70 free Lake trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
62 free lake trivia questions with answers. Sixty questions on lakes, from record-holders to oddities. The first stretch is the big names: the Caspian, Baikal's depth and age, Titicaca's floating islands, Superior and its Great Lake siblings, Victoria, Tanganyika, Malawi's 700 cichlids, Loch Ness, Windermere and Crater Lake. Then it turns to lake science: oxbows, kettles, endorheic basins, why the Dead Sea floats you, what a limnic eruption is and which moon has methane lakes. The back half is the strange stuff. Lakes that are pink, lakes that exploded, a lake that vanished into a salt mine in an afternoon, a sea that dried up because of cotton, the lightning capital of the world, a crater you can see from space, and the lakes of story and stage: Excalibur, Swan Lake, Lake Wobegon and Betty White's crocodile. It suits geography classes, pub quizzes and anyone who has stood on a shore and wondered how deep it goes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual lakes and landforms, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which body of water is the world's largest lake, though it is usually called a sea?
Caspian Sea
It is bordered by five countries and is famous for caviar and oil, and its shores are below sea level.
Q 02Which body of water is the deepest in the world, plunging more than a mile down?
Baikal
Its sheer depth means it holds 22-23% of the world's fresh surface water, more than all the North American Great Lakes together.
Q 03The world's deepest lake, in Siberia, is also its oldest. Roughly how old is it?
25-30 million years
Most lakes are geologically young; this one sits in an active rift and just keeps getting deeper.
Q 04What is the freshwater seal species found only in Lake Baikal called?
Nerpa
Its main prey is the golomyanka, a translucent oily fish that makes up the lake's biggest fish biomass.
Q 05Often called the highest navigable lake in the world, Titicaca sits on the border of which two countries?
Peru and Bolivia
Its surface is 3,812 metres above sea level, and the Uros people live on islands they build from cut totora reeds.
Q 06The Uros people of Lake Titicaca build their floating islands out of what?
Totora reeds
The buoyant sedge grows thickly in the shallows and is layered and constantly topped up as the bottom rots away.
Q 07Which lake is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area?
Superior
By volume it is only third, behind Baikal and Tanganyika, which are far deeper.
Q 08The Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a November 1975 storm on which of the Great Lakes?
Superior
Gordon Lightfoot's song calls the lake 'Gitche Gumee', borrowing the name from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.
Q 09Together, the five North American Great Lakes hold roughly what share of the world's surface fresh water?
More than one-fifth
Hydrologically, Michigan and Huron are a single body of water joined at the Straits of Mackinac.
Q 10Which is the only one of the Great Lakes located entirely within the United States?
Michigan
Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary and Green Bay all sit on its shores.
Q 11Which of the Great Lakes is the shallowest and smallest by volume, and therefore also the warmest?
Erie
Its warmth nearly became a problem in 1999 for two nuclear plants that rely on cool lake water.
Q 12Lake Victoria shares its water among Tanzania, Uganda and which other country?
Kenya
John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore in 1858 and renamed it after Queen Victoria; the invasive Nile perch has since wiped out many native species.
Q 13Which African lake is the world's longest freshwater lake?
Tanganyika
David Livingstone visited it repeatedly on his last expedition while hunting for the source of the Nile.
Q 21The shores of the Dead Sea are the lowest land on Earth, at roughly how far below sea level?
440 metres
Its water is about 9.6 times saltier than the ocean, dense enough that swimming feels like floating.
Q 22The Dead Sea, with salinity around 34%, is roughly how much saltier than the ocean?
Nearly tenfold
Nothing much can live in it, which is how it got its name; its density is 1.24 kg per litre.
Q 23The big salt lake beside Salt Lake City, Utah, is the remnant of which vast prehistoric lake?
Bonneville
The old lakebed left behind the Bonneville Salt Flats, and the modern lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere.
Q 14Which lake is home to more species of fish than any other, including at least 700 species of cichlids?
Malawi
Livingstone reached it in 1859 and named it Lake Nyasa, a name Tanzania still uses.
Q 15Loch Ness contains more water than all the lakes of which two countries combined?
England and Wales
It is only Scotland's second-largest loch by area, but its great depth makes it the largest by volume in the British Isles.
Q 16Which loch is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area?
Lomond
Within the whole UK it is beaten only by Lough Neagh and Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.
Q 17Windermere, the largest body of water in England, lies in which national park?
The Lake District
It is a ribbon lake, and Bowness is the only town that actually touches its shore.
Q 18Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are collectively known by what name?
The Lake Poets
Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb moved in the same circle in England's Lake District.
Q 19Crater Lake fills a caldera left by the collapse of which volcano?
Mount Mazama
The collapse happened about 7,700 years ago, and Wizard Island is a cinder cone that grew afterwards.
Q 20How deep is Crater Lake, making it the deepest in the United States?
594 metres
That is 1,949 feet, and the water is famous for its intense blue colour and clarity.
Q 24Robert Smithson's 1970 land artwork Spiral Jetty coils into which body of water in the American West?
Great Salt Lake
It is only visible when the water drops below about 4,198 feet above sea level, so it spent years submerged.
Q 25Lake Como's distinctive shape, carved by the ancient Adda glacier, resembles which letter?
An inverted Y
At over 400 metres deep it is one of Europe's deepest lakes, though only Italy's third-largest after Garda and Maggiore.
Q 26A holiday of ghost-story writing beside which lake produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?
Geneva
Locals call it Le Léman; it is the largest lake on the course of the Rhône.
Q 27Lake Constance, known in German as the Bodensee, sits where which three countries meet?
Germany, Switzerland and Austria
The Rhine flows in at one end and out at the other, so it is really three connected bodies of water.
Q 28Why did the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest lake, shrink to a tenth of its size by 2007?
Soviet irrigation diverted its rivers
The cotton fields it fed left behind a new desert, the Aralkum, and the lake split into four separate pieces.
Q 29A shrinking Sahel lake borders Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and which fourth country that shares its name?
Chad
Its open water fell from 25,000 square km in 1960 to about 2,000 by 1980 through drought and diversion.
Q 30Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by capacity, was created by which dam?
Hoover Dam
It lies on the Colorado River about 24 miles east of Las Vegas, straddling Nevada and Arizona.