World Lakes Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

The largest inland body of water on Earth, big enough that five countries share its shore and argued for decades over whether to treat it as a lake or a sea. It has no link to any ocean, sits below sea level, tastes only lightly salty, and once produced most of the world's finest caviar. Name this lake.

Question 2

A huge maze of linked bays and thousands of islands, the biggest lake in Finland and a big reason it is called the land of a thousand lakes. It drains through one river into a larger lake in Russia. Its rarest resident is a freshwater seal, with only a few hundred left. Can you identify this lake?

Question 3

Once the largest lake in the Middle East and full of flamingos, now mostly gone since the 1990s to dams, wells and drought, with parts turned blood red by salt-loving microbes. A highway causeway crosses it on a bridge. Salt storms off the dry bed damage farmland for miles around. Name this lake.

Question 4

A shallow, blistering-hot lake full of natural soda in northern Tanzania, so harsh that its water can burn skin, with salt-loving microbes staining it blood red. Almost nothing breeds near it, which is exactly why it is the main nesting site on Earth for one kind of flamingo. Name this lake.

Question 5

The largest lake in Turkey and the biggest natural-soda lake in the world. It has no outlet, and its water is so soapy you could wash clothes in it. Only one small fish can survive in it, and it swims up freshwater streams to lay its eggs. A 10th-century Armenian church stands on one island. Which lake is this?

Question 6

The deepest and oldest lake on Earth, it holds close to one-fifth of all the liquid fresh water on the planet's surface. It lies in southern Siberia, freezes solid enough in winter to drive a truck across, and is the only place a true freshwater seal lives. Which lake is this?

Question 7

A deep lake carved by glaciers in Patagonia, with a different name on each side of the Chile-Argentina border. On its Chilean shore, waves have carved swirled grey-and-white marble into caves and pillars that glow blue from the water below. Small boats can go right inside the arches. Which lake matches these clues?

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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.