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50 free Glacier trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This glacier trivia quiz covers the slow rivers of ice that shaped half the world's landscapes. The easy questions handle the basics: what a glacier is, why the ice looks blue, how much of the planet's fresh water it holds, and which continent has none. The harder end goes into glaciology proper: how snow becomes firn and then ice, why a glacier needs 50 metres of thickness before it flows, crevasses and seracs, the difference between plucking and abrasion, moraines, drumlins, eskers and roches moutonnees, the surge that can move ice 90 metres a day, glacial earthquakes in Greenland, the Little Ice Age, isostatic rebound, ice cores as climate records, and the nitrogen-ice glaciers New Horizons found on Pluto. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our geology, Ice Age, Antarctica and Glacier National Park quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds what, over many years?
Its ablation
Ablation is the loss of ice by melting, evaporation and calving; the equilibrium line marks where gain equals loss.
Q 02Roughly what percentage of Earth's glacial ice is held in the polar ice sheets?
About 99%
The rest is in mountain glaciers on every continent except mainland Australia.
Q 03Which country has more glacial ice than any other outside the polar regions?
Pakistan
It has more than 7,000 known glaciers.
Q 04Glaciers cover roughly what share of Earth's land surface?
About 10%
Nearly all of that is the Antarctic ice sheet, which blankets about 98% of the continent to an average depth of 2,100 metres.
Q 05Glacial ice and ice sheets hold roughly what share of the world's fresh water?
About 69%
That makes glaciers the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet.
Q 06Why does glacier ice look blue?
It absorbs red light and has no air bubbles
Air bubbles make ordinary ice white; in a glacier they are squeezed out under pressure.
Q 07The word 'glacier' comes ultimately from a Latin word meaning what?
Ice
It arrived in English from French via Franco-Provencal and the Vulgar Latin glaciarium.
Q 08What is the study of glaciers called?
Glaciology
Glaciers are a key part of the cryosphere, the frozen portion of the Earth system.
Q 09Above what area is a body of glacial ice classed as an ice sheet rather than an ice cap?
50,000 square km
Only two ice sheets exist today, covering most of Antarctica and Greenland.
Q 10If both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted, roughly how much would global sea level rise?
Over 70 metres
Meltwater from today's shrinking glaciers is already what the IPCC calls a 'slow onset' driver of sea level rise.
Q 11What are rocky peaks that poke up through an ice sheet called?
Nunataks
They barely erode at all, an estimated 5 metres per 1.2 million years.
Q 12Glaciers that end in the sea and calve icebergs are known as what?
Tidewater
They go through centuries-long cycles of advance and retreat that are far less tied to climate than other glaciers.
Q 13A glacier that is at melting point from surface to base all year round is called what?
Temperate
Polar glaciers stay below freezing throughout; a warm-based glacier can slide on a film of meltwater at its bed.
What is the granular, partly compacted snow that is on its way to becoming glacial ice called?
Q 21Isolated pinnacles of ice left where the cracks in a glacier's surface intersect are called what?
Seracs
They form in the rigid fracture zone, the top 50 metres of the ice.
Q 22The combined width of a glacier's dark and light ogive bands usually equals what?
Its annual movement
They form below icefalls, where broken ice ablates faster in summer and collects more snow in winter.
Q 23Glaciers moving faster than about a kilometre a year can trigger what?
Glacial earthquakes up to magnitude 6.1
In Greenland they peak in July to September and roughly doubled between 2002 and 2005.
Firn
Fresh snow becomes neve, then firn, and finally glacial ice as the air is squeezed out over years.
Q 15What is the armchair-shaped hollow, also called a corrie or cwm, where a glacier usually begins?
A cirque
Snow collects and compresses there until the ice overflows the 'lip' and starts to move.
Q 16Roughly how thick must ice be before a glacier will even begin to flow?
About 30 metres
Once it passes about 50 metres, the upper layers slide over the lower ones and the ice deforms as a plastic flow.
Q 17Who came up with the essentially correct explanation of glacier flow in the 1840s?
James Forbes
Rival ideas included regelation and the notion that refreezing meltwater made glaciers dilate; acceptance took decades.
Q 18What is the typical mean speed of a glacier?
About 1 metre per day
Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae can manage 20 to 30 metres a day, and surging glaciers have hit 90.
Q 19What are the cracks called that open in the rigid upper 50 metres of a glacier?
Crevasses
They rarely exceed 46 metres deep, because below that the ice is plastic; hidden under snow bridges they make travel hazardous.
Q 20What is a moulin?
A shaft down which meltwater plunges into a glacier
Streams then run through englacial or subglacial tunnels and sometimes pop out again at the surface.
Q 24What are the two principal processes by which glaciers erode terrain?
Plucking and abrasion
Plucking lifts blocks of fractured bedrock; abrasion sandpapers the rock beneath into flour.
Q 25What is the pulverised sediment produced by glacial abrasion called?
Rock flour
Its grains are just 0.002 to 0.00625 mm across, and wind can carry them far away to form deep deposits.
Q 26Long scratches carved into bedrock by boulders in a moving glacier are called what?
Striations
Mapping their direction tells researchers which way the ice was flowing.
Q 27Large boulders carried far from their source and dropped by a glacier are called what?
Glacial erratics
They can be a completely different rock from what they sit on, and their patterns hint at past ice movements.
Q 28What is a moraine formed at the foot of a glacier called?
Terminal
Lateral moraines run along the sides, and medial moraines form where two glaciers merge; the word was coined by French Alpine peasants.
Q 29What are the canoe-shaped glacial hills called, of which about 10,000 lie east of Rochester, NY?
Drumlins
Their steep side faces the direction the ice came from, and their formation is still not fully understood.
Q 30Glaciers turn V-shaped river valleys into valleys shaped like which letter?
U
Smaller tributary glaciers cut less deep, leaving 'hanging valleys' perched above the main trough.