Fjords Trivia
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48 free Fjords trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This fjords trivia quiz covers the glacier-carved sea inlets that give Norway, New Zealand, Greenland, Chile, Alaska and Canada their most dramatic coastlines. The easier questions handle the basics: what a fjord actually is, which country has nearly 1,200 of them, the 'King of the Fjords', the cliff called Pulpit Rock and the New Zealand fiord Rudyard Kipling called the eighth wonder of the world. The harder end is for geography obsessives: the sill at a fjord's mouth and why it starves deep water of oxygen, the Antarctic inlet nearly two kilometres deep, the 420-kilometre fjord system in Canada's Arctic, the coral reefs found on Norwegian fjord floors in 2000, the Old Norse root shared with the Scots word firth, why the Bay of Kotor and the Oslofjord are not technically fjords at all, the glacier at Ilulissat that calves 20 billion tonnes of ice a year, and the German cruiser sunk in a fjord narrows in 1940. There are also questions on the Fjord horse, the Flåm railway, Hurtigruten and the waterfalls of Geiranger. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the fjords, regions and features involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Norway, glaciers, New Zealand and national parks quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which comedy troupe's pet-shop sketch insists that a dead parrot is merely 'pining for the fjords'?
Monty Python
Monty Python. The joke outlived the bird: when a 55-million-year-old Danish fossil was described as a parrot in 2008, the lead scientist ruled out any pining, because Norway's fjords were carved by ice less than a million years ago.
Q 02Without its fjords, how long would Norway's roughly 29,000 km coastline be?
2,500 km
2,500 km. That is a straight baseline; trace every fjord and bay and Norway's statisticians get about 29,000 km, because a coast grows longer the finer the ruler used to measure it.
Q 03What shape of valley does a glacier carve, which later becomes a fjord?
U-shaped
U-shaped. A river cuts only at its bed and leaves a V, but a glacier fills the valley and grinds the floor and walls together; side valleys are left hanging high above, which is why fjords are lined with waterfalls.
Q 04What is the shallow rock bar across most fjord mouths called, a name borrowed from part of a doorway?
A sill or threshold
A sill or threshold. The glacier lost its bite where it spread out near the coast, and the bar it left can seal in the deep water: in some fjords it is renewed so rarely that the oxygen runs out and the bottom turns foul.
Q 05The Bay of Kotor in Montenegro is often called a fjord but is actually what?
A ria, a drowned river valley
A ria, a drowned river valley. No glacier carved it, and the river that did has vanished into the limestone: only after heavy rain does a spring burst from the cliff at Risan and fall straight into the bay.
Q 06Which author created Slartibartfast, a planet designer who won an award for shaping Norway's fjords?
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy his weary craftsman is woken from a five-million-year sleep to help build a replacement Earth, and when handed Africa he gives it fjords too.
Q 07Which habitat thrives in cold darkness on the floors of some Norwegian fjords?
Coral reefs
Coral reefs. Unlike their tropical cousins these corals need no sunlight, sifting plankton from the current instead, and Norwegian fishermen knew of them for centuries before submersibles showed how vast they are.
Q 08Which Alaskan city is the closest to Tracy Arm, an Inside Passage fjord that ends at the twin Sawyer Glaciers?
Juneau
Juneau. Tour boats weave through the fjord's floating ice all summer, and early one August morning in 2025 a mountainside beside the South Sawyer Glacier collapsed, throwing water almost 500 metres up the opposite wall.
Q 09Which Scottish word for an estuary, as on the Forth, Clyde and Moray, comes from the same root as 'fjord'?
Firth
Firth. Both words go back to an ancient root meaning 'to cross', which also gave English ford, ferry and fare, so a fjord was first of all a passage, a way through by boat.
Q 10Whose word for a sea inlet ends the Irish town names Wexford and Waterford?
The Vikings
The Vikings. They founded both towns, and the '-ford' is no river crossing but Old Norse fjǫrðr, a fjord: Wexford's first name, Veisafjǫrðr, is usually read as 'inlet of the mudflats'.
Q 11Norway's Sognefjord reaches roughly what depth below sea level?
About 1,300 m
About 1,300 m. The deepest soundings lie not at the sea but far up the fjord, where the ice was thickest and ground hardest, and the floor actually rises again towards the ocean.
Q 12Which nickname does the Sognefjord carry as Norway's longest and deepest fjord?
King of the Fjords
King of the Fjords. It runs about 205 km inland, yet ships enter over a rock step only 100 to 200 m down, far shallower than the basin behind it, which lies deeper than the sea outside.
Q 13Among mainland Europe's glaciers, Jostedalsbreen above the inner Sognefjord holds which record?
Largest
Q 21Which Norwegian coastal service has carried post and passengers between remote ports since 1893?
Hurtigruten
Hurtigruten. The 'fast route' sailed on through the night: a pilot's notebook of compass courses and timings let Captain Richard With thread the dark, poorly charted coast.
Q 22Which Norwegian railway, one of Europe's steepest on ordinary rails, drops 865 m in 20 km to reach the Sognefjord?
Flåm Line
Flåm Line. With gradients of up to 5.5 percent, the hour-long ride down from Myrdal on the Oslo to Bergen main line sheds its height through some 20 tunnels, one of them a horseshoe bend inside the mountain.
Q 23What happened in the Oslofjord's Drøbak narrows in April 1940?
Largest. Yet it is no relic of the Ice Age: it probably melted away entirely several thousand years ago, and its oldest ice is thought to be only a millennium or two old.
Q 14Which status did Norway's Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord jointly earn in 2005?
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site. UNESCO listed the pair together, although they lie 120 km apart, as the archetypal fjord landscape, among the longest, deepest and most scenically outstanding anywhere.
Q 15How wide is the Nærøyfjord at its narrowest point?
About 250 m
About 250 m. When winter ice stopped the mail boats on the old Bergen to Oslo post road, carriers walked the shore path and then crossed the frozen fjord on the ice here, at its narrowest point.
Q 16Which waterfall faces the Seven Sisters directly across the Geirangerfjord?
The Suitor
The Suitor. Legend says he proposed to each of the Seven Sisters across the water, was turned down every time and took to drink, which is why his waterfall is shaped like a bottle.
Q 17Which 2015 Norwegian disaster film is set in the fjord village of Geiranger?
The Wave
The Wave. The threat is real: a crack in the nearby mountain Åkerneset widens by several centimetres each year, so geologists monitor it constantly to warn Geiranger before any flood wave.
Q 18Which nickname have the Hardangerfjord's mild, sheltered slopes earned?
The fruit orchard of Norway
The fruit orchard of Norway. The county around it has long led the country in apples, plums and sweet cherries, and the blossom on the fjordside each spring draws visitors of its own.
Q 19Preikestolen, the flat-topped Pulpit Rock near Stavanger, juts out 604 m above which Norwegian fjord?
Lysefjord
Lysefjord. The cliff's flat top is only about 25 m square, and Tom Cruise dangled from its edge in the finale of Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
Q 20Hikers climb to Kjeragbolten, almost 1,000 m above a Norwegian fjord, to be photographed standing on what?
A wedged boulder
A wedged boulder. A melting glacier left the five-cubic-metre rock jammed in a crevice, and walkers can step onto it without any climbing gear above a 984 m drop.
The sinking of the German cruiser Blücher
The sinking of the German cruiser Blücher. Old guns and torpedoes at Oscarsborg fortress sent the invasion flagship down, and the delay let the king, government and parliament get out of Oslo before the Germans arrived.
Q 24Norway's third-longest fjord, at about 130 km, shares its name with which city?
Trondheim
Trondheim. Just off its harbour lies Munkholmen, an islet that has served as an execution ground, a monastery, a fortress and a prison, and is now where the city goes to swim.
Q 25Narvik, the Ofotfjord port fought over in 1940, was built to export what from Sweden?
Iron ore
Iron ore. A railway over the mountains carries it from the Kiruna mines to Narvik's ice-free harbour, which is why both sides raced for this small Arctic town in April 1940.
Q 26Hornindalsvatnet in western Norway, a fjord-like lake gouged out by a glacier, holds what record?
Europe's deepest lake
Europe's deepest lake. It goes down 514 m although its surface lies only 53 m above the sea, so the bed sits some 460 m below sea level, a fjord in everything but salt water.
Q 27The Norwegian Fjord horse always comes in shades of which pale colour?
Dun
Dun. All five recognised shades are duns, and the mane is kept short so that it stands upright and shows off the stripe of dark hair running down its centre between pale edges.
Q 28Nansen Sound, Greely Fiord and Tanquary Fiord form a fjord chain cutting deep into Nunavut's Ellesmere Island in which country?
Canada
Canada. A Norwegian expedition under Otto Sverdrup charted these waters around 1900, and Norway kept a claim to the islands just west of Ellesmere for almost three decades before conceding them.
Q 29Norway's Lærdal road tunnel, built to replace a fjord ferry, holds which world record?
Longest
Longest. At 24.5 km the drive takes about 20 minutes, so its builders blasted out caverns with special lighting along the way to break the monotony and keep drivers alert.
Q 30Scoresby Sund, widely called the world's largest fjord system, cuts into the east coast of which island?
Greenland
Greenland. Ittoqqortoormiit, the town at its mouth, was planted there by Denmark, which settled hunting families on the fjord partly to mark its sovereignty over the east coast.