World Lakes Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

The lowest point in Australia is usually a blinding white salt pan, bone dry for years. Every decade or so, monsoon rain a thousand kilometres away drains down desert channels and fills it, and fish and pelicans seem to appear from nowhere. A land-speed record was set on its dry crust in 1964. Can you identify this lake?

Question 2

A small glacier-fed lake below ten sharp peaks in the Canadian Rockies, its blue so intense from rock powder that it barely looks real. It once appeared on the back of a twenty-dollar note. So many visitors came that private cars are now banned on the access road. Name this lake.

Question 3

The largest body of brine in the Western Hemisphere, a shrunken leftover of a huge Ice Age lake whose old shorelines still mark the mountains above a big city. A rail causeway splits it into a blue half and a pink half. Only tiny brine shrimp live in it, and an artist coiled a rock jetty into it in 1970. Which lake is this?

Question 4

Africa's largest lake by area, but shallow for its size, and thought to have dried out completely more than once in the past million years. A predatory fish stocked here in the 1950s wiped out hundreds of small native species. Its outflow is where the White Nile begins. Can you identify this lake?

Question 5

A very deep, very clear lake high in the Sierra Nevada, straddling the California-Nevada line. It is so deep and cold that the main body has essentially never frozen, and boulders are visible far below the surface. Mark Twain wrote about camping on its shore and accidentally starting a forest fire. Which lake matches these clues?

Question 6

The largest permanent desert lake in the world, and the largest alkaline lake anywhere, glowing jade green from algae in a furnace-hot part of the Rift Valley. It is shrinking as a dam holds back the river that feeds it. Its shores have yielded some of the oldest human fossils ever found. Which lake is this?

Question 7

The largest lake in the European Union, low across the middle of Sweden and linked by a 19th-century canal to both the North Sea and the Baltic, so seagoing ships cross it. It has its own salmon that never go to sea. Rare eagles nest on a flat-topped hill on its southern shore. Which lake is being described?

Question 8

India's biggest coastal lagoon and the main winter home for migrating birds on the whole subcontinent, cut off from the Bay of Bengal by a long sandbar. It has its own small population of Irrawaddy dolphins. A new inlet dug in 2000 flushed it out and brought the fish back. Can you identify this lake?

Question 9

The deepest lake in the United States fills the caldera left when a volcano blew its top about 7,700 years ago. No river runs in or out, so the water is extraordinarily clear and deep blue. A cinder cone forms one island, and a bleached log has floated upright in it for over a century. Which lake is being described?

Question 10

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?

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.