Droughts
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40 free Droughts trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A drought sounds like the dullest kind of disaster: nothing happens, and then it keeps not happening. The facts say otherwise. When the water goes, lakes and riverbeds give back things nobody has seen for generations, whole towns start counting every drop, and plants and animals fall back on survival tricks that sound invented. This quiz collects the best of those stories. It covers the science of dry spells and how forecasters grade them, the creatures that wait out years without rain, the rainmakers and engineers who tried to fight back, and the great droughts of history, from ancient kingdoms to the American plains of the 1930s and the water emergencies of this century. It is written for curious readers, students and teachers looking for drought fun facts with sources behind them. Most questions can be reasoned out by a casual player, and each answer comes with a short explanation worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which name is given to the carved river rocks in Central Europe that only surface when a drought drops the water?
Hunger stones
Hunger stones were carved during past droughts to warn later generations that famine follows low water. One in the Elbe at Děčín tells whoever can read it to weep.
Q 02In which country do droughts expose the Dolmen of Guadalperal, a 5,000-year-old monument drowned by a reservoir?
Spain
Spain flooded the monument in 1963 when it filled the Valdecañas reservoir on the Tagus. Its likeness to a famous English ring of stones earned it the nickname the Spanish Stonehenge.
Q 03Which South African city came close to Day Zero, the day its taps would be shut off, in a 2018 drought?
Cape Town
Cape Town would have been the first major city in the world to run dry. Residents were limited to 50 litres a day each, and winter rain refilled the dams before the deadline came.
Q 04Which African fish survives droughts by burrowing into mud and sleeping for months inside a cocoon of dried mucus?
Lungfish
Lungfish can breathe air, so they outlast a dried-up pond that kills other fish. Their line is older than the dinosaurs, with fossils reaching back more than 400 million years.
Q 05Which novelist's brother discovered that silver iodide could seed clouds, a rainmaking tool still tried in droughts?
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut later gave the crystal structure of ice a starring role in his novel Cat's Cradle. His brother Bernard found the compound at his desk in 1946, by looking through a basic chemistry text.
Q 06Which 2014 science-fiction film used real interviews with Dust Bowl survivors to portray its dying, dust-choked Earth?
Interstellar
Interstellar director Christopher Nolan asked Ken Burns for clips from his 2012 documentary on the 1930s storms. The witnesses on screen are describing the real thing.
Q 07Which California city hired rainmaker Charles Hatfield to fill a reservoir, then saw floods destroy its bridges?
San Diego
San Diego got far more than it asked for from a man who called himself a moisture accelerator. Hatfield had sold sewing machines, and he went back to it during the Depression.
Q 08Which insects swarmed England in their billions during the 1976 drought after the aphids they feed on died off?
Ladybugs
Ladybugs, or ladybirds as the British call them, were put at 23.65 billion along England's southern and eastern coasts that July. A warm spring had first let the aphids boom.
Q 09Which reservoir behind Hoover Dam shrank so far in a 2022 drought that a body in a barrel emerged?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead was then at its lowest level since it first filled in the 1930s. The barrel may have been stuck in the mud since the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Q 10Which desert, where some weather stations have never recorded rain, does NASA use to test Mars instruments?
Atacama
Atacama soil is so dry and lifeless that it stands in for the Martian surface. It is the driest non-polar desert in the world, yet ocean fog keeps a few cacti alive.
Q 11Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joads, a family driven from Oklahoma by drought, on the road to California?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath borrowed closely from field notes taken by Sanora Babb, a writer working for the Farm Security Administration. It came out in 1939, while the dust was still blowing.
Q 12Which name was given to April 14, 1935, when a huge wall of dust rolled across the Dust Bowl states?
Black Sunday
Black Sunday began clear, warm and still, which is why so many people were caught outdoors. A news story about the storm gave the Dust Bowl its name.
Q 13Which president ordered a belt of more than 200 million trees planted across the Great Plains to tame the Dust Bowl?
Roosevelt
Q 21Which trees' growth rings showed that the Roanoke colonists of 1587 arrived during an extreme drought?
Bald cypress
Bald cypress trees in the region gave a record running from 1185 to 1984, and 1587 turned out to be the worst growing season in all 800 years.
Q 22Which civilization abandoned cities such as Tikal and Copán during a drought called the worst in 7,000 years?
Maya
Maya cities in the southern lowlands emptied in the 8th and 9th centuries. Mud cores from Yucatán lakes point to a dry spell of some 200 years, though scholars still argue over how much it mattered.
Q 23Which climate pattern tends to deepen droughts in California and the US Southwest while soaking eastern Australia?
La Niña
Roosevelt's Great Plains Shelterbelt ran in a band from the Canadian border into Texas. The rows of trees broke the wind and held soil and moisture in place.
Q 14Which African tree endures droughts by storing up to 120,000 litres of water inside its swollen trunk?
Baobab
Baobab trees can live for more than 2,000 years, but their trick has limits: many of Africa's oldest and largest began dying early this century, likely from drought and heat.
Q 15Which seasonal wind pattern, when it fails, is the usual cause of drought and poor harvests across India?
Monsoon
Monsoon winds bring India most of its yearly rain in one season, from June to September, so a weak one leaves crops and reservoirs short for the whole year.
Q 16Which US national park saw more than a third of its land burn during the severe drought summer of 1988?
Yellowstone
Yellowstone's fires burned for months, and thousands of firefighters and soldiers could not put them out. Rain and snow on September 11 finally calmed them.
Q 17Which biblical prophet warned King Ahab of a years-long drought, then hid by a brook where ravens fed him?
Elijah
Elijah saw the drought end, in the biblical account, only after he faced 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and prayed there for rain.
Q 18Which shipping shortcut cut its daily crossings from 36 ships to 22 in 2023 when drought lowered Gatun Lake?
Panama Canal
Panama Canal locks are fed by rain, not the sea: each passing ship uses millions of litres of fresh water drawn from the artificial lake at the route's summit.
Q 19Which nut, grown mostly in drought-prone California, needs roughly a gallon of water to produce a single kernel?
Almonds
Almonds are thirsty enough that California's dry years have pushed some growers out of the business, cutting supply and raising prices. The state grows about 80 percent of the world's crop.
Q 20Which US city's water utility coined the word xeriscaping in 1981 for gardens designed to need little watering?
Denver
Denver Water planner Nancy Leavitt built the word from the Greek for dry. The utility has since tried a new name, partly because the word sounds so much like zeroscaping.
La Niña is a cooling of the tropical Pacific, the opposite phase to its better-known sibling. A sudden switch to it in 2010 ended Australia's Millennium Drought with record rain.
Q 24Which animal did Indigenous Australians dig out of desert burrows and gently squeeze for a drink of fresh water?
A frog
A frog is right: the water-holding frog fills its bladder and skin pockets, seals itself in a mucus cocoon and can wait underground for up to five years until rain returns.
Q 25Which 1974 Jack Nicholson film has a detective uncover a plot to dump Los Angeles water during a drought?
Chinatown
Chinatown drew on the real California water wars, in which Los Angeles secured the water rights of the distant Owens Valley and left its farms to dry out.
Q 26Which river fell so low in Europe's 2022 drought that dozens of German warships sunk in 1944 reappeared?
Danube
Danube water had hidden the wrecks since the fleet was sunk to block the route to Soviet forces. A European Commission researcher called 2022 the continent's worst year in 500.
Q 27Which folk singer left Texas with the Dust Bowl migrants and earned the nickname the Dust Bowl Troubadour?
Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie turned what he saw on the road to California into the 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. He had grown up in Okemah, Oklahoma.
Q 28Which nickname stuck to families fleeing the Dust Bowl for California, even those from Kansas, Texas or Arkansas?
Okies
Okies was shorthand for Oklahomans, but it came to cover anyone who had lost everything on the Plains. By 2007 about an eighth of California's population had that heritage.
Q 29Which photographer documented Dust Bowl migrants for the government and took the 1936 portrait Migrant Mother?
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange found the family by chance, after passing a sign for a pea pickers' camp on a cold, rainy drive home. Her subject, Florence Owens Thompson, was named only decades later.
Q 30Which profession did A. E. Douglass follow before he founded tree-ring dating, a key tool for tracing ancient droughts?
Astronomer
Astronomer Douglass went looking for the sunspot cycle in wood: he reasoned that changes in the sun would shift the weather, and that trees would record it.