Fog
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40 free Fog trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Fog is weather at its most mysterious: a cloud that settles on the ground, swallows landmarks and muffles sound. It has grounded aircraft, hidden armies, sunk ships and shut down cities, and it has given painters, poets and horror directors some of their best material. This quiz starts with the science: what fog is, how the main types form, and the strange effects it produces, from ghostly bows to giant shadows. Then it travels to the foggiest coasts, valleys and deserts on Earth, and to the plants, animals and people who rely on fog to survive. History and culture round it out, with famous accidents and escapes, the pollution that once choked great cities, and fog on film, on canvas and in print, including the 1980 cult horror film The Fog. It suits weather fans, students, teachers planning a science lesson and anyone hosting a quiz night.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which New York skyscraper was hit in July 1945 by a B-25 bomber lost in thick fog?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building was struck between its 78th and 80th floors, yet many floors reopened for business the following Monday. The pilot had been unable to land at LaGuardia because of the weather.
Q 02Which first name do San Franciscans give their summer fog, after a giant in the film Big Fish?
Karl
Karl the Fog began in 2010 as an anonymous Twitter account for the city's fog, and the name has been widely used ever since. A companion Instagram account followed.
Q 03Which towering trees of California's northern shore drink summer fog directly through their leaves?
Coast redwoods
Coast redwoods grow tallest where fog is most frequent, and the tallest trees thin out wherever it becomes rarer. Fog that drips from their foliage also waters the forest floor around their roots.
Q 04Aviation's deadliest accident, a 1977 collision of two 747s in dense fog, happened on which island?
Tenerife
Tenerife was so fogbound that neither crew could see the other jet on the runway, and the controller could see neither of them. The collision killed 583 people.
Q 05The London Fog, a milky vanilla drink invented in Vancouver in the 1990s, is made with which tea?
Earl Grey
Earl Grey gives the drink its citrusy bergamot note under the steamed milk. Mary Loria came up with it at a Vancouver cafe while she was pregnant, then kept ordering it elsewhere until it caught on.
Q 06Which Halloween director made The Fog, a 1980 film about drowned sailors haunting a coastal town?
John Carpenter
John Carpenter also composed the film's score and co-wrote its script. The idea came to him on a trip to England, as he watched an eerie fog roll across the land near Stonehenge.
Q 07A fogbow forms like a rainbow, but fog's tiny droplets usually leave the arc looking which color?
White
White is what remains because droplets smaller than 0.05 mm smear the colors together through diffraction. A fogbow may still keep a faint reddish outer edge and a bluish inner one.
Q 08Victorian London's thick, greenish-yellow coal-smoke fogs were nicknamed after which hearty food?
Pea soup
Pea soup gave the pea-souper its name, a fog tinted by tarry soot and sulfur dioxide. The joke later ran in reverse: a thick pea and ham soup became known as a London particular.
Q 09Foghorn Leghorn, the booming Looney Tunes character with a Southern accent, is which kind of animal?
A rooster
A rooster, Foghorn Leghorn was modeled on Senator Claghorn, a blustery Southern politician from a 1940s radio show. Leghorn is a real breed of chicken that takes its name from an Italian port.
Q 10Which poet wrote the short poem Fog, his American haiku, while waiting to interview a judge?
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was carrying a book of Japanese haiku when he cut through a park and saw fog over the harbor. With forty minutes to kill, he wrote the poem on a scrap of newsprint.
Q 11By international definition, fog becomes mere mist once visibility improves beyond which distance?
1 kilometer
1 kilometer, roughly 0.62 miles, is the cut-off: anything murkier counts as fog and anything clearer is only mist. Both are the same thing, tiny water droplets hanging in the air near the ground.
Q 12Which type of fog forms after sunset on clear, calm nights as the ground loses its heat to the sky?
Radiation fog
Radiation fog is at its thickest shortly after sunrise, before the sun grows strong enough to evaporate it. It favors valleys and swampy ground, where cold air drains downhill and collects.
Q 13Fog typically forms once the air cools to within a few degrees of which other temperature?
Dew point
Q 21The Grand Banks, among Earth's foggiest places and richest fishing grounds, lie off which island?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland's offshore banks sit where the cold Labrador Current mixes with the warm Gulf Stream, which is what breeds the fog. Overfishing there forced the cod fishery to close in 1992.
Q 22Which word do Scots use for the cold sea fog that rolls onto the east coast off the North Sea?
Haar
Haar forms mostly between April and September, when warm air passes over the cold sea and its moisture condenses. The same fog also goes by the name sea fret.
Q 23Garúa, a cold coastal fog and drizzle, keeps which South American capital gray through winter?
Lima
Lima gets less sunshine in a year than London, exceptionally little for a city in the tropics. The chill comes from the cold Humboldt Current offshore, which also keeps the coast a desert.
Dew point is the temperature at which air can hold no more water vapor, so the surplus condenses into droplets. Fog appears when the air is less than about 2.5 °C (4.5 °F) above it.
Q 14Which flat, featureless cloud type is essentially fog that sits above the ground?
Stratus
Stratus often starts life as morning fog that lifts off the ground, and some people simply call it high fog. Its name comes from a prefix meaning layer.
Q 15Sea smoke, a wispy fog common in polar regions, forms when very cold air drifts over what?
Warmer water
Warmer water gives off vapor that condenses the moment it meets the frigid air, much like steam rising from a hot bath. Sailors also know the effect as frost smoke.
Q 16Freezing fog leaves trees, fences and power lines coated in which kind of ice?
Rime
Rime forms when supercooled fog droplets freeze onto whatever they touch. Freezing rain leaves a different, glassy coating known as glaze.
Q 17Low-lying stage fog is classically made by dropping which substance into hot water?
Dry ice
Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, which turns straight to gas in the hot water and chills the vapor into a thick fog. A fan then steers the cloud so that it lies low to the ground.
Q 18In Hawaii, the fog-like haze known as vog, a word modeled on smog, is created mainly by what?
Volcanic gases
Volcanic gases from Kilauea, chiefly sulfur dioxide, react with sunlight, oxygen and moisture to make the haze. In 2008 the volcano was measured releasing 2,000 to 4,000 tons of the gas every day.
Q 19Which astronomy term for a glowing cloud of gas and dust is simply the Latin word for cloud or fog?
Nebula
Nebula once covered any fuzzy patch in the night sky: Charles Messier's catalog of 103 nebulae included objects now known to be galaxies. He listed them because they could be mistaken for comets.
Q 20Robert Foulis reportedly thought up the foghorn when which piano sounds reached him through fog?
The lowest notes
The lowest notes were all he could hear of his daughter's playing as he walked home one foggy night in 1853. Another engineer installed the horn from his plans, and Foulis never won a patent for it.
Q 24Mesh nets on El Tofo mountain once harvested fog for the village of Chungungo in which country?
Chile
Chile's project grew to 94 nylon mesh collectors with a pipeline down the mountain, supplying all 300 inhabitants of the village. Fog droplets catch on the netting and trickle into a trough below.
Q 25Beetles and the Welwitschia plant live on fog rolling off the Atlantic into which African desert?
Namib
Namib fog beetles angle their bodies into the dawn breeze so that droplets gather on their backs and roll down to their mouths. The coast can have more than 180 days of thick fog a year.
Q 26Tule fog, the winter fog of California's Central Valley, is named after a plant of which habitat?
Wetlands
Wetlands full of tule, a tall marsh sedge, gave the fog its name. By 2005 tule fog was the leading cause of weather-related accidents in California.
Q 27The Brocken specter, a giant shadow cast onto fog, is named after a peak in which German mountains?
Harz
Harz hikers on the fog-prone Brocken, the highest peak of the range, see their own shadows thrown onto the mist. The shadow only seems enormous, because the eye misjudges how far away the cloud is.
Q 28Foggy Bottom, a Washington neighborhood, has become a nickname for which arm of the US government?
State Department
The State Department moved its headquarters there in 1947. Nobody is sure how the district got its name: it may recall its swampy riverside ground, or the fog that mingled with smoke from its old factories.
Q 29Pogonip, a Western US word for freezing fog, comes from which Native American language?
Shoshone
Shoshone gave the word to The Old Farmer's Almanac, whose December calendar regularly tells readers to beware the pogonip. Jack London put a deadly one into his story collection Smoke Bellew.
Q 30Which Chinese megacity, the country's wartime capital in the 1940s, is nicknamed the Fog City?
Chongqing
Chongqing has fog on more than 100 days a year. Built on mountains where the Jialing River joins the Yangtze, the city was heavily bombed by Japan while it served as the seat of government.