100 free Dead Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Dead Sea is not a sea at all but a landlocked lake, and almost everything about it is extreme. Its shores are the lowest dry land on Earth, its water is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, nothing bigger than a microbe lives in it, and it is dropping by more than a metre a year. This quiz covers the numbers (depth, salinity, density, elevation, shrinkage), the science (why you float, why it turned red in 1980, why the two water layers suddenly mixed in 1979, where the sinkholes come from) and the geology of the Sedom Lagoon, Lake Lisan and Mount Sodom. It also covers the human story: Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife, David hiding at Ein Gedi, the Nabatean asphalt trade that supplied Egyptian mummies, Herod's fortress at Masada and the siege of 73 CE, the Essenes of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vespasian's buoyancy test, the potash industry, the modern resorts and the abandoned plan to refill the lake from the Red Sea. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Dead Sea and its surroundings, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Israel, Jordan and Bible quizzes next.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Despite its name, what kind of body of water is the Dead Sea?
A landlocked salt lake
It sits in an endorheic basin, meaning no streams flow out of it; water leaves only by evaporation.
Q 02Which country borders the Dead Sea on its eastern shore?
Jordan
Israel and the West Bank lie on the western side.
Q 03What is the Dead Sea's main tributary?
Jordan River
The river has been so heavily diverted that it now supplies only about a sixth of the lake's inflow, less than direct rainfall.
Q 04As of 2025, roughly how far below sea level is the surface of the Dead Sea?
440 metres
That makes its shores the lowest land-based elevation on Earth, and the level keeps falling.
Q 05Compared with ordinary seawater, the Dead Sea is roughly how much saltier?
About tenfold
Its salinity was 34.2% in 2011, against about 3.5% for seawater.
Q 06Why can anyone float effortlessly in the Dead Sea?
The water's high density
At about 1.24 kg per litre the brine simply holds a human body up, much like Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Q 07How deep is the Dead Sea at its deepest point?
304 metres
That makes it the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
Q 08Why is the lake called 'dead'?
Its salinity prevents fish and plants living in it
Only tiny quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi survive in the brine.
Q 09The Dead Sea's surface area shrank from 1,050 sq km in 1930 to about how much by the 2020s?
605 sq km
Diversion of the Jordan River since the 1960s is the main cause; the level has been dropping more than a metre a year.
Q 10The oldest and most common Hebrew name for the lake translates as what?
Sea of Salt
Yam HaMelah appears in both biblical and modern Hebrew; the Talmud also calls it the Sea of Sodom.
Q 11Ancient Greek and Roman geographers usually named the lake after which substance that floated on it?
Asphalt
Lacus Asphaltites reflected a large trade in the free-floating bitumen the lake still spits up from deep seeps.
Q 12The Arabic name 'Sea of Lot' refers to whose nephew?
Abraham
Lot's wife was said to have turned into a pillar of salt during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Q 13Which second-century Roman historian called the lake the 'Jewish Sea'?
Tacitus
Pliny the Elder, meanwhile, located the Essenes on its western shore above the town of Engeda.
Q 21The Dead Sea has the highest concentration of which ion of any water on Earth?
Bromide
Israel extracts about 206,000 tons of elemental bromine a year from the brine.
Q 22What happened to the Dead Sea's water column in the winter of 1978-79?
Its two layers mixed into one
The upper layer had become saltier than the lower one; once it cooled and grew denser, the lake overturned into a single homogeneous body.
Q 23After a rainy winter in 1980, the Dead Sea briefly turned which colour?
Red
Diluted brine let an alga called Dunaliella bloom, which fed red-pigmented halobacteria.
Q 14The Dead Sea lies on the boundary between which two tectonic plates?
African and Arabian
The Dead Sea Transform fault runs from Turkey's East Anatolian Fault down to the Red Sea Rift.
Q 15The 210-metre-tall formation of halite along the lake's south-western shore is called what?
Mount Sodom
Heavy sediment squeezed ancient salt beds upward like mud creeping up the sides of a bucket, leaving the salt mount standing as a cliff.
Q 16Geologists call the ancient Mediterranean inlet that once flooded the Dead Sea valley what?
Sedom Lagoon
It was linked to the sea through what is now the Jezreel Valley and left rock salt 2.3 km thick.
Q 17The Dead Sea is the last remnant of a much larger prehistoric body of water known by what name?
Lake Lisan
Between 70,000 and 12,000 years ago Lisan's level stood 100 to 250 metres higher than today's lake.
Q 18What Köppen climate type does the Dead Sea have?
Hot desert
It gets under 50 mm of rain a year and averages 192 days above 30 °C.
Q 19Compared with sea level, the air at the Dead Sea has a slightly higher content of what?
Oxygen
The extra atmospheric pressure at such low elevation seems to help patients with reduced lung function.
Q 20Which metal's chloride makes up about half of the Dead Sea's dissolved salt, unlike the ocean's sodium salt?
Magnesium
Early-1980s analysis put magnesium chloride at 50.8% and sodium chloride at just 30.4%; the ocean's salt is about 85% sodium chloride.
Q 24Egyptian mummification used which product imported from the Dead Sea region?
Asphalt
The lake still discharges pebbles and blocks of the black bitumen from deep seeps.
Q 25The Dead Sea's reduced ultraviolet light is used in photoclimatherapy for which skin condition?
Psoriasis
The weaker UVB lets patients sunbathe for longer stretches safely.
Q 26According to Genesis, which two cities destroyed by fire from heaven stood near the Dead Sea?
Sodom and Gomorrah
Admah, Zeboim and Zoar were the other 'Cities of the Plain'; Zoar was spared when Lot fled there.
Q 27Where near the Dead Sea was King David said to have hidden from Saul?
Ein Gedi
The oasis later thrived on Judean date palms and a secret-recipe persimmon perfume made for the Temple.
Q 28Which people monopolised the Dead Sea's trade in the Hellenistic period?
Nabateans
Anchorages have been found on both shores, including a Hasmonean-era dry dock at Khirbet Mazin.
Q 29Which king built the famous fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea's western shore?
Herod the Great
His other Dead Sea fortress, Machaerus on the eastern bank, is where Josephus says John the Baptist was imprisoned and died.
Q 30Per Josephus, how many Masada defenders died by suicide when the Roman siege ended in 73/74 CE?
960
The Sicarii had seized the fortress early in the First Jewish-Roman War and held out after the Temple fell in 70 CE.