Caribbean Sea Trivia
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93 free Caribbean Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Caribbean Sea trivia quiz is about the body of water itself rather than the islands around it: where it starts and stops, how deep it goes, what lives in it and how it got its name. The easy questions are ones any beach-goer can try: which ocean it belongs to, which peninsula and which big islands bound it, what its name comes from, when hurricane season runs and what famous canal links it to the Pacific. From there it moves through the straits that connect it to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, the five basins of its floor, the currents that sweep through it and the reefs that line its western shore. The harder end is for geographers and divers: the Cayman Trough, the Caribbean plate, the Anegada Passage, the age of the sea, Kick 'em Jenny, the Great Blue Hole, Isla de Aves, the extinct Caribbean monk seal, the lionfish invasion, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, coral bleaching figures, the tsunami threat and the odd fact that Barbados and Trinidad are officially in the Atlantic. A few questions on Columbus, pirates and rum round it out. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the sea, its straits, reefs and wildlife before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Caribbean, oceans and coral reef quizzes next.
30 of 93 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Dust that hazes Caribbean skies each summer is blown across the Atlantic from which desert?
The Sahara
The Sahara sends plumes of dust across the Atlantic all summer; the dry air that carries them dims Caribbean skies and can keep hurricanes from forming.
Q 02Which Mexican resort city on the Caribbean was a nearly empty barrier island until planners chose it for tourism in 1970?
Cancún
Cancún was a nearly deserted barrier island until 1970, when Mexican government planners, after a three-year study, picked it to be built from scratch as a resort city.
Q 03The Greater Antilles form the sea's northern boundary, running from Cuba east to which island?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico ends the Greater Antilles in the east. Spaniards first called the island San Juan and its harbour town Puerto Rico, 'rich port'; over the centuries the two names swapped.
Q 04The Caribbean Sea has been nicknamed the 'American' version of which sea that also lies between two continents?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean lends its name to the 'American Mediterranean', a label for the Caribbean and the waters joined to it, though the Caribbean alone, at about 2.75 million sq km, is the bigger sea.
Q 05Which Caribbean island holds the Pitch Lake, a vast natural lake of asphalt that Walter Raleigh used to caulk his ships?
Trinidad
Trinidad's Pitch Lake holds millions of tons of natural asphalt; Raleigh patched his ships with it in 1595, and since the 1800s it has been dug out to surface roads at home and abroad.
Q 06Which of Columbus's ships ran aground off a Caribbean island on Christmas Day 1492?
The Santa María
The Santa María ran aground on 25 December 1492; her timbers were hauled ashore to build a stockade that Columbus named La Navidad, 'Christmas', and he left 39 men there when he sailed home.
Q 07Which barrier reef, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, runs along Central America's Caribbean coast?
The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef
The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, also called the Great Mayan Reef, stretches about 1,000 km from Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula to Honduras and is the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere.
Q 08Roatán, a scuba-diving hotspot and the largest of the Bay Islands, belongs to which country?
Honduras
Honduras was handed the Bay Islands by Britain in 1859 after seven years as a British colony; English-speaking islanders remained the majority there until the late 20th century.
Q 09Which strait between Cuba and Haiti lets Atlantic water into the Caribbean?
The Windward Passage
The Windward Passage, about 80 km wide between eastern Cuba and northwestern Haiti, is a main Atlantic entry to the Caribbean and lies on the Panama Canal to US east coast shipping route.
Q 10The Yucatán Channel links the Caribbean Sea with which body of water?
The Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico takes the Caribbean's outflow through the Yucatán Channel, 217 km wide between Mexico and Cuba; the water loops round the gulf, squeezes out past Florida and becomes the Gulf Stream.
Q 11The Mona Passage separates which two islands?
Hispaniola and Puerto Rico
Hispaniola and Puerto Rico face each other across the Mona Passage; a 1918 earthquake beneath the strait sent a tsunami sweeping over the towns of Puerto Rico's west coast.
Q 12Which future American founding father was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis and grew up on St Croix?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a teenage clerk on St Croix when his vivid letter about a 1772 hurricane ran in the local paper; impressed islanders raised a fund that sent him to New York for an education.
Q 13The Carib people, namesake of the Caribbean, also gave English which word through Columbus's version of their name?
Cannibal
Q 21Which steady air currents from the east carried sailing ships from Europe across the Atlantic to the Caribbean?
The trade winds
The trade winds have nothing to do with commerce: 'trade' once meant a path or track, and the winds were named for holding a steady course, which is what made them the sailing road to the Caribbean.
Q 22Which westward-flowing ocean current crosses the Atlantic from Africa and feeds the Caribbean Sea?
The North Equatorial
The North Equatorial Current, driven west by the prevailing winds, splits off South America: one branch flows into the Caribbean while the other, the Antilles Current, passes outside the islands.
Q 23Which warm current runs northwest along South America's coast to feed the Caribbean Current?
Cannibal comes from Caniba, Columbus's rendering of the Caribs' name; Europeans believed they ate human flesh, while Columbus at first took the name to mean they were subjects of the Great Khan.
Q 14Which Colombian archipelago in the western Caribbean lies far closer to Nicaragua than to Colombia?
San Andrés
San Andrés and its sister islands lie off Nicaragua, far from the Colombian mainland; Nicaragua took its claim to the International Court of Justice, which held in 2007 that a 1928 treaty had already made them Colombia's.
Q 15The Cayman Trough marks the Caribbean Plate's boundary with which other tectonic plate?
North American
The North American and Caribbean plates grind past each other along the Cayman Trough, the sea's deepest point; farther east the same boundary zone produced the 2010 earthquake that wrecked Port-au-Prince.
Q 16Gustavia, capital of Saint-Barthélemy, is named for a king of which country that ruled the island for nearly a century?
Sweden
Sweden got Saint-Barthélemy from France in 1784 in exchange for trading rights in Gothenburg and handed it back after a vote in 1877; the island's coat of arms still shows Sweden's three crowns.
Q 17Which Martinique volcano destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre in minutes in 1902?
Mount Pelée
Mount Pelée sent a cloud of scorching gas and ash through Saint-Pierre on 8 May 1902, killing nearly everyone in the city; a prisoner shielded by his thick-walled cell was among the few survivors.
Q 18Which spice appears on the national flag of Grenada, the Caribbean's 'Isle of Spice'?
Nutmeg
Nutmeg, a native of Indonesia's Spice Islands, became one of Grenada's chief exports; when the country became independent in 1974, the nutmeg was the one emblem carried over from its earlier flag.
Q 19Which submarine volcano north of Grenada broke the sea surface in 1939?
Kick 'em Jenny
Kick 'em Jenny was unknown until that eruption, which sent high waves onto Grenada's coast; it has erupted at least a dozen times since, and ships must keep 1.5 km clear of its summit.
Q 20Which Category 5 hurricane, the strongest ever to make landfall on Dominica, devastated the island in September 2017?
Maria
Maria intensified explosively on 18 September 2017, reaching Category 5 just before it hit Dominica that night; it wrecked most of the island's housing and stripped its forests bare.
The Guiana Current
The Guiana Current carries South Atlantic water, freshened by the Amazon's outflow, northwest along the Guianas and into the Caribbean on its eastern side.
Q 24Which Caribbean islands are so dry that cactus scrub, not rainforest, is their main vegetation?
Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao
Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, the ABC islands off Venezuela, get so little rain that cactus scrub covers them, and Aruba makes most of its drinking water by desalinating the sea.
Q 25The Caribbean hurricane season runs during which months?
June to November
June to November is the official Atlantic hurricane season, dates chosen to take in over 97% of the basin's tropical storm activity; the storms need sea water of about 26.5 °C or more and peak in late August and September.
Q 26The words 'hurricane' and 'hammock' reached English, via Spanish, from the language of which Caribbean people?
The Taíno
The Taíno were the first people Columbus met in 1492, so their words for things new to Europeans, hurakán for the storm and hamaca for the hanging bed, passed into Spanish and on into English.
Q 27Which colourful Caribbean reef fish grinds up coral rock and excretes it as white sand?
Parrotfish
Parrotfish scrape algae off dead coral with their beak-like teeth, grind up the rock and pass it as fine sand; one large fish can produce hundreds of pounds of it a year.
Q 28Coral bleaching happens when overheated corals expel which symbiotic organisms living in their tissues?
Zooxanthellae
Zooxanthellae, single-celled algae living in coral tissue, supply most of the coral's food and its colour; when water warms, corals expel them and turn white.
Q 29The United States bought its Virgin Islands in 1917, for $25 million in gold, from which country?
Denmark
Denmark sold St Thomas, St John and St Croix after Washington grew afraid that Germany might overrun Denmark and turn the islands into a submarine base for attacks on Caribbean shipping.
Q 30Which giant fish gathers by the hundred off Mexico's Caribbean coast to feed on drifting fish eggs?
Whale sharks
Whale sharks, the largest fish alive, were long thought of as loners, yet in 2009 an aerial survey counted 420 in one patch of sea off Yucatán, all feeding on the eggs of spawning little tunny.