Geology Trivia
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98 free Geology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Geology is the story of a 4.54-billion-year-old planet told by its rocks, and these 46 geology trivia questions and answers cover the whole plot. You will meet the people who worked it out, from Nicolas Steno's shark teeth and James Hutton's Siccar Point to Alfred Wegener's drifting continents, Marie Tharp's map of the seafloor and Inge Lehmann's inner core. You will cover the machinery too: the seven or eight major plates, the three kinds of boundary, hotspots under Hawaii and Yellowstone, subduction at the Mariana Trench and the collision still lifting the Himalayas. The quiz also takes in the geologic time scale, the Great Oxidation Event, the Chicxulub impact, the Mohs scale, why pumice floats and marble shines, and the landmarks that make geology visible: the Grand Canyon, the Giant's Causeway, Uluru, Devils Tower and Mount St. Helens. It suits earth-science students, pub-quiz teams and anyone who picks up interesting rocks on walks. Easy questions ask which river carved the Grand Canyon; hard ones ask how old the Acasta Gneiss is. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and geological survey sources, and each question shows its source once you answer.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Scottish scientist, author of the 1788 Theory of the Earth, is called the father of modern geology?
James Hutton
James Hutton saw land endlessly worn down and rebuilt, so he concluded the rocks showed 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end'.
Q 02What name did Alfred Wegener give the single landmass that he said later broke apart into today's continents?
Pangaea
Pangaea was Wegener's name for it, but he died on a Greenland expedition in 1930, decades before geologists accepted continental drift.
Q 03During his lifetime, continental drift pioneer Alfred Wegener was best known for work in which science?
Meteorology
Meteorology took him to Greenland in 1906, where he flew kites and tethered balloons to measure the polar air.
Q 04Clair Patterson dated the Earth at 4.55 billion years using lead from what?
A meteorite
A meteorite had kept its original lead since the solar system formed, while Earth's own rocks have been mixed and recycled by plate tectonics.
Q 05Earth's oldest known minerals, 4.4-billion-year-old zircons, come from the Jack Hills of which country?
Australia
Australia protected part of the Jack Hills on its National Heritage List in 2020, safeguarding the site of Earth's oldest known crystals.
Q 06Which volcano's AD 79 eruption buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius killed the naturalist Pliny the Elder, who had sailed his fleet toward the eruption to rescue people on the coast.
Q 07Divers at Silfra swim through a fissure between two tectonic plates in which country?
Iceland
Iceland's Silfra is fed by glacial meltwater that seeps through porous lava rock for 30 to 100 years, filtering it until it is exceptionally clear.
Q 08Which force do most geologists now consider the main driver of tectonic plate motion?
Slab pull
Slab pull comes from gravity: old seafloor grows cold and dense, and its sinking weight drags the whole plate along behind it.
Q 09Which Danish seismologist discovered Earth's solid inner core in 1936?
Inge Lehmann
Inge Lehmann noticed faint P-waves arriving in the core's 'shadow zone', where none were expected, and explained them with a separate inner core.
Q 10The Mohorovičić discontinuity, or 'Moho', marks the boundary between which two layers of the Earth?
Crust and mantle
Crust and mantle meet at the Moho, which the US Project Mohole tried to drill down to from the seafloor until Congress cut its funding in 1966.
Q 11Which layer of the Earth is liquid and generates the Earth's magnetic field?
The outer core
The outer core does not transmit seismic S-waves, which cannot travel through liquid, and that is how seismologists know it is molten.
Q 12In which epoch of the geologic time scale are we living, which began about 11,700 years ago?
Holocene
Holocene is still official: in 2024 geologists rejected a proposal to follow it with a new 'Anthropocene' epoch marking human impact.
Q 13Which of these is one of the four eons that divide Earth's history?
Hadean
The Hadean is named after Hades, the Greek underworld, for the intense heat of the newly formed Earth.
Q 21On the Mohs hardness scale devised in 1812, which mineral sits at 1, the softest?
Talc
Talc sits at 1 because Mohs ranked his ten minerals simply by which one scratches another, not by any measured hardness.
Q 22Which mineral group makes up more than half of the Earth's crust?
Feldspar
Feldspar breaks down into clay minerals such as kaolinite as it weathers, so much of the clay in the ground began as feldspar.
Q 23The Giant's Causeway's roughly 40,000 interlocking columns are made of which volcanic rock?
Basalt
Basalt columns at the Causeway were painted by Susanna Drury, and engravings of her pictures were copied into the French Encyclopédie.
Q 14Nicolas Steno, a founder of modern geology, realised that 'tongue stones' found in rocks were actually what?
Fossil shark teeth
Fossil shark teeth sitting inside solid rock led Steno to ask how one solid could come to lie within another, the question behind his rules for rock layers.
Q 15Which principle popularised by Charles Lyell holds that 'the present is the key to the past'?
Uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism shaped young Charles Darwin, who took the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology aboard HMS Beagle in 1831.
Q 16The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption began with the largest what above sea level in recorded history?
Landslide
The landslide released the pressure on the volcano's magma, which then exploded through the sliding debris.
Q 17The Chicxulub crater lies buried beneath which peninsula?
Yucatán
Yucatán's asteroid strike set off earthquakes and giant tsunamis and spread a blanket of debris across the whole Earth.
Q 18Which element did Luis and Walter Alvarez find concentrated in the clay layer marking the end of the Cretaceous?
Iridium
Iridium spikes in that clay all around the world, and in 1980 the Alvarez team argued it came from a giant asteroid impact.
Q 19On the Richter scale, each whole-number step multiplies the measured amplitude by what factor?
Ten
Ten times the amplitude per step, but magnitudes based only on wave amplitude misjudge very large quakes, so seismologists now prefer moment magnitude.
Q 20The most powerful earthquake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5 in 1960, struck which country?
Chile
Chile's 1960 quake sent tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
Q 24The Grand Canyon's oldest rocks were exposed by which river cutting down through them?
The Colorado River
The Colorado River cut through layer after layer as the land rose, exposing rocks nearly 2 billion years old.
Q 25The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is which type of plate boundary?
Divergent
Divergent boundaries pull apart, so along the ridge new seafloor keeps forming as the plates separate about 2.5 cm a year.
Q 26Which scientist's 1950s maps of the Atlantic seafloor, made with Bruce Heezen, revealed a rift valley along its ridge?
Marie Tharp
Marie Tharp drew the maps from data Heezen gathered at sea, because women were then barred from working aboard research ships.
Q 27The San Andreas Fault marks the boundary between the North American Plate and which other?
Pacific
The Pacific Plate moves northwest past North America along the fault, and a sudden slip in 1906 caused the great San Francisco earthquake.
Q 28Yellowstone's most recent supereruption left behind what kind of vast volcanic feature?
A caldera
A caldera forms when the ground collapses into a magma chamber emptied by a giant eruption, and Yellowstone has three of them.
Q 29Which Canadian geophysicist proposed in 1963 that Hawaii formed as the seafloor moved over a hotspot?
J. Tuzo Wilson
J. Tuzo Wilson argued the moving plate carries each island away from a fixed hotspot until its volcanoes die, so the chain grows older to the northwest.
Q 30The Himalayas are still rising because of the collision of the Eurasian Plate with which other plate?
Indian
The Indian Plate carried India north until it hit Asia, and that collision is still pushing the peaks higher.