Glacier Trivia
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100 free Glacier trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This glacier trivia quiz covers the slow rivers of ice that shaped half the world's landscapes. The easy questions handle the basics: what a glacier is, why the ice looks blue, how much of the planet's fresh water it holds, and which continent has none. The harder end goes into glaciology proper: how snow becomes firn and then ice, why a glacier needs 50 metres of thickness before it flows, crevasses and seracs, the difference between plucking and abrasion, moraines, drumlins, eskers and roches moutonnees, the surge that can move ice 90 metres a day, glacial earthquakes in Greenland, the Little Ice Age, isostatic rebound, ice cores as climate records, and the nitrogen-ice glaciers New Horizons found on Pluto. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our geology, Ice Age, Antarctica and Glacier National Park quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds what, over many years?
Its ablation
Its ablation, the ice lost to melting, evaporation and calving: while snowfall keeps pace a glacier holds steady or grows, and once losses pull ahead its front starts to retreat.
Q 02Glaciers are found on every continent except the mainland of which one?
Australia
Australia: glaciers last sat on its Snowy Mountains during the ice age, and the small lakes they scooped out near Mount Kosciuszko are still there.
Q 03Since 1984, which two countries' troops have faced off on the Siachen Glacier, often called the world's highest battlefield?
India and Pakistan
India and Pakistan: most of the soldiers lost there died not in combat but from avalanches, exposure and altitude sickness, and the shelling stopped only with a ceasefire in 2003.
Q 04At the peak of the last ice age, ice sheets buried nearly all of which present-day country?
Canada
Canada: the ice sheet that smothered it also carved out the basins that later filled with meltwater to become the Great Lakes.
Q 05Which mummy, more than 5,000 years old, did hikers find melting out of glacier ice in the Alps in 1991?
Ötzi
Ötzi: he did not simply freeze on the mountain pass, because an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder shows that someone shot him.
Q 06Why does glacier ice look blue?
It absorbs red light and has no air bubbles
It absorbs red light and has no air bubbles: ordinary ice looks white because trapped bubbles scatter every colour, but a glacier's weight squeezes them out, so light sinks deep enough to lose its red.
Q 07Who argued that glaciers had carved Yosemite Valley, against a state geologist who said its floor had dropped?
John Muir
John Muir: he found a living glacier in the high Sierra in 1871 to back his case, though geologists now say he went too far in thinking ice alone had carved the whole valley.
Q 08Glacier National Park, where the ice has been shrinking since about 1850, is in which US state?
Montana
Montana: the park has had to replace its own exhibits warning that the glaciers would be gone by 2020, because the ice, though still shrinking, outlasted that forecast.
Q 09What do glaciologists call a dome of glacier ice covering less than 50,000 square kilometres, such as Europe's Vatnajökull?
An ice cap
An ice cap: past that size the same kind of dome is called an ice sheet, and although several spread across the northern continents in the last ice age, only two are left today.
Q 10If Earth's two great ice sheets melted completely, roughly how far would global sea level rise?
About 70 metres
About 70 metres, around 60 of them from Antarctica alone: enough to flood every coastal city on the planet and give each continent a new shoreline.
Q 11What are rocky peaks that poke up through an ice sheet called?
Nunataks
Nunataks, from an Inuit word: botanists once thought Arctic plants sat out the ice ages on these bare summits, though later studies have cast doubt on the idea.
Q 12Glaciers that end in the sea and calve icebergs are known as what?
Tidewater
They go through centuries-long cycles of advance and retreat that are far less tied to climate than other glaciers.
Q 13A glacier that is at melting point from surface to base all year round is called what?
Temperate
Temperate: because its ice sits at melting point, water reaches the bed and lets the whole glacier slide over the rock, while a polar glacier stays frozen to its bed and barely slips at the base.
Q 21Isolated pinnacles of ice left where the cracks in a glacier's surface intersect are called what?
Seracs
Seracs: the word is French for a white whey cheese, given because a glacier crowded with these blocks of ice looks like a mass of unpressed curds.
Q 22The combined width of a glacier's dark and light ogive bands usually equals what?
Its annual movement
Its annual movement: a dark band forms in summer and a light one in winter as ice passes through an icefall, so each pair marks one year's travel and the stripes can be read like tree rings.
Q 23What triggers the 'glacial earthquakes' that seismometers around the world can detect?
A giant iceberg breaking off
Q 14What is the granular, partly compacted snow that is on its way to becoming glacial ice called?
Firn
Firn: the name comes from a Swiss German word meaning 'of last year', because it is snow that has outlasted at least one summer's melt without yet turning to ice.
Q 15What is the armchair-shaped hollow, also called a corrie or cwm, where a glacier usually begins?
A cirque
A cirque: snow packs into the hollow until ice spills over its lip, and when the glacier finally melts away the bowl is often left holding a small mountain lake called a tarn.
Q 16What sets a glacier apart from a year-round snowfield?
It moves under its own weight
It moves under its own weight: once the ice is some tens of metres thick, the pressure makes its lower layers deform, and the whole mass begins to creep.
Q 17What nickname do glaciologists give the balls of moss that roll around the surface of some glaciers?
Glacier mice
Glacier mice: no relation to rodents, they roll about the ice gathering moss as they go, and each ball shelters its own tiny community of springtails, worms and water bears.
Q 18When a glacier is said to be retreating, what is its ice actually doing?
Still flowing downhill
Still flowing downhill: a glacier works like a conveyor belt that never reverses, and its front 'retreats' only because the end melts away faster than new ice arrives.
Q 19What are the deep cracks that open in the brittle surface ice of a glacier called?
Crevasses
Crevasses: they open where the ice is stretched over steeper or faster ground, and the most dangerous are those hidden beneath a thin bridge of drifted snow.
Q 20What is a moulin?
A meltwater shaft in a glacier
A meltwater shaft in a glacier: the name is French for 'mill', and the water it swallows can reach the bed far below, where it helps the ice slide.
A giant iceberg breaking off: as the berg capsizes it shoves the glacier's front backwards for a few minutes, a jolt of about magnitude 5 that instruments can pick up across the planet.
Q 24What are the two principal processes by which glaciers erode terrain?
Plucking and abrasion
Plucking and abrasion: the ice freezes onto loosened blocks of bedrock and tears them out, then drags that rubble along its bed like coarse sandpaper, smoothing and scoring the rock below.
Q 25Which sediment turns meltwater rivers milky and many glacial lakes turquoise?
Rock flour
Rock flour: ice drags stones across its bed until both are worn to grains so fine that they stay suspended in the meltwater instead of settling.
Q 26Long scratches carved into bedrock by boulders in a moving glacier are called what?
Striations
Striations: rock stuck in the glacier's sole turns it into coarse sandpaper, and because the scratches line up with the ice's path, scientists read them to work out which way vanished glaciers flowed.
Q 27Large boulders carried far from their source and dropped by a glacier are called what?
Glacial erratics
Glacial erratics: the name comes from the Latin for wandering, and matching one to its home bedrock shows geologists which way the ice carried it.
Q 28What is a moraine formed at the foot of a glacier called?
Terminal
Terminal: it marks the farthest line the ice front reached, and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are partly built of the one the last ice sheet left off New England.
Q 29What are the streamlined, canoe-shaped hills called that glaciers left in swarms across upstate New York?
Drumlins
Drumlins: the name comes from an Irish word for a ridge, and because flowing ice streamlined each one along its own path, scientists read a field of them like a compass for a vanished glacier.
Q 30Glaciers turn V-shaped river valleys into valleys shaped like which letter?
U
U: a river saws only a narrow notch, but a glacier fills the whole valley and grinds its floor and walls together, leaving a flat bottom and steep sides, as in Yosemite Valley.