World Lakes Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This warm, clear lake, deep in the African rift, holds more fish species than any other lake on Earth, mostly small, bright cichlids kept in home aquariums around the world. An explorer called it the Lake of Stars for the lantern-lit fishing boats. Three countries claim parts of it, and where the border runs is still disputed. Name this lake.

Question 2

Called the little sister of a giant lake over the border, this deep, very clear Mongolian lake holds about seventy percent of the country's fresh water. Its winter ice was once so thick that trucks drove across it, until too many broke through and it was banned. Reindeer herders live in the forest at its northern end. Which lake matches these clues?

Question 3

The largest volcanic lake in the world, filling a giant volcanic crater from an eruption about 74,000 years ago so huge that some scientists think it briefly cooled the whole planet. An island almost the size of Singapore sits inside it, home to a people known for boat-shaped clan houses. Which lake matches these clues?

Question 4

A shallow lake just behind the dunes near Dakar, up to ten times saltier than the sea. Workers rub on shea butter and wade in for hours to rake salt into white cones on the bank. Salt-loving algae turn the water a strawberry colour, strongest in the dry season. Which lake is this?

Question 5

A shallow lake in the Sahel with no outlet, yet its water stays fresh because the salt drains away underground. It has shrunk to a fraction of its 1960s size through drought and irrigation, though in prehistory it was bigger than the Caspian. Four countries meet around it. Which lake is being described?

Question 6

The lowest dry land on Earth is on its shore, and its surface drops more than a metre a year as the river feeding it is drained upstream. The water is so salty and dense that swimmers just float on top. Nothing lives in it, and ancient scrolls were found in caves nearby. Which lake is this?

Question 7

The lowest point in Africa, a lake in a volcano crater more than 150 metres below sea level, in a rift near the sea. Seawater seeps in underground and bakes in ferocious heat, leaving water among the saltiest anywhere and a wide white salt pan all around. Caravans have cut its salt for centuries. Name this lake.

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About World Lakes

A lake looks like the simplest thing in geography, a puddle on a map, yet almost every superlative attached to lakes comes with an asterisk. The "largest lake in the world" is the Caspian Sea, but only if you allow a body that five governments spent decades arguing was legally a sea. The deepest is Baikal, a single rift crack in Siberia that holds close to a quarter of all the unfrozen fresh water on the planet, more than the five North American Great Lakes stacked together. The oldest are a tiny club, Baikal, Tanganyika, Toba, Maracaibo, Biwa, most of them tens of millions of years old and each with a cast of endemic species, from Baikal's air-breathing golomyanka to Tanganyika's several hundred kinds of cichlid, that exist nowhere else because the lake has been a closed world for so long.

Water chemistry splits the family in two. Lakes with an outlet stay fresh; lakes with nowhere to drain slowly turn to brine, because the rivers keep delivering dissolved salts and only pure water leaves as vapour. That single rule produces the Dead Sea and Lake Assal, saltier than the ocean and dense enough to read a newspaper while floating, the pink lakes of Retba and Hillier where salt-loving algae dye the water strawberry, and the caustic soda lakes of the East African Rift, Natron and Nakuru and Van, whose lethal pH is exactly why a million flamingos can nest there undisturbed. Colour is chemistry too: the unreal turquoise of Pukaki and Moraine Lake is rock ground to flour by a glacier and hanging in the water; the jade of Turkana is algae; the swirl inside the Marble Caves of Lake General Carrera is six thousand years of waves polishing limestone.

Almost no lake is permanent on a geological clock, and the way each one formed is written into its shape. Glaciers gouged the finger lakes, Wakatipu, Como, Loch Ness, and left the Great Lakes and the ten-thousand-island tangle of Saimaa. Rifts pulled open the deep troughs of Baikal, Tanganyika, Malawi and the Dead Sea, the deepest and longest-lived of all. Volcanoes did the rest: calderas hold Toba, Taupo, Crater Lake and Atitlan, while a single lava flow dammed Lake Van. A few are accidents of their own chemistry, Kivu and Nyos quietly storing enough dissolved gas in their depths to kill everything around them if the water ever overturns, as it did at Nyos in 1986. Others barely hold still: Lake Eyre is bone-dry for years then briefly becomes Australia's largest lake, and the Tonle Sap runs backwards every monsoon.

Lakes also keep unusually good records of us. A dam at the mouth of Lake Victoria sets the level of the White Nile. A road across the ice of Lake Ladoga kept Leningrad alive for two winters. The uranium in the first atomic bombs was carried in sacks along the shore of Great Bear Lake, and the bombs themselves were designed beside Qinghai Lake. Sherlock Holmes was nearly killed off at a waterfall, but Frankenstein was born in a wet summer on Lake Geneva. And lakes vanish: the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest on Earth, is mostly desert with rusting trawlers on it; Lake Chad, Urmia and Poopo have each lost most of their water in a single lifetime to irrigation and drought. The photographs in this quiz are the easy part. The clues are deliberately oblique, so you will need the geology, the history and the wildlife, not just the view.