Geysers Trivia
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59 free Geysers trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Geysers are rare. They need heat from shallow magma, plenty of groundwater and, most of all, the right underground plumbing, and that combination exists in only a handful of places on Earth. This quiz covers all of them: Yellowstone, which holds about half the world's geysers, the Valley of Geysers on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, El Tatio high in the Chilean Andes, New Zealand's Taupō Volcanic Zone and the Icelandic hot spring that gave the word 'geyser' to English. You will meet the famous individuals (Old Faithful, Steamboat, Strokkur, Grand, Beehive) and the strange ones: a cold-water geyser on the Rhine driven by carbon dioxide, a Pennsylvania geyser powered by a burning coal seam, an accidental geyser in Nevada now owned by Burning Man, and the ice plumes of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Questions run from easy (what heats a geyser) to expert (which neighbouring geyser warns that Grand is about to go). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on geysers, individual geysers and geyser fields, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our volcanoes, Yellowstone National Park and Iceland quizzes next.
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Q 01The word 'geyser', borrowed from the name of one hot spring, means what?
Gusher
Gusher is the sense of Old Norse geysa, 'to gush'; travel writers of the 1700s took Geysir, the name of one famous spring, as their word for every spring that spouts.
Q 02The Great Geysir, which gave its name to every geyser on Earth, is in which country?
Iceland
The Great Geysir is in Iceland's Haukadalur valley, where in 1846 the chemist Robert Bunsen, of Bunsen-burner fame, took the measurements behind the modern explanation of why geysers erupt.
Q 03Roughly what share of the world's geysers are in Yellowstone National Park?
About half
About half of the world's geysers are in Yellowstone, more than 500 in all, yet its most famous one, Old Faithful, is neither the tallest nor the largest of them.
Q 04Where does the water that erupts from Yellowstone's geysers come from?
Seeping rainwater
Seeping rainwater supplies it: rain and melted snow sink deep through the rock, are superheated there and driven back to the surface, so every eruption is recycled weather.
Q 05Which geyser's major eruptions top 300 feet, far above Old Faithful's, making it the world's tallest active geyser?
Steamboat
Steamboat Geyser is the tallest active geyser on Earth; once the water of a major eruption is spent, it roars on with steam alone for hours, and sometimes for days.
Q 06The world's tallest active geyser sits in which Yellowstone basin?
Norris
Norris Geyser Basin is its home, and the plumbing is shared: after each major eruption, nearby Cistern Spring drains and takes days to refill.
Q 07What did the world's tallest active geyser do after a major eruption in 1911?
Went dormant
Went dormant for 50 years: no major eruption came until 1961, yet in 2019 and 2020 the same geyser set a record of 48 major eruptions a year.
Q 08Old Faithful was named in 1870 by which expedition?
Washburn–Langford–Doane
The Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition chose the name after watching the geyser spout nine times at regular intervals during a stay of barely a day and a half.
Q 09On average, how long is the gap between Old Faithful's eruptions?
About 90 minutes
About 90 minutes is the closest answer: averages quoted run from about 90 to 100 minutes, and despite the legend Old Faithful has never erupted at exact hourly intervals.
Q 10Old Faithful erupts in which US state?
Wyoming
Wyoming holds Old Faithful and 96% of Yellowstone, yet the park is older than the state: it was created in 1872, and Wyoming joined the Union in 1890.
Q 11Since 1939, the average wait between Old Faithful's eruptions has done what?
Lengthened
Lengthened, by more than 20 minutes, yet the name still fits: Old Faithful remains one of the few geysers regular enough for rangers to predict.
Q 12Old Faithful, which fires a steady jet from a low mound, is which of the two main geyser types?
Cone
Old Faithful is a cone geyser: its narrow vent acts like a nozzle and fires one steady column, where fountain geysers burst in all directions from an open pool.
Q 13What is the tallest predictable geyser on Earth?
Grand
Grand Geyser empties its pool with every eruption and takes hours to refill, so a full pool and a waiting crowd are the signs that the next show is close.
Q 21What is the only feasible way for visitors to reach the Valley of Geysers?
Helicopter
Helicopter flights are the only way in, because the valley lies inside a remote, strictly protected nature reserve.
Q 22El Tatio, the largest geyser field in the Southern Hemisphere, is in the Andes of which country?
Chile
Chile's El Tatio sits so high in the Andes, about 4,300 metres up, that water there boils at only about 86 °C.
Q 23In Britain, 'geyser' was also the everyday name for which household item?
A water heater
A water heater: British homes borrowed the spring's name for the gas heater that supplied their hot water, and in South Africa a geyser is still the household hot-water tank.
Q 14Geyserite, the deposit that coats geysers, is a form of what?
Silica
Geyserite is opaline silica: hot water dissolves silica from rocks such as rhyolite, and as it cools the silica drops out as opal, which slowly recrystallises into quartz.
Q 15The heat that drives a geyser comes from what?
Magma close to the surface
Geysers are driven by magma close to the surface, which is why nearly all lie in areas of recent volcanic activity such as the Yellowstone caldera.
Q 16What feature of a geyser's underground plumbing sets it apart from an ordinary hot spring?
Constrictions that build pressure
A geyser's plumbing has constrictions that build pressure as they trap water; cooler water above presses on hotter water beneath like a pressure-cooker lid, letting it superheat until it flashes to steam.
Q 17Which bacterium, first described from a Yellowstone hot spring in 1969, gave biotechnology its key PCR enzyme?
Thermus aquaticus
Thermus aquaticus thrives in water of about 70 °C, so its Taq polymerase survives the repeated heating that PCR demands, which destroyed the enzyme used before it.
Q 18The world's second-largest geyser field, the Valley of Geysers, is on which Russian peninsula?
Kamchatka
Kamchatka kept the secret a long time: the valley was unknown to science until April 1941, when geologist Tatyana Ustinova and her guide followed a river upstream and saw a geyser erupt.
Q 19Which gas gives the mud pots found beside many geysers their rotten-egg smell?
Hydrogen sulphide
Hydrogen sulphide does more than smell: it is turned into sulphuric acid, which breaks the surrounding rock down into the clay that makes the mud.
Q 20In June 2007, what buried much of Russia's Valley of Geysers?
A mudflow
A mudflow set off by a landslide covered about two-thirds of the valley, but the loss proved smaller than feared: the water behind it soon fell and Velikan, one of the largest geysers, kept erupting.
Q 24How high did eruptions of Waimangu, the largest geyser ever known, reach in the early 1900s?
About 460 metres
Waimangu's blasts reached about 460 metres, far above any geyser erupting today, but lasted only from 1900 to 1904; the great volcanic eruption of 1886 is thought to have created its plumbing.
Q 25The name Waimangu, given by Māori, means what?
Black waters
Waimangu is Māori for 'black waters' (wai, water; mangu, black), because the geyser hurled up water darkened by rocks and mud from the surrounding terrain.
Q 26Tours to El Tatio, a geyser field high in the Andes, are timed to arrive at which time of day?
Dawn
Dawn: tours set out at about four in the morning because the extreme cold around sunrise makes the columns of steam stand out at their most dramatic.
Q 27One of four sightseers killed at Waimangu in 1903 was an international in which sport?
Rugby
Rugby player Joe Warbrick, captain of the 1888 Natives team that toured the British Isles, ignored his guide brother's calls to move back and was swept away with three others by a sudden eruption.
Q 28Strokkur, the reliable geyser in the Haukadalur valley, has a name meaning what?
Churn
Churn, as in a butter churn, is what the name means; each eruption begins with the pool swelling upward before the surface breaks and the jet shoots out.
Q 29How often does Strokkur typically erupt?
6 to 10 minutes
Strokkur erupts roughly every 6 to 10 minutes, a regularity that makes it one of the few natural geysers tourists can count on seeing during a short visit.
Q 30Strokkur has erupted regularly since 1963, when locals did what on the advice of the Geysir Committee?
Cleared out its blocked conduit
Locals cleared out its blocked conduit through the bottom of the basin, and the fix has held: Strokkur has been the valley's main geyser ever since.