North Sea Trivia
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67 free North Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This North Sea trivia quiz covers the shallow shelf sea between Britain and the continent from every angle: its geography (the Norwegian trench, Dogger Bank, the Wadden Sea, the Skagerrak and the Frisian Islands), its geology and prehistory (Doggerland, the Storegga tsunami, the 1931 Dogger Bank earthquake and the Draupner rogue wave), and its long history of storm surges from the Grote Manndrenke of 1362 to the 1953 flood that killed more than 2,000 people and produced the Delta Works and the Thames Barrier. You will also find questions on the sea's wars and rivalries (Vikings, the Hanseatic League, the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Dogger Bank incident, Jutland, Scapa Flow), its economy (Ekofisk and Brent crude, Piper Alpha, Rotterdam, the Kiel Canal, herring and cod, Horns Rev and the giant wind farms), its wildlife, and its many names, from Mare Germanicum to Vesterhavet. Some questions suit anyone who has stood on a beach at Scheveningen or Scarborough; others will test geographers, sailors and oil workers. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on the North Sea and its major features and events, and each explanation adds one further detail.
30 of 67 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country's short stretch of North Sea coast includes the port of Dunkirk?
France
France touches the North Sea only from near Calais to the Belgian border, yet that strip holds Dunkirk, where more than 338,000 Allied troops were lifted off the beaches and harbour in 1940.
Q 02Which two waters link the North Sea to the Atlantic?
The English Channel and the Norwegian Sea
The English Channel and the Norwegian Sea open it to the Atlantic at either end, and the ocean water flowing in through both keeps the North Sea almost as salty as the open ocean.
Q 03The North Sea is unusually shallow because it lies on which feature?
A continental shelf
A continental shelf, Europe's, carries almost the whole sea, leaving it so shallow that much of its southern floor was dry land until the seas rose after the last ice age.
Q 04Which island group, Britain's most northerly, marks the North Sea's northern edge?
Shetland
Shetland was the base of the wartime 'Shetland Bus': Norwegian crews in fishing boats ran it from the islands, slipping agents and supplies into occupied Norway.
Q 05The Dogger Bank, a famous North Sea fishing ground, is what kind of geological feature?
A moraine of glacial debris
A moraine of glacial debris heaped up in the last ice age, the bank lies as little as 15 metres down; its name probably comes from doggers, the two-masted boats that fished it.
Q 06The Long Forties and Broad Fourteens are named for their depth in what unit?
Fathoms
Fathoms, each about six feet or the span of a sailor's outstretched arms, filled old charts, so wide areas that kept sounding 40 and 14 became the Long Forties and Broad Fourteens.
Q 07Which two rivers are the largest flowing into the North Sea?
The Elbe and the Rhine-Meuse
The Elbe and the Rhine-Meuse pour in so much fresh water that the North Sea's saltiness varies most around their estuaries.
Q 08What is the direction of the main water circulation around the edges of the North Sea?
Anti-clockwise
Anti-clockwise: most Atlantic water enters from the northwest, sweeps south along Britain and round the basin, then leaves northward up the eastern shore.
Q 09In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula comes ashore from a wrecked ship at which English North Sea port?
Whitby
Whitby is where the ship Demeter runs aground and a huge dog bounds ashore; Stoker holidayed in the Yorkshire port in 1890 and found the name Dracula in a book at its library.
Q 10North Sea storm surges turn deadliest when a northerly gale coincides with which kind of tide?
A spring tide
A spring tide, the extra-high tide of new and full moon, met a severe gale in the worst North Sea surge on record, and the sea flooded land lying up to 5.6 metres above its usual level.
Q 11Which German port city lost more than 300 residents when a North Sea storm surge burst its dikes in 1962?
Hamburg
Hamburg had a sixth of its area under water; its police senator Helmut Schmidt, later West German chancellor, made his name by calling in the army and NATO helicopters without legal authority.
Q 12What are the low-lying Dutch lands called that were reclaimed from the water and ringed by dikes?
Polders
Polders make up most of the quarter of the Netherlands lying below sea level; because they sit lower than the water around them, they have to be pumped dry, a job once done by windmills.
Q 13The tsunami-causing Storegga Slides were underwater landslides off which country?
Norway
Q 21Which large marine mammals lived around Scotland's northern isles in historic times but are now only rare vagrants?
Walruses
Walruses once ranged as far south as Orkney; today a wanderer is rare enough to be logged, with only a few dozen recorded in Scotland over the past two centuries.
Q 22The engineer of the Bell Rock lighthouse, standing in the North Sea off Scotland since 1810, was grandfather to which novelist?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson came from a family of lighthouse builders: his grandfather Robert raised the Bell Rock tower on a reef that the sea covered for 20 hours a day, and it still stands.
Q 23What older English name for the North Sea lingered in use until the First World War?
German Ocean
Norway's seabed slope collapsed about 8,000 years ago, and the tsunami it raised struck Scotland's east coast, leaving a layer of sand that can still be seen around the Montrose Basin.
Q 14Britain's strongest recorded example of which natural hazard was centred on the Dogger Bank in 1931?
An earthquake
An earthquake of magnitude 6.1 struck far enough out to sea that the worst damage ashore was toppled chimneys and, at Filey in Yorkshire, a twisted church spire.
Q 15The 25.6-metre Draupner event of 1995 was significant as what?
The first rogue wave measured by instruments
The first rogue wave measured by instruments, it hit the Draupner gas platform on New Year's Day 1995 and proved that the freak waves of sailors' stories, long thought implausible, were real.
Q 16What have North Sea trawlers hauled up from Doggerland, the drowned land beneath them?
Mammoth bones
Mammoth bones, lion remains and a few stone tools have come up in the nets; in 1931 the trawler Colinda landed a lump of peat holding a barbed antler point, proof that people once lived there.
Q 17Doggerland's people lived by hunting and fishing, so most traces of them date to which period?
Mesolithic
Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age: rising seas had swallowed Doggerland by about 6500 BCE, so its people stayed hunter-gatherers to the end, before farming, the mark of the Neolithic, arrived.
Q 18Which kind of animal left the bone that oil drillers pulled up from over two kilometres beneath the North Sea bed?
A dinosaur
A dinosaur: the sliver of bone, in a 1997 drill core from Norway's Snorre oil field, was later identified as Plateosaurus, which lived when the North Sea basin was a dry river plain.
Q 19Which giant fish drew wealthy big-game anglers to the North Sea off Scarborough in the 1930s?
Bluefin tuna
Bluefin tuna, known then as tunny, were landed off Yorkshire at more than 700 lb apiece, one of them a world record, yet within a few decades the fish had vanished from the North Sea.
Q 20Which North Sea fish stock collapsed under purse-seine netting in the 1960s and 1970s and never recovered?
Mackerel
Mackerel native to the North Sea crashed once purse seines could ring an entire shoal; herring crashed alongside them, but herring later came back and the mackerel never did.
German Ocean translated the Roman name Oceanus Germanicus and filled English maps for centuries, until 'North Sea', a borrowing from Dutch, finally pushed it out.
Q 24The name 'North Sea' probably came into English via the Dutch, in contrast with which body of water?
The Zuiderzee
The Zuiderzee, literally 'Southern Sea', was the shallow inland bay of the Netherlands; the Dutch Noordzee lay to its north, and English adopted the Dutch name in the late 13th century.
Q 25Besides Nordsøen, Danes call the North Sea by a second name meaning what?
West Sea
West Sea, Vesterhavet in Danish: seen from Denmark the water lies to the west, so both names are in use.
Q 26The Viking Age is traditionally dated from a raid in 793 on which North Sea island monastery?
Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne's raiders spilled the blood of monks around the altar, and the scholar Alcuin wrote from Charlemagne's court that never before had such terror appeared in Britain.
Q 27Which Baltic-centred trading alliance controlled most North Sea trade in the 13th century?
The Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League lost its grip in the 16th century because the states growing up around it absorbed its member cities one by one, and the towns' own quarrels kept them from resisting.
Q 28Up which English river did a Dutch fleet sail in 1667 to burn warships at Chatham and tow away the flagship?
The Medway
The Medway raid ranks among the Royal Navy's worst humiliations and forced a quick peace; the stern carving of the captured flagship, the Royal Charles, is still on show in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.
Q 29In the 1904 Dogger Bank incident, the Russian fleet mistook British trawlers for what?
Japanese warships
Japanese warships, torpedo boats in particular, were what Russia's jittery Baltic Fleet thought it saw on its way to the Far East; two Hull fishermen died and Britain came close to war with Russia.
Q 30The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was fought off the coast of which country?
Denmark
Denmark's Jutland peninsula lay about 100 km to the east when 250 British and German warships met in the war's only full fleet battle, after which both sides claimed victory.