Strontium
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40 free Strontium trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Strontium rarely makes the headlines, yet this soft, silvery metal has one of the stranger life stories on the periodic table. It was found in a mine, named after a village, and went on to color celebrations, shield living rooms and worry a generation of Cold War parents. This quiz collects the strontium fun facts people go looking for: where the name comes from, how the metal behaves, what its compounds are used for, and why one radioactive form became a household word in the 1950s. A few questions cover the basic chemistry, pitched so that no science degree is needed. It suits chemistry students revising the elements, teachers who want a lively classroom round, and anyone who enjoys the odd corners of science. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the surprising part sticks.
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Q 01Strontium salts give fireworks which brilliant color, the same one that identifies the element in a flame test?
Red
Red fireworks get their color from strontium salts, and the same crimson flame told chemists in the 1790s that they had found a new element.
Q 02Strontium is named after Strontian, a mining village where its ore was discovered in 1790, in which country?
Scotland
Scotland can claim the only element named after a place in the United Kingdom. Strontian lies on the north shore of Loch Sunart.
Q 03Cold War scientists in St. Louis collected over 320,000 of which childhood castoffs to measure strontium-90 fallout?
Baby teeth
Baby teeth mailed in by schoolchildren, who got a button in return, showed strontium-90 levels climbing through the 1950s, evidence that helped end above-ground testing.
Q 04Strontium aluminate, a pigment developed in Japan in the 1990s to replace zinc sulfide, is prized for doing what?
Glowing in the dark
Glowing in the dark is what it does about ten times brighter and ten times longer than the pigment it replaced, which is why watch brands licensed it in the 1990s.
Q 05Strontium 90, a short-lived 1977 band, featured all three members of the classic line-up of which British rock group?
The Police
The Police took on guitarist Andy Summers soon after he played with Sting and Stewart Copeland in the project, put together by former Gong bassist Mike Howlett.
Q 06Radioactive strontium is dangerous because the body mistakes it for which nutrient and builds it into growing bones?
Calcium
Calcium sits just above strontium in the periodic table and behaves so similarly that most of the strontium a person absorbs ends up in the skeleton.
Q 07Strontium-90 from 1950s bomb tests reached children through which everyday food, after fallout settled on pastures?
Milk
Milk carried it because dairy cows grazed on contaminated plants, which is why US officials began testing supplies around the country in the 1950s.
Q 08Strontium titanate, sold to jewelers from the 1950s under the name Fabulite, was a popular imitation of which gemstone?
Diamond
Diamond has almost the same refractive index, but the imitation splits light into over four times as much rainbow fire, far more than the real thing shows.
Q 09The Soviet Union used the decay heat of strontium-90 to power about a thousand of which unmanned Arctic structures?
Lighthouses
Lighthouses on the remote northern coast ran for years without refueling, but they went untended after 1991 and the last generators were only removed by 2021.
Q 10Strontium chloride has been the active ingredient in which bathroom product made for people sensitive to hot and cold?
Toothpaste
Toothpaste made with it works by plugging the tiny open channels in dentine that carry sensations to the nerve, though most brands have since switched ingredients.
Q 11Which two-letter symbol stands for strontium in the periodic table, where it is element number 38?
Sr
Sr marks element 38, whose most common natural form, strontium-88, makes up about 83 percent of the element and is not radioactive at all.
Q 12Strontium belongs to which family of the periodic table, a group of six that also includes magnesium and radium?
Alkaline earth metals
Alkaline earth metals fill group 2, and each has two outer electrons that it gives up readily, which makes every member of the family reactive.
Q 13Which British chemist, also remembered for a miners' safety lamp, first isolated strontium metal in 1808?
Humphry Davy
Q 21Which US president signed a 1963 ban on above-ground nuclear tests after seeing data on strontium-90 in children?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Britain and the Soviet Union once a survey showed levels in the young had almost tripled since testing began.
Q 22Strontium-90 is absent from natural ores and arises as a common by-product of which process inside reactors and bombs?
Nuclear fission
Nuclear fission of uranium-235 yields strontium-90 in nearly six of every hundred splits, which makes it a major part of the radioactivity in spent fuel.
Q 23Strontium-90 decays into an isotope of which neighboring element, named like three others after a village in Sweden?
Yttrium
Humphry Davy freed it with electricity, the method he used to isolate potassium, sodium and magnesium for the first time within the same two years.
Q 14Which heavier element sits directly below strontium in the periodic table and is slightly softer than it?
Barium
Barium is the next step down the group, and physician Adair Crawford was preparing its compounds in 1790 when he noticed that an ore from Strontian behaved differently.
Q 15Strontium's first ore turned up in 1790 in mines near Strontian that had been dug to extract which heavy metal?
Lead
Lead from the Strontian mines was later cast into bullets for the Napoleonic Wars, and captured soldiers from Napoleon's army joined the workforce there.
Q 16Strontian, the village that gave strontium its name, has a native name meaning the point of a hill of which beings?
Fairies
Fairies give the village its name: Sròn an t-Sìthein means the nose, or point, of a knoll said to be home to the mythical sídhe.
Q 17Which pale blue crystal, often found lining the hollows of geodes, is the main ore mined for strontium?
Celestine
Celestine is strontium sulfate, and miners favor it over the rarer carbonate ore because it far more often forms deposits large enough to work.
Q 18The world's largest known geode, a cave of strontium sulfate crystals found beneath a winery, lies in which US state?
Ohio
Ohio's Crystal Cave was found in 1897 by a winemaker digging a well on a Lake Erie island, and tourists paying to see it kept his winery alive through Prohibition.
Q 19Strontium's first large-scale use, in 19th-century Germany, was helping factories produce which kitchen staple?
Sugar
Sugar was pulled from beet molasses using strontium hydroxide, and German refiners needed so much of it that mining the ore became a local industry.
Q 20For decades most strontium went into the glass of color television tubes, where it blocked which kind of radiation?
X-rays
X-rays from the tubes were soaked up by the front glass, and at the peak of the tube era this one job used about three-quarters of American strontium.
Yttrium-90 lasts only a few days and is put to work in medicine, attached to drugs that carry its radiation straight to cancer cells.
Q 24Which cheerfully named secret US study of the 1950s measured strontium-90 in human bones gathered from around the world?
Project Sunshine
Project Sunshine stayed secret until 1956 and later caused outrage when it emerged that many remains, often of young children, had been taken without the families' consent.
Q 25Three men in which ex-Soviet republic were badly burned in 2001 after camping beside abandoned strontium-90 generators?
Georgia
Georgia's Lia accident began when the men found two canisters that had melted the snow around them and used them as heaters through a winter night.
Q 26Geologists date ancient rocks and Moon samples by measuring strontium-87 left by the slow decay of which element?
Rubidium
Rubidium-87 decays so slowly, with a half-life of about 49 billion years, that the same method also works on meteorites.
Q 27Strontium locked in ancient bones revealed that some people buried at which English monument had come from Wales?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge drew its bluestones from Wales too, and a 2018 study found that many of those buried around the time it was built had probably lived near the quarries.
Q 28Scientists reconstruct past ocean temperatures from the strontium laid down in the skeletons of which sea animals?
Corals
Corals take up less strontium when the water is warmer, and their skeletons can give a temperature record fine enough to read month by month.
Q 29Strontium metal reacts on contact with water, forming strontium hydroxide and giving off bubbles of which gas?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen bubbles off as the metal breaks water apart, a reaction brisker than that of the element above it in the group and milder than that of the one below.
Q 30Pure strontium metal reacts so readily with air that laboratories usually keep it submerged in which liquid?
Mineral oil
Mineral oil or kerosene keeps oxygen away from the metal, which otherwise begins to tarnish within moments of being cut.