60 free Mediterranean Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Mediterranean is a small sea with an enormous story. It covers less than 1% of the world's ocean surface, yet it saw the rise of Egypt, Minoan Crete, Phoenicia, Greece and Rome, and it is the only sea whose entire coastline was ever ruled by one state. This quiz starts with the geography a beginner can manage: the 14 km strait that joins it to the Atlantic, the canal that joins it to the Red Sea, its two largest islands and its 21 coastal countries. Then it digs deeper into the Messinian salinity crisis that dried the sea out and the Zanclean flood that refilled it, the Calypso Deep, the salty two-layer flow through Gibraltar and the 100-year residence time that makes it a climate bellwether. History gets its share too: Darius's canal, Mare Nostrum, the Barbary pirates and the million Europeans they enslaved, Lepanto, Nelson at Aboukir Bay, the Suez Canal and the invasive Red Sea species it let in. So do the natural hazards (Thera, Vesuvius, Etna, the 1908 Messina tsunami) and the wildlife, from the monk seal to the orcas that vanished in the 1980s. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Mediterranean and its features, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Atlantic Ocean, Greece and Italy quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Mediterranean Sea lies between which three continents?
Europe, Asia and Africa
It is almost completely enclosed by land, with the Levant to the east, Anatolia and Southern Europe to the north and North Africa to the south.
Q 02How wide is the Strait of Gibraltar at its narrowest, where it separates Spain from Morocco?
14 km
The strait is the sea's only natural link to the Atlantic, and the ancients called its flanking rocks the Pillars of Hercules.
Q 03The Mediterranean connects to the Black Sea through which strait?
Bosporus
The Dardanelles lead into the Sea of Marmara first; the Bosporus then cuts through Istanbul into the Black Sea.
Q 04Roughly what share of the global ocean surface does the Mediterranean cover?
0.7%
That is about 2.5 million square kilometres, split among fifteen marginal seas.
Q 05What does 'Mediterranean' literally mean in Latin?
In the middle of land
The word combines medius (middle) and terra (land), a calque of the Greek mesogeios.
Q 06What Latin name did the Romans give the sea once the Empire controlled all its shores?
Mare Nostrum
It means 'Our Sea'; earlier Romans had called it Mare Magnum (Great Sea) or Mare Internum (Internal Sea).
Q 07In Turkish the Mediterranean is Akdeniz, meaning what?
White Sea
In Turkic tradition white stood for the west, black for the north, which also explains the Black Sea's name.
Q 08The Old English name for the Mediterranean, Wendel-sæ, referred to which people?
The Vandals
The Vandals had occupied the North African coast during the Migration Period.
Q 09Which state is the only one ever to have controlled the entire Mediterranean coastline?
Roman Empire
For about 400 years after Augustus the sea earned the nickname 'Roman Lake'.
Q 10Which two civilisations were the earliest advanced societies trading across the Mediterranean?
Egyptians and Minoans
The Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC wrecked many of the eastern Mediterranean's cities and trade routes.
Q 11Which Persian king built a canal linking the Red Sea to the Nile, and so to the Mediterranean?
Darius I
It was wide enough for two triremes to pass with oars extended and took four days to traverse.
Q 12What are the two largest Mediterranean islands, by both area and population?
Sicily and Sardinia
The sea has around 10,000 islands and islets, of which only about 250 are permanently inhabited.
Q 13What is the longest river that empties into the Mediterranean?
Nile
Its basin makes up about two-thirds of the sea's drainage area, though the Rhône and Po discharge similar volumes because Europe is so much wetter.
Q 21The residence time of water in the Mediterranean is roughly how long?
100 years
That short turnover makes the sea a sensitive recorder of climate change.
Q 22Which cold winter winds trigger deep-water formation in the Mediterranean?
Bora and Mistral
Deep water forms mainly in the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Gulf of Lion.
Q 23Because it is so low in nutrients and chlorophyll, the Mediterranean is described as which kind of area?
LNLC
It effectively meets the definition of a marine desert, with the eastern basin called 'ultraoligotrophic'.
Q 14Which two island countries lie within the Mediterranean?
Cyprus and Malta
The UK also has coastline via Gibraltar and the Cyprus bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.
Q 15Where is the deepest recorded point in the Mediterranean, the Calypso Deep?
Ionian Sea
It lies in the Hellenic Trench about 63 km south-west of Pylos, Greece, at more than 5,100 metres.
Q 16Roughly how long is the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Gulf of Alexandretta?
4,000 km
The coastline runs about 46,000 km in total.
Q 17About 5.9 million years ago the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and dried out. What is this event called?
Messinian salinity crisis
Salt deposits from it are more than a million cubic kilometres in volume and in places over 3 km thick.
Q 18The Zanclean flood that last refilled the Mediterranean is estimated to have taken roughly how long?
Less than two years
Water poured through the newly breached Gibraltar gateway at about a thousand times the flow of the Amazon.
Q 19Without the inflow of Atlantic water, the Mediterranean's level would fall by roughly how much each year?
About 1 metre
Evaporation greatly exceeds rain and river runoff, especially in the east, which is why salinity rises eastward.
Q 20Saltier Mediterranean water sinking below incoming Atlantic water creates what kind of exchange through Gibraltar?
Two-layer flow
In the 1920s Herman Sörgel proposed damming the strait to harvest hydroelectric power in his Atlantropa scheme.
Q 24A shallow ridge between Sicily and which country divides the Mediterranean into two basins?
Tunisia
The Western Mediterranean covers about 850,000 square kilometres, the Eastern about 1.65 million.
Q 25Marsili, one of the largest volcanoes in Europe, lies under which sea about 175 km south of Naples?
Tyrrhenian Sea
At 70 km long and 30 km wide it is larger than Etna and belongs to the Aeolian volcanic arc.
Q 26Which body of water lies between Corsica and the Italian region of Liguria?
Ligurian Sea
The Alboran Sea sits between Spain and Morocco, and the Balearic Sea between mainland Spain and its islands.
Q 27The Malta Escarpment, an undersea cliff south of Sicily, is home to more than how many submarine canyons?
500
The 250 km escarpment's cliffs reach 3.5 km high in places, and the canyons were not carved by rivers.
Q 28The 1571 Battle of Lepanto was the last great naval battle fought mainly between which type of vessel?
Galleys
The Holy League, organised by Pope Pius V, nearly wiped out the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras.
Q 29Which Ottoman admiral won the Battle of Preveza in 1538?
Hayreddin Barbarossa
The Ottomans had already extinguished the Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople in 1453.
Q 30Per Robert Davis, Barbary pirates enslaved about a million Europeans across which centuries?
16th to 19th
The corsairs of north-west Africa preyed on Christian shipping and coastal towns across the western Mediterranean.