state has the Antelope slot canyons. From there it moves into the record book: the deepest canyon on Earth, the two Peruvian rivals for deepest in the Americas, the largest in Africa and Europe, the widest in the world and the 750 km one hidden under Greenland's ice. The harder end is for people who like their geology: how box canyons got used as corrals, why canyons favour arid country, what turbidity currents do on the seabed, the Copper Canyon railway with 86 tunnels, the Andean condors of Colca, the Leakeys at Olduvai, the Grand Canyon's Great Unconformity, the Vishnu Schist and John Wesley Powell's 1869 run, plus the greatest canyon of all, on Mars. Individual national-park quizzes for the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Canyonlands cover those places in far more depth. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the individual canyons and on canyon formation before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which river cuts the Iron Gates, the gorge that divides Serbia from Romania?
The Danube
The Danube: a dam built across the gorge around 1970 raised the river and drowned Ada Kaleh, a mid-stream island of Turkish houses with its own mosque.
Q 02From which language does the word 'canyon' come?
Spanish
Spanish: cañón also means a tube or pipe, the usual explanation for the gorge sense, though some dictionaries allow that it began as an older word built on calle, a street.
Q 03Why do deep, sheer canyons form more readily in dry regions than in wet ones?
Little rain wears the walls back
Little rain wears the walls back: a stream fed from wetter country upstream keeps sawing downward, while the dry cliffs beside it stay steep and angular instead of slumping into a broad valley.
Q 04What defines a box canyon?
Steep walls on three sides and one way in
Steep walls on three sides and one way in: the town of Telluride sits in one, yet Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank there in 1889 and still got clean away.
Q 05What term describes a river that lies at the bottom of a deep canyon and cannot shift its course?
Entrenched
Entrenched: on a floodplain a river wanders and changes course at will, but one that has cut deep into rock is walled in and can only go on cutting downward.
Q 06The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, often ranked as the deepest on Earth, lies in which Himalayan region?
Tibet
Tibet. The gorge around the peak Namcha Barwa proved so impenetrable that 19th-century surveyors could not follow the river through it to see where it came out.
Q 07The Yarlung Tsangpo is the upper course of which great river?
The Brahmaputra
The Brahmaputra. To prove the link, the surveyor Kinthup threw 500 marked logs into the Tsangpo in the 1880s, but his contact had died and nobody downstream was watching for them.
Q 08Nepal's Kali Gandaki Gorge separates Dhaulagiri from which 8,000-metre peak, encircled by a famous trekking circuit?
Annapurna
Annapurna. The river held its course as the Himalayas rose around it, cutting down so far that it now runs more than five kilometres below the summits on either side.
Q 09The Kali Gandaki region is famous for shaligram fossils, revered by Hindus as a form of which god?
Vishnu
Vishnu. The sacred black stones are fossil ammonites, the coiled shells of sea creatures, found today in a riverbed high in the Himalayas.
Q 10Colca and Cotahuasi, two canyons each about twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, are in which South American country?
Peru
Peru. Both lie in the country's far south, where farmers in the Colca valley still work stepped terraces that were built before the Incas.
Q 11Which bird is the star attraction of Colca Canyon, gliding past the walls at close range?
Andean condor
Andean condor. Early in the morning the birds ride thermals rising from the canyon floor and glide past the Cruz del Cóndor lookout on the rim.
Q 12In which US national park do hikers wade up the Virgin River through a canyon called The Narrows?
Zion
Zion. In The Narrows the river is the trail: hikers wade upstream over slippery boulders between sheer walls that stand only 20 to 30 feet apart in places.
Q 13What is the largest canyon in Africa?
Fish River
Fish River Canyon is about 160 km long, yet the river that cut it now flows only after the summer rains and shrinks to a chain of pools for the rest of the year.
Q 21On which Greek island is the Samaria Gorge, a national park since 1962?
Crete
Crete. The gorge was made a national park mainly as a refuge for the kri-kri, a rare wild goat, and at the Gates its walls close to about four metres apart.
Q 22The river in Provence's Verdon Gorge is known for which distinctive colour?
Turquoise-green
Turquoise-green. The river leaves the gorge straight into the Lake of Sainte-Croix, a reservoir filled in the 1970s after the old village of Les Salles-sur-Verdon was demolished to make room.
Q 23Which river carved the Grand Canyon?
The Colorado
The Colorado. It only began cutting down after the whole region had been lifted into a high plateau, so the canyon is far younger than the rocks in its walls.
Q 14The river that carved Namibia's great canyon ends by joining which river on the South African border?
The Orange
The Orange River. Hikers on the canyon's five-day trail finish their walk at ǀAi-ǀAis, a resort whose hot springs rise in the bed of the tributary itself.
Q 15Why is South Africa's Blyde River Canyon unusual among great gorges?
It is green, full of subtropical vegetation
It is green, full of subtropical vegetation: Mpumalanga bills it as the world's largest 'green canyon', and its Three Rondavels peaks are named for the round huts they resemble.
Q 16What does 'Blyde' mean in old Dutch, a name given by Voortrekkers in 1844?
Glad or happy
Glad or happy: the trekkers had given their leader's party up for dead and named a nearby stream the Treur, or 'mourning', before the men caught up with them alive.
Q 17Which Tanzanian Rift Valley site yielded the hominin fossils excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey?
Olduvai
Olduvai Gorge. In 1959 Mary Leakey found a 1.75-million-year-old skull there, whose huge back teeth earned it the nickname Nutcracker Man.
Q 18The Tara River Canyon, which UNESCO credits with the deepest gorges in Europe, lies mostly in which country?
Montenegro
Montenegro. In 1942 partisans blew up an arch of the canyon's great road bridge to stop an enemy advance, and the engineer who helped them was later shot on the bridge itself.
Q 19A Justin Bieber music video sent so many fans to a canyon in which country that officials closed it in 2019?
Iceland
Iceland. Fans flocked to Fjaðrárgljúfur after Bieber dangled his feet over its cliffs in the video for I'll Show You, and the ranger said some tried to bribe her to open the gate.
Q 20Guinness World Records has listed Greece's Vikos Gorge as what?
Deepest relative to its width
Deepest relative to its width: at one point its walls fall about a kilometre while the rims stand barely further apart, though champions of rival gorges contest the claim.
Q 24Roughly how many years of Earth's geological history are exposed in the Grand Canyon's walls?
2 billion
2 billion, near enough: that is roughly the age of the oldest rocks at the bottom. Even the youngest layer, at the rim, is older than the first dinosaurs, so no dinosaur fossils turn up there.
Q 25Who led the 1869 boat expedition that made the first known passage through the Grand Canyon?
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell had lost his right forearm at the Battle of Shiloh seven years before he led four small boats down the river; one sank in a rapid, taking food and instruments with it.
Q 26Who said of the Grand Canyon, 'Leave it as it is'?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. Bills to make the canyon a national park kept failing in Congress, so in 1908 he declared it a national monument by proclamation; park status finally came in 1919.
Q 27García López de Cárdenas, the first European known to see the Grand Canyon, was scouting for which conquistador in 1540?
Francisco Coronado
Francisco Coronado. Hopi guides led his scouts to the rim, but three soldiers sent to climb down got only a third of the way to the river, and the party, short of water, turned back.
Q 28What name do geologists give the gap in the Grand Canyon's rocks where a vast span of time is missing?
The Great Unconformity
The Great Unconformity. The missing rock was not skipped but destroyed: older layers were lifted up and worn away by erosion before new sediment buried the surface, like pages torn from a book.
Q 29Which gorge on the Snake River is often called the deepest in North America?
Hells
Hells Canyon. After a long fight over who should dam the Snake, a power company built three dams in the area, and in 1975 the gorge became a national recreation area.
Q 30Where did radar reveal a 750 km canyon in 2013, thought to be the longest on Earth?
Under Greenland's ice sheet
Under Greenland's ice sheet. Hidden beneath about a mile of ice, the canyon is thought to be older than the ice itself, a river valley carved before Greenland froze over.