Icebergs Trivia
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49 free Icebergs trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
An iceberg is simply a chunk of freshwater ice, at least 15 metres long, that has broken off a glacier or ice shelf and floated away, and yet icebergs have sunk the world's most famous ship, been mistaken for islands, been named after Belgium and Jamaica for size, and been eyed as a water supply for the desert. This quiz covers the physics (why only a tenth shows above the water, why old ice is blue, why melting bergs fizz), the geography (Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier, Antarctica's Ross and Larsen shelves, Newfoundland's Iceberg Alley) and the record holders from B-15 to A-68 and A23a. It also covers the human side: the Titanic and the International Ice Patrol founded because of it, radar and satellites, the naming system that gives every big Antarctic berg a letter and number, plans to tow icebergs to South Africa, iceberg beer, Project Habakkuk's ice aircraft carrier, Hemingway's iceberg theory and how iceberg lettuce got its name. Questions run from easy (what 'tip of the iceberg' means) to expert (the year the Ross Ice Shelf was discovered). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on icebergs, ice shelves, glaciers, individual bergs and the Ice Patrol, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Antarctica, Titanic and glaciers quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01An iceberg is a piece of what kind of ice, over 15 metres long, broken off a glacier or ice shelf?
Freshwater ice
Freshwater ice: a berg is a piece of a glacier or ice sheet that formed on land, so it holds no salt even though it floats in the sea; frozen seawater is sea ice, a different thing.
Q 02Roughly what fraction of an iceberg's volume sits above the water?
About one tenth
About one tenth: ice is only slightly less dense than seawater, so roughly nine-tenths of a berg floats out of sight, which gave English the phrase 'tip of the iceberg'.
Q 03The word 'iceberg' is a partial loan translation from which language?
Dutch
Dutch: ijsberg literally means 'ice mountain', and English translated the 'ice' half but left 'berg' alone, which is why it counts as only a partial loan translation.
Q 04What do mariners call chunks of glacier ice that rise less than a metre above the sea, smaller than bergy bits?
Growlers
Growlers, about the size of a grand piano, ride so low that lookouts lose them among the whitecaps, so a ship steering round a big berg can be in more danger from the small pieces beside it.
Q 05Operation Iceberg was the Allied codename for the 1945 invasion of which Pacific island?
Okinawa
Okinawa: the landing on 1 April 1945 was the biggest amphibious assault of the Pacific war, and the island was meant to be the springboard for an invasion of Japan that never had to happen.
Q 06What are the huge icebergs that break off Antarctica's ice shelves called, after their shape?
Tabular
Tabular bergs break off Antarctica's floating ice shelves as flat slabs that can be tens of kilometres wide; Greenland's glaciers tend to shed irregular, jagged ones instead.
Q 07Which Antarctic ice shelf, the world's largest, shed the biggest iceberg ever measured?
Ross
Ross: the shelf released B-15 in March 2000, and the berg's biggest fragment then sat across the entrance to McMurdo Sound for years, stopping the sea ice from clearing and hampering supply ships.
Q 08Iceberg B-15, which broke off Antarctica in 2000 as the biggest berg ever measured, was about the size of which island?
Jamaica
Jamaica: B-15 measured roughly 295 by 37 km, about 11,000 square kilometres, and it was so big that its last fragments were still being tracked 18 years later.
Q 09An iceberg reported by the USS Glacier in 1956, some 335 km long, was said to be larger than which country?
Belgium
Belgium covers a little over 30,000 square kilometres and the berg was put at about 31,000, but the ship's estimate was never confirmed, so satellite-measured bergs hold the verified records.
Q 10In late 2020 the giant iceberg A-68a drifted towards which British territory, raising fears for its penguins and seals?
South Georgia
South Georgia: the berg was about as big as the island itself, and scientists feared it would ground offshore and block penguins and seals from their feeding routes, but it broke up in early 2021.
Q 11Why did iceberg A23a barely move from 1986 to 2020?
It was stuck on the sea bed
It was stuck on the sea bed: soon after breaking away with a Soviet research base on its back, its deep keel dug into the mud of the Weddell Sea, and it sat there for more than 30 years.
Q 12Which organisation is the only one that names and tracks all Antarctic icebergs?
The US National Ice Center
The US National Ice Center, which began as a partnership between the Navy and the weather agency NOAA, names and tracks every Antarctic berg at least 10 nautical miles long, working mostly from satellite images.
Q 13In Antarctic iceberg names such as A-68 or B-15, what does the letter stand for?
Q 21How high above the sea stood the tallest North Atlantic iceberg on record?
168 m, a 55-storey building
168 m, a 55-storey building: the berg was logged by the US icebreaker Eastwind, a height record from the Arctic, whose bergs are generally smaller than Antarctica's.
Q 22Which fast-moving glacier, whose fjord is a UNESCO site, is a prolific iceberg producer?
Jakobshavn
Jakobshavn, on Greenland's west coast, produces around 10 per cent of the island's icebergs and is often named as the likely birthplace of the berg that sank Titanic.
Q 23Greenland, whose glaciers launch most of the North Atlantic's icebergs, is a self-governing territory of which country?
Denmark
The quadrant where it originated
The quadrant where it originated: Antarctica is split into four sectors lettered A to D, and the name then stays with the berg, so A23a, which broke away in 1986, was still being tracked under it almost 40 years later.
Q 14Titanic's collision with an iceberg in April 1912 killed roughly how many people?
About 1,500
About 1,500 of the roughly 2,200 people aboard died, largely because the ship's lifeboats had room for only about half of those on board.
Q 15Which captain kept Titanic steaming at about 22 knots despite a string of ice warnings?
Edward Smith
Edward Smith shifted course a little to the south after the warnings but never slowed down, was off the bridge when the berg was sighted, and went down with his ship.
Q 16Why did Titanic's lookouts have no binoculars on the night she struck the iceberg?
A mix-up at Southampton
A mix-up at Southampton: a last-minute reshuffle of officers before sailing left the crow's nest without a pair, though in the moonless dark binoculars would reportedly have made little difference.
Q 17The International Ice Patrol, formed in 1914, is operated by which body?
The United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard inherited the job: the US Navy patrolled after Titanic sank but could not spare the ships in 1913, so the Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard's forerunner, took over.
Q 18What does the Ice Patrol do each April where Titanic sank?
Lays a wreath from a ship or aircraft
The Ice Patrol lays a wreath from a ship or aircraft over the spot each 15 April, and the crew read out a dedication to Titanic and those who died with her.
Q 19Which treaty came out of the international conference called after Titanic sank?
SOLAS, the Safety of Life at Sea convention
SOLAS, the Safety of Life at Sea convention, was adopted in 1914 as the direct response to Titanic, and its fifth version, from 1974, is generally regarded as the most important treaty on merchant-ship safety.
Q 20Jökulsárlón, a glacier lagoon full of drifting icebergs that appears in two James Bond films, is in which country?
Iceland
Iceland: the lagoon formed only as the glacier behind it retreated, yet it is already the country's deepest lake, and its bergs appear in A View to a Kill and Die Another Day.
Denmark: Greenland runs most of its own domestic affairs but remains part of the Danish kingdom, which is why the island's great berg-filled icefjord sits on the World Heritage list under Denmark's name.
Q 24Which 2012 documentary captured the biggest glacier break-up ever filmed, in a fjord in western Greenland?
Chasing Ice
Chasing Ice: two of photographer James Balog's crew camped for weeks above the glacier before 7.4 cubic kilometres of ice broke away in front of their cameras, which they likened to watching a city fall apart.
Q 25What is the fizzing sound made by a melting iceberg popularly called?
Bergie Seltzer
Bergie Seltzer is high-pressure air, sealed in when the ice formed thousands of years ago, bursting out bubble by bubble as the berg melts; a chip of berg ice dropped in a drink fizzes the same way.
Q 26Why do some old icebergs appear blue?
Compressed, bubble-free ice absorbs red light
Compressed, bubble-free ice absorbs red light, so the further light travels through it the bluer it comes out; the colour belongs to the ice itself and has nothing to do with the sky.
Q 27A huge iceberg toppling back against the ice front it just broke from can set off what?
A 'glacial earthquake'
A 'glacial earthquake': as the berg topples it shoves the glacier's front backwards for several minutes, and seismometers around the world register a tremor of about magnitude 5.
Q 28Which Canadian province taxed iceberg harvesting in 2016 and capped berg water exports?
Newfoundland and Labrador
Its annual iceberg supply exceeds the entire freshwater consumption of the United States; the water goes into bottled water, ice cubes and beer.
Q 29Nick Sloane, who refloated the Costa Concordia, proposed in 2019 to tow an Antarctic iceberg to which drought-hit country?
South Africa
South Africa: after Cape Town's 2018 'Day Zero' water scare, the salvage master planned to catch a berg near Gough Island and let ocean currents do most of the towing to the city, for about $200 million.
Q 30Icebergs are often measured in multiples of which island's area, about 59 square kilometres?
Manhattan
Manhattan is the press's favourite yardstick: the ice island that broke off Greenland's Petermann Glacier in 2010 was reported as four times its size, and a piece that followed in 2012 as twice its size.