Great Rift Valley Trivia
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49 free Great Rift Valley trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Great Rift Valley trivia quiz covers the 6,500-kilometre chain of depressions that runs from Syria through the Red Sea to Mozambique. The easy questions are the ones any geography student knows: what a rift valley is, which continent is slowly splitting, the lowest point on Earth's land surface, the highest mountain in Africa, and where Lucy and the Leakeys' fossils were found. From there it moves into the geology: the African, Somali and Nubian plates, the Afar triple junction, the eastern Gregory and western Albertine branches, and the mantle plumes underneath. The hard end covers the record-holders and the odd corners: the second-deepest lake on Earth, the lake with more fish species than any other, the world's largest desert lake, the only active carbonatite volcano, the lava lake that has burned since 1906, the lake that could erupt with dissolved gas, the calcifying waters of Natron and the flamingos that breed there, plus the explorers Thomson, Gregory, Burton, Speke and Teleki who mapped and named it all. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the rift system, its lakes, volcanoes and fossil sites, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In its original definition, the Great Rift Valley runs from northern Syria to which African country?
Mozambique
Mozambique: the rift has been tearing open for millions of years, and the volcanic activity along it built Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, Africa's two highest mountains.
Q 02Which British geologist introduced the term Great Rift Valley in 1896?
John Walter Gregory
John Walter Gregory coined it as the title of his 1896 book about a journey to Mount Kenya and Lake Baringo. Still exploring at 68, he drowned when his canoe overturned on a river in Peru.
Q 03A rift valley is a long, steep-sided valley that has done what?
Dropped between a series of faults
Dropped between a series of faults: as the crust is stretched, a block of land sinks between parallel fractures, so the valley is made by collapse from below rather than carved from above by water or ice.
Q 04The East African Rift is slowly splitting the African plate into which two plates?
Somali and Nubian
Somali and Nubian: as the two plates part, the small Victoria plate caught between them is being turned anticlockwise, the opposite way to its neighbours.
Q 05If the East African Rift keeps widening, what is expected to form between its two sides?
A new ocean
A new ocean: the sides part by only a few millimetres a year, so the sea is millions of years away, yet in Ethiopia's Danakil Depression the rift floor already lies below sea level.
Q 06Rift Valley fever, first identified among sheep in Kenya in 1931, spreads between animals mainly through the bite of what?
Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes carry the virus, so outbreaks follow unusually heavy rains and floods, when huge numbers hatch; people usually catch it from the blood or raw milk of infected animals.
Q 07Where do the Red Sea Rift, the Aden Ridge and the East African Rift meet?
The Afar triple junction
The Afar triple junction is still tearing open: in September 2005 a 60 km stretch of the Afar rift was wrenched apart by as much as 8 metres as molten rock forced its way in.
Q 08Lake Albert, in the rift's western branch, was named in 1864 for which royal?
Britain's Prince Albert
Britain's Prince Albert had died in 1861, and explorer Samuel Baker, reaching the lake in 1864 while searching for the Nile's headwaters, named it for Queen Victoria's late consort.
Q 09The Dead Sea Transform, the fault behind the rift's Asian section, separates the African plate from which other plate?
The Arabian plate
The Arabian plate is sliding north past Africa along this fault and has shifted about 105 km so far; a basin pulled open along the way now holds the Dead Sea.
Q 10Which river flows south along the rift valley floor and empties into the Dead Sea?
The Jordan
The Jordan ends in the Dead Sea, which has no outlet; so much of the river is now diverted for farms and cities that the sea's surface has been falling by about a metre a year.
Q 11The shores of the Dead Sea hold which world record?
Lowest land on Earth
Lowest land on Earth: the shore lies more than 400 metres below sea level and keeps dropping as the water retreats, which has opened sinkholes along the coast.
Q 12The Dead Sea is roughly how many times saltier than the ocean?
10
About 10 times: the brine is so dense that bathers float without trying, and fish swept in by floods die quickly.
Q 13The Virunga volcanoes of the rift's western branch are the best-known home of which endangered great apes?
Gorillas
Gorillas: Dian Fossey studied mountain gorillas from a camp between two of the Virunga volcanoes, and after decades of protection they had recovered to just over 1,000 by 2019.
Q 21Which Kenyan town on the rift's edge calls itself the Home of Champions for its distance runners?
Iten
Iten: Colm O'Connell, an Irish missionary who came in 1976 to teach geography, started coaching his pupils with no athletics experience and went on to train a string of world and Olympic champions.
Q 22Which lake in the rift's western branch is the world's longest freshwater lake and its second deepest?
Tanganyika
Tanganyika was first reached by Europeans in 1858, when Burton and Speke arrived hunting for the headwaters of the Nile, which Speke went on to find later that year at Lake Victoria.
Q 23Lake Malawi holds more species of fish than any other lake, most of them from which family?
Cichlids
Q 14The Arabah, the dry section of the rift south of the Dead Sea, ends at which gulf?
Aqaba
Aqaba: its gulf is the rift carried on under water, which is why it plunges more than 1,500 metres while the wider Gulf of Suez next door is under 100 metres deep.
Q 15For centuries, caravans have carried which commodity out of Ethiopia's Danakil Depression?
Salt
Salt: bars cut from the depression's salt flats were carried up to the highlands and served as money across Ethiopia into the 20th century.
Q 16Dallol in the Danakil Depression holds what climatic record?
Hottest year-round average temperature
Hottest year-round average temperature: about 35 °C, measured from 1960 to 1966 while a mining company prospected there; Dallol has since emptied into a ghost town.
Q 17Erta Ale, a volcano in northern Ethiopia, has held what rare feature at its summit for decades?
A lava lake
A lava lake: molten rock has churned in Erta Ale's summit pit since at least 1967, and possibly since 1906, at times rising high enough to spill over the rim.
Q 18The unique soda-rich lava of Tanzania's Ol Doinyo Lengai erupts black, then weathers to which colour?
White
White: the lava is natrocarbonatite, which no other active volcano erupts, and it is the coolest lava known, so by day it looks more like flowing mud than molten rock.
Q 19What do the Maasai call Ol Doinyo Lengai?
The Mountain of God
The Mountain of God: the Maasai hold it to be the home of their god Engai, and when it erupted in 2007 and 2008 its ash emptied whole villages of the herders living around it.
Q 20Kilimanjaro is Africa's highest peak and also the world's highest what?
Free-standing mountain
Free-standing mountain: Kilimanjaro is a lone pile of three volcanoes rather than a peak in a range, so it rises nearly 4,900 metres straight from the plains around it.
Cichlids: hundreds of kinds evolved inside this one lake, nearly all of them found nowhere else, and their bright colours have made them favourites of aquarium keepers.
Q 24Lake Victoria, though not in a rift trough itself, is Africa's largest lake and the world's largest lake of what kind?
Tropical
Tropical: Lake Victoria is the largest lake in the tropics yet only about 80 metres deep, because it fills a shallow sag between the rift's two branches rather than a rift trench.
Q 25Which invasive fish has driven many of Lake Victoria's endemic species to extinction?
Nile perch
Nile perch were released into the lake in the 1950s; the predators, which can grow to nearly two metres, ate through the native fish until several hundred species had died out or nearly so.
Q 26Which desert lake in northern Kenya is nicknamed the Jade Sea for the colour of its water?
Lake Turkana
Lake Turkana has no outlet, so the water its rivers pour in can leave only by evaporation, which is why so large a lake is brackish.
Q 27The Jade Sea's colonial-era name, Lake Rudolf, honoured the crown prince of which empire?
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary: Count Sámuel Teleki named the lake in 1888 for Crown Prince Rudolf, who died at his Mayerling hunting lodge the following year; Kenya dropped the colonial name in 1975.
Q 28Lake Natron's water can reach a pH above 12 and does what to the bodies of animals that die in it?
Calcifies them
Calcifies them: minerals in the caustic water crust the carcasses as they dry, leaving drowned birds looking like stone statues, which photographer Nick Brandt collected and posed for a famous series.
Q 29Lake Natron is the only regular East African breeding site for which birds?
Lesser flamingos
Lesser flamingos nest far out on the lake's soda flats because the caustic water around them keeps predators away, which leaves East Africa's whole flock relying on this one lake.
Q 30Lake Kivu, like Cameroon's Lake Nyos, holds enough dissolved gas to suffer which rare catastrophe?
Limnic eruptions
Limnic eruptions: gas held in the deep water can burst out all at once, and the carbon dioxide cloud that Lake Nyos released in 1986 suffocated about 1,700 people.