The Arctic Trivia
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48 free The Arctic trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Arctic takes its name from the Greek word for bear, after the constellations that wheel over the North Pole, and the bears are still there: roughly 22,000 to 31,000 polar bears hunting ringed seals from the sea ice. Eight countries own land inside the Arctic Circle, two of them without a single metre of Arctic coastline, and nobody owns the pole itself, which sits above four kilometres of shifting ocean. This quiz covers the region end to end: the latitude lines and the midnight sun, the cities that sit on or above the Circle, the Arctic Council and the seabed claims, the Russian titanium flag, the explorers and their ships and airships, the submarines under the ice, the narwhals, terns, muskoxen and lemmings, Svalbard's treaty and its Seed Vault, and the permafrost and sea-ice numbers that make the Arctic the planet's early-warning system. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a geography quiz night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bear did the ancient Greeks have in mind when they named the Arctic after their word for bear?
The Great Bear
The Great Bear is the constellation Ursa Major, which circles the pole without ever setting, so the Greeks called the north arktikos, of the Bear. Some accounts credit the Little Bear, home of the Pole Star, instead.
Q 02The Arctic Circle marks the southern limit of what?
The midnight sun
The midnight sun lasts a single day on the circle itself, at the June solstice. The run of unbroken daylight lengthens the farther north you go, until at the North Pole it lasts six months.
Q 03Ecologists draw the Arctic's edge where July averages 10 °C, which closely matches which other boundary?
The northern tree line
The northern tree line is where summers turn too cold for trees and tundra takes over. It pays little heed to the Arctic Circle: in some regions forests grow well to the north of it.
Q 04What Arctic record did Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town famous for its brutal winters, set in June 2020?
Highest temperature
Highest temperature: 38 °C, a swing of nearly 106 degrees from the same town's record low. It came in a long Siberian heatwave that fed vast Arctic wildfires.
Q 05Which city near the Arctic Circle bills itself as the official hometown of Santa Claus?
Rovaniemi
Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland, began its Arctic Circle trade with a cabin built in 1950 for a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt. Today a line marked across Santa Claus Village lets visitors step over the circle.
Q 06What is the largest city in the world north of the Arctic Circle?
Murmansk
Murmansk was the last city founded in the Russian Empire, built in 1915–16 as a First World War supply port because its harbour stays ice-free. In the next war it took in the Allied Arctic convoys.
Q 07What is the largest US settlement north of the Arctic Circle?
Utqiagvik
Utqiagvik dropped the name Barrow in 2016 after a referendum won by six votes, 381 to 375. The sun sets there in mid-November and does not rise again for about two months.
Q 08The Arctic Circle creeps north by about 14 metres a year because of a slow change in what?
Earth's axial tilt
Earth's axial tilt wobbles over a 41,000-year cycle, and the circle moves with it. On Iceland's Grímsey a concrete sphere marking the line is shifted every year, and the plan is to roll it into the sea when the circle leaves, around 2047.
Q 09Which two Arctic states have no direct access to the Arctic Ocean?
Finland and Sweden
Finland and Sweden hold Arctic land but no northern shore, since Norway's coast lies between them and the sea. In 2008 the five coastal states met without them, and without Iceland, which complained at being left out.
Q 10What was the first binding treaty concluded under the Arctic Council, in 2011?
A search and rescue agreement
A search and rescue agreement, signed in Nuuk in May 2011, divides the Arctic into national rescue zones. Its text insists that those zones settle nothing about borders, several of which the eight signatories still dispute.
Q 11The Russian flag planted on the seabed beneath the North Pole in 2007 was made of what?
Titanium alloy
Titanium alloy went into a metre-tall flag, set down by a mini-submarine more than four kilometres beneath the ice. Canada's foreign minister scoffed that this was not the 15th century, when planting a flag could claim a territory.
Q 12Besides a flag, what did Canadian and Danish expeditions take turns leaving on disputed Hans Island?
Bottles of liquor
Bottles of liquor, Canadian whisky answered by Danish schnapps, gave the dispute its name, the Whisky War. It ended in 2022 when the two countries split the rock, giving Canada and Denmark a land border with each other.
Q 13Russia, Denmark and Canada each argue that the undersea Lomonosov Ridge is a natural extension of what?
Q 21The polar bear's scientific name describes it as a bear of what?
The sea
The sea: Ursus maritimus spends most of its life out on the frozen ocean. It is the only bear classed as a marine mammal, protected in the United States under the same law as whales and dolphins.
Q 22Under its white or yellowish fur, what colour is a polar bear's skin?
Black
Black skin lies under a coat that is not really white either. The hollow outer hairs hold no pigment at all, and only look white because of the way they scatter light.
Q 23A male narwhal's spiralled tusk is actually which tooth?
A left canine
A left canine grows forward through the upper lip, spiralling to the left, and a rare male sprouts a second tusk from the right one. It may double as a sensor, picking up changes in the water around the whale.
Their continental shelf
Their continental shelf is the prize: prove it runs beyond 200 nautical miles and the law of the sea grants the seabed there. The ridge spans 1,800 km of the ocean floor, leaving a UN panel to weigh three overlapping claims.
Q 14Canada regards the Northwest Passage as what?
Its internal waters
Its internal waters, Canada says, so foreign ships must ask permission to pass. The United States calls the route an international strait, and made the point in 1985 by sending the icebreaker Polar Sea through without asking.
Q 15What did the International Maritime Organization ban ships from burning or carrying in the Arctic from July 2024?
Heavy fuel oil
Heavy fuel oil is the cheap, tar-like residue left over from refining crude. Loopholes let ships with protected tanks burn it until 2029, which campaigners said left three-quarters of Arctic shipping untouched.
Q 16Which cruise ship became the largest yet to navigate the Northwest Passage, in 2016?
Crystal Serenity
Crystal Serenity carried more than 1,500 passengers and crew from Alaska to New York. Critics took the fact that it was possible at all as a warning about the retreating ice.
Q 17Melting sea ice speeds up Arctic warming because the open water left behind does what?
Absorbs more sunlight
Absorbs more sunlight: bright ice bounces most of the sun's energy back to space, while the darker sea soaks it up and melts more ice. Since 1979 the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe.
Q 18Which culture, ancestral to today's Inuit, spread east from Alaska and replaced the Arctic's earlier Dorset people?
Thule
Thule was the ancient Greeks' word for the farthest north, borrowed by archaeologists from a Greenland settlement where remains were first found. With dog sleds and skin boats these whale hunters crossed rapidly from Alaska to Greenland.
Q 19What was the Soviet Union's pioneering 1937 research station North Pole-1 built on?
A drifting ice floe
A drifting ice floe carried four men for nine months, from near the pole to the sea off Greenland, more than 2,500 km away. Icebreakers finally took them off in February 1938, after several failed attempts.
Q 20Polar bears are specialised hunters of which prey in particular?
Ringed seals
Ringed seals are mostly taken by ambush: a bear can wait for hours beside a breathing hole in the ice. When the hunting is good it eats only the energy-rich blubber and skin and leaves the rest.
Q 24Which whale is the narwhal's closest living relative?
The beluga
The beluga is the only other living member of the narwhal's family. In 2019 DNA from an odd skull that a Greenland hunter had kept on his shed proved the two can interbreed: its mother was a narwhal and its father a beluga.
Q 25Arctic terns see two summers a year by migrating from the Arctic to where?
The Antarctic coast
The Antarctic coast is reached by a zigzag, not a straight line, because the birds ride the prevailing winds. Tracked terns from Greenland averaged about 71,000 km a year, the longest migration known in any animal.
Q 26How did scientists finally map the Arctic tern's full migration route in 2010?
Tiny tags on leg bands
Tiny tags on leg bands, each weighing 1.4 grams, showed the yearly trip was about twice as long as anyone had thought. Over a 30-year life that adds up to roughly three round trips to the Moon.
Q 27What happens to a white Arctic fox's coat when summer comes?
It turns brown
It turns brown, moulted for a shorter, darker coat that hides the fox among the summer rocks and plants. A rarer 'blue' type skips the trick and stays charcoal-dark all year round.
Q 28Which Arctic animal's Inuktitut name, umingmak, means the bearded one?
The muskox
The muskox earns it with outer hair that hangs almost to the ground. The English name misleads, since the animal is no ox and is more closely related to sheep and goats.
Q 29What is the name of the prized soft wool harvested from muskoxen?
Qiviut
Qiviut is shed, not shorn: the animals moult their underwool each spring and farmers comb it out by hand. The soft fibre is so scarce that Alaska's wildlife agency says it has been called the rarest in the world.
Q 30Which longstanding myth is attached to lemmings?
That they leap off cliffs en masse
That they leap off cliffs en masse owes much to Disney's 1958 documentary White Wilderness. Its famous scene was faked in landlocked Alberta, where the crew filmed lemmings on a turntable and then threw them off a cliff.