Lake Trivia
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115 free Lake trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
62 free lake trivia questions with answers. Sixty questions on lakes, from record-holders to oddities. The first stretch is the big names: the Caspian, Baikal's depth and age, Titicaca's floating islands, Superior and its Great Lake siblings, Victoria, Tanganyika, Malawi's 700 cichlids, Loch Ness, Windermere and Crater Lake. Then it turns to lake science: oxbows, kettles, endorheic basins, why the Dead Sea floats you, what a limnic eruption is and which moon has methane lakes. The back half is the strange stuff. Lakes that are pink, lakes that exploded, a lake that vanished into a salt mine in an afternoon, a sea that dried up because of cotton, the lightning capital of the world, a crater you can see from space, and the lakes of story and stage: Excalibur, Swan Lake, Lake Wobegon and Betty White's crocodile. It suits geography classes, pub quizzes and anyone who has stood on a shore and wondered how deep it goes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual lakes and landforms, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 115 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which body of water is the world's largest lake, though it is usually called a sea?
Caspian Sea
Caspian Sea: it has features of both, and a 2018 treaty among its five shoreline nations treats it as legally neither fully a sea nor a lake.
Q 02Which US city lies along the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain?
New Orleans
New Orleans: in 2005 Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees holding back the lake, leaving about 80% of the city underwater.
Q 03Lake Baikal, often called the world's oldest lake, formed roughly how long ago?
25 million years ago
25 million years ago: that great age and isolation gave the lake one of the world's most unusual sets of freshwater animals, many found nowhere else.
Q 04Lake Baikal in Siberia has its own species of which marine mammal, found nowhere else?
Seal
Seal: when the lake freezes over, Baikal seals use their claws to cut breathing holes in the ice.
Q 05Often called the highest navigable lake in the world, Titicaca sits on the border of which two countries?
Peru and Bolivia
Peru and Bolivia: though Bolivia lost its coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific, its navy patrols the lake.
Q 06The Uros people of Lake Titicaca build their floating islands out of what?
Totora reeds
Totora reeds: the bottom layers rot away in the water, so islanders keep adding fresh reeds on top.
Q 07Which writer lived for two years in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond, a small Massachusetts lake?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau: midway through his stay there, he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax.
Q 08The freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a November 1975 storm on which lake?
Superior
Superior: all 29 men aboard died, and the mystery of the sinking inspired Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 hit song.
Q 09Which river is the natural outlet of the Great Lakes, carrying their water to the ocean?
St. Lawrence River
St. Lawrence River: since its Seaway opened in 1959, ocean-going ships can sail up it from the Atlantic as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota.
Q 10Which is the only one of the Great Lakes located entirely within the United States?
Michigan
Michigan: after sewage kept washing into the lake that supplied its drinking water, Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900.
Q 11Which city in New York State lies at the eastern end of Lake Erie, the shallowest Great Lake?
Buffalo
Buffalo: storm winds blowing along the shallow lake can pile its water up there by several feet, flooding the shore.
Q 12Lake Victoria shares its water among Tanzania, Uganda and which other country?
Kenya
Kenya: the Nile perch, introduced into the lake in the 1950s, has greatly reduced its native cichlid fish.
Q 13Which African lake is the world's longest freshwater lake?
Tanganyika
Tanganyika: in 1871 Henry Morton Stanley 'found' the explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji, on its eastern shore.
Q 21The Dead Sea, whose shores are the lowest land on Earth, lies between Israel and which country?
Jordan
Jordan: human water use has sent the lake's level plunging, so the lowest land on Earth keeps getting lower.
Q 22Which clifftop fortress overlooking the Dead Sea was the Jewish rebels' last stand against Rome?
Masada
Masada: to break in, Roman troops built a siege ramp up to its walls, and that ramp still stands today.
Q 23Which vast Ice Age lake that covered much of Utah shares its name with a famous land speed racetrack?
Bonneville
Bonneville: its old shorelines still ring the surrounding foothills as flat benches, like bathtub rings.
Q 14Which lake, home to hundreds of species of cichlids, has more species of fish than any other lake?
Malawi
Malawi: cut off from other waters, its fish evolved into hundreds of species found nowhere else.
Q 15Which Scottish loch holds more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined?
Ness
Ness: its most famous monster photo, the 1934 'surgeon's photograph', was revealed in 1994 as a hoax using a toy submarine.
Q 16Which loch is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area?
Lomond
Lomond: it lies across the Highland edge, so glaciers cut a deep, narrow trench in the hard northern rock but spread wide over the softer south.
Q 17Which is the largest lake in England, lying in the Lake District?
Windermere
Windermere: in 1930 Sir Henry Segrave set a world water speed record on it, but died of injuries from the attempt.
Q 18Which poet, who settled at Grasmere in the Lake District, wrote 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'?
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth: the poem grew from an 1802 walk with his sister Dorothy, who wrote in her journal of a long belt of daffodils along the lake shore.
Q 19Crater Lake fills a caldera left by the collapse of which volcano?
Mount Mazama
Mount Mazama: winds carried ash from its eruption as far as southern Canada.
Q 20Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States, is in which state?
Oregon
Oregon: the lake's trout and salmon are not native; people stocked them there starting in 1888.
Q 24Robert Smithson's 1970 land artwork Spiral Jetty coils into which body of water in the American West?
Great Salt Lake
Great Salt Lake: soon after it was built the jetty sank beneath the water, reappearing for long only when drought lowered the lake decades later.
Q 25Lake Como in northern Italy has a shape that resembles which letter?
An inverted Y
An inverted Y: in April 1945 partisans captured the fleeing dictator Benito Mussolini near Dongo, on its shore.
Q 26A holiday of ghost-story writing beside which lake produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?
Geneva
Geneva: the summer of 1816 was so cold and stormy that the friends stayed indoors, where Lord Byron proposed the contest.
Q 27Lake Constance, the Bodensee, borders Germany, Switzerland and which third country?
Austria
Austria: in 1900 the first Zeppelin airship made its maiden flight over the lake, from a floating hangar near Friedrichshafen.
Q 28Why did Central Asia's Aral Sea shrink to a fraction of its former size?
Soviet irrigation diverted its rivers
Soviet irrigation diverted its rivers: starved of that water, the sea shrank so far that it split into separate lakes.
Q 29A lake in the Sahel borders Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and which fourth country?
Chad
Chad: drought and heavy water use shrank the lake's open water from about 25,000 square km in the 1960s to about 1,500 by the early 2000s.
Q 30Lake Mead, the reservoir near Las Vegas, was created by which dam?
Hoover Dam
Hoover Dam: the rising lake behind it swallowed the town of St. Thomas, whose last resident left in 1938.