Caspian Sea Trivia
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49 free Caspian Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Caspian is the largest lake in the world, unless it is a sea, and since 2018 it is legally neither. This quiz covers the geography, the history and the arguments. It starts with the numbers: five coastlines, an area the size of Japan, a surface 27 metres below the ocean, water a third as salty as seawater, a northern shelf you could almost wade across and a southern basin deeper than the Persian Gulf. Then the names people have given it, from the Hyrcanian Sea and the Sea of the Khazars to Iran's Mazandaran Sea, and the river that has been changing its mind about flowing in for millennia. Oil and fish follow: Bibi-Heybat's first offshore wells, the Nobels in Baku, the town on stilts at Oil Rocks that James Bond visited, Kazakhstan's share of the crude, and the beluga sturgeon whose eggs are worth more than a bribe. The wildlife includes a seal found nowhere else and a tiger found nowhere any more; the hardware includes the Caspian Sea Monster and the warship-ekranoplan that ended up stuck on a beach. Derbent, Astrakhan, Baku's winds and Maiden Tower, the Volga–Don route to the ocean and the sea's projected shrinkage round it out. Easy questions suit anyone who can find it on a map; the expert tier reaches Ogurja Ada, Fyodor Soimonov and the Uzboy channel. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the sea, its ports and its wildlife, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Caspian Sea holds what distinction among the world's lakes and seas?
Largest inland one
Largest inland one. It has a seagoing past: its basin was joined to the world ocean until it was cut off millions of years ago, and the stranded water is still salty.
Q 02The 1971 treaty named after Ramsar, an Iranian resort on the Caspian, protects what?
Wetlands
Wetlands. Delegates signed it in the resort in February 1971, and the marshes and lakes it protects around the world are now known as Ramsar sites.
Q 03In Iran today the Caspian is often called by what name, after a province on its southern shore?
The Mazandaran Sea
The Mazandaran Sea. Over the centuries Persian writers named the sea after whichever people, town or province on its shores mattered most, and this lush northern province is the name in use now.
Q 04The Caspian Sea covers roughly the same area as which country?
Japan
Japan. A lake on that scale dwarfs the famous ones: it is about one and a half times the area of all five North American Great Lakes put together.
Q 05The surface of the Caspian Sea lies roughly how far below global sea level?
About 27 metres
About 27 metres. The level never sits still: it fell by roughly three metres between 1929 and 1977, then climbed back almost as far over the next two decades.
Q 06How salty is the Caspian compared with the open ocean?
A third as salty
A third as salty. Rivers freshen it so much near their mouths that the water there is nearly fresh, while one shallow gulf evaporates into brine far saltier than any ocean.
Q 07Azerbaijan's Caspian shore has the world's greatest concentration of which natural feature?
Mud volcanoes
Mud volcanoes. Underground gas pushes cool mud up into cones that can stand hundreds of metres high, and when a big one erupts the gas can catch fire and send up a flame just as tall.
Q 08In October 2015 Russian warships on the Caspian fired cruise missiles some 1,500 km at targets in which country?
Syria
Syria. Four small ships launched 26 missiles that crossed Iran and Iraq on the way, showing how far beyond its own shores the little Caspian flotilla could reach.
Q 09The Caspian is a stranded remnant of which vanished ocean, named after a sea goddess of Greek myth?
The Tethys
The Tethys. As that ocean closed, an arm of it was cut off across Eurasia and slowly shrank, leaving the Caspian and its neighbours behind as remnants.
Q 10Which river flows through Tbilisi and on across Azerbaijan to reach the Caspian?
The Kura
The Kura. Georgians call it the Mtkvari, and it no longer runs free: one dam stands just above Tbilisi, and another in Azerbaijan holds back a great reservoir.
Q 11Which mountain range, crowned by Mount Damavand, walls off the Caspian's southern shore from the Iranian plateau?
The Alborz
The Alborz. Its seaward face wrings the moisture out of the Caspian air, so that slope is drenched and green while the far side, just over the passes, is dry.
Q 12Which Central Asian river is thought to have once sent water to the Caspian along the now-dry Uzboy channel?
The Amu Darya (Oxus)
The Amu Darya (Oxus). The dry Uzboy bed still winds across the Karakum desert toward the Caspian, though geologists argue to this day over how much of the great river ever ran down it.
Q 13Dammed off from the Caspian in 1980, the Garabogazköl lagoon did what within four years?
Dried out
Q 21Baku's UNESCO-listed Old City contains the Palace of the Shirvanshahs and which famous landmark?
The Maiden Tower
The Maiden Tower. The stone tower, usually dated to the 12th century, is still the city's emblem, though the skyline behind it now belongs to three glass skyscrapers shaped like flames.
Q 22Yanar Dag, a hillside near Baku, has been famous for decades for doing what without a pause?
Burning
Burning. Natural gas seeping up through the rock feeds flames as much as three metres high, day and night; hillside fires like it earned Azerbaijan the name Land of Fire.
Q 23Which annual televised event did Baku host in 2012?
Eurovision
Dried out. Planners feared the lagoon was draining the Caspian, but cutting it off left a bowl of blowing salt, and the barrier was torn out in 1992 once the sea had risen again.
Q 14From 1973 to 1999 the desert port of Aktau made its drinking water from the Caspian using what?
A nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor. The Soviet BN-350 fast reactor lit the city and distilled seawater for it; Aktau later hosted the 2018 summit where the five coastal states signed the Caspian's legal convention.
Q 15Legally, after the 2018 convention, the Caspian Sea is defined as what?
Neither fully a sea nor a lake
Neither fully a sea nor a lake. The surface is shared like open sea while the seabed, with its oil and gas, is left for the five states to divide by agreement, easing a dispute that began when the Soviet Union broke up.
Q 16Astrakhan, the Russian port near the Caspian, gave its name to a fur made from newborn what?
Lambs
Lambs. The tight curls come from newborn Karakul lambs of Central Asia, and the name passed on to a woollen cloth woven to imitate them.
Q 17Which Swedish family built the oil company that dominated Baku's Caspian boom from the 1870s?
The Nobels
The Nobels. Robert set up in Baku in 1873 and drew in his brother Ludvig; their firm became one of the largest oil companies in the world, with a third brother, Alfred of dynamite fame, as a shareholder.
Q 18Which James Bond film sends 007 to Azerbaijan to protect an heiress building an oil pipeline from the Caspian?
The World Is Not Enough
The World Is Not Enough. The 1999 film moves from the pipeline's mountain route to a caviar dealer's factory out in the Caspian, where the heiress Bond was sent to guard has him attacked by her helicopters.
Q 19Baku is the largest city on the Caspian and also the largest in which mountainous region?
The Caucasus
The Caucasus. Oil made the city: around 1900 the fields at Baku were the most productive on Earth and pumped about half of the world's supply.
Q 20Baku is widely nicknamed the 'City of' what?
Winds
Winds. A cold gale that can gust to nearly 150 km/h and a warm counterpart, the gilavar, take turns over the city, and one or the other is blowing in every season.
Eurovision. Azerbaijan earned the right to host by winning in 2011 at only its fourth attempt, and put up the Baku Crystal Hall for the show in about eight months.
Q 24The first successful oil tanker, built for the Caspian trade, was named after which prophet?
Zoroaster
Zoroaster. While other shippers still moved oil in wooden casks, the steamer carried it in bulk in built-in tanks, and it reached the Caspian from its Swedish shipyard by way of Russia's rivers and canals.
Q 25The Caspian's beluga sturgeon shares its name with the beluga whale; what does the Russian word behind 'beluga' mean?
White
White. The name belonged to the pale sturgeon first, the fish behind beluga caviar, and was only later passed on to the unrelated white whale of the Arctic.
Q 26What is the IUCN conservation status of the beluga sturgeon, hunted for its caviar?
Critically endangered
Critically endangered. So many egg-bearing females have been caught for caviar, legally and by poachers, that the 2019 assessment found the wild fish surviving largely thanks to hatchery restocking.
Q 27Traditionally, 'caviar' means only wild sturgeon roe from the Caspian and which other sea?
The Black Sea
The Black Sea. By that old rule the red roe of salmon is not caviar at all, and the cheap jars of lumpfish roe are dyed black with cuttlefish ink to pass for the real thing.
Q 28What is the only aquatic mammal endemic to the Caspian Sea?
A seal
A seal. Its closest relatives are the ringed seal of the Arctic and the seal of Lake Baikal, and its ancestors probably reached the Caspian along rivers that have long since vanished.
Q 29Which tiger, the extinct Caspian tiger's closest relative, was sent to Kazakhstan in 2024?
Siberian
Siberian. Genetic work suggests the two were one continuous population until people split their range in recent centuries, so a captive pair was moved to a reserve near Lake Balkhash in the hope that their cubs can live wild.
Q 30The experimental Soviet craft nicknamed the 'Caspian Sea Monster' was what kind of vehicle?
A ground-effect ekranoplan
A ground-effect ekranoplan. Skimming just above the water let it fly fast while staying too low for many radars to spot, a mix the Soviet navy tested for years.