Which mineral fizzes when acid touches it, and which island rose out of the sea in 1963? Sixty earth science trivia questions answer both, from minerals and lava to hail, glaciers and the oldest crystals found.
Read the full guide
Five rounds, from the crust to the clouds
Start a mixed table on Ice, rivers and landforms, where fjord, crevasse and mesa are fair for anyone. Deep time and Weather and the sky are for the table that knows its graupel from its virga. Teams write a letter, you press Check answer, and the tally stays on paper.
Earth science trivia for a class, on paper
A science teacher can pick one round under Topic and hand out Print question sheet; Print answer key carries the reason behind every answer for the review.
Tips
Play Volcanoes and earthquakes second: the Hawaiian lava words start the best guessing.
Questions and answers
What are some easy earth science trivia questions?
What is halite better known as? What is a crevasse? The flat-topped hill called a mesa is named after the Spanish word for what? The answers are rock salt, a deep crack in a glacier, and table.
How were the answers checked?
Each was read on September 24, 2026 in the English Wikipedia article linked under it, and figures are as those pages gave them: feldspars at about 60% of the crust, the Jack Hills zircons at about 4.4 billion years.
Why are the three rock types not a question?
Other quizzes on this site already ask them, along with Earth's layers, Pangaea and cloud types. This set asks what they skip, such as what slate, marble and quartzite each started out as.
Feldspars make up about how much of Earth's crust by weight?Answer: About 60%. Source: Wikipedia: Feldspar
Galena is the most important ore of which metal?Answer: Lead. Source: Wikipedia: Galena
Halite is the mineral form of which everyday substance?Answer: Rock salt. Source: Wikipedia: Halite
The name hematite comes from the Greek word for what?Answer: Blood. Source: Wikipedia: Hematite
Obsidian is a natural what?Answer: Volcanic glass. Source: Wikipedia: Obsidian
On the Mohs scale of hardness, which mineral sets the top of the scale at 10?Answer: Diamond. Source: Wikipedia: Mohs scale
Quartzite was once which kind of rock?Answer: Quartz sandstone. Source: Wikipedia: Quartzite
Slate is a fine-grained metamorphic rock that usually starts out as which rock?Answer: Shale. Source: Wikipedia: Slate
To a geologist, marble is which rock after heat and pressure have changed it?Answer: Limestone. Source: Wikipedia: Marble
What does calcite do when a drop of acid lands on it?Answer: It fizzes. Source: Wikipedia: Calcite
Which mineral can be split into thin, bendy sheets?Answer: Mica. Source: Wikipedia: Mica
Which mineral sits at 9 on the Mohs scale, one step below diamond?Answer: Corundum. Source: Wikipedia: Mohs scale
Show all 60 questions (48 more)
Volcanoes and earthquakes 12
A stratovolcano, built of many layers of lava and ash, is also called what?Answer: A composite volcano. Source: Wikipedia: Stratovolcano
In 1943 the Mexican volcano Parícutin began to grow out of what?Answer: A farmer's cornfield. Source: Wikipedia: Parícutin
In Hawaiian, what is lava with a rough surface of broken blocks called?Answer: ʻAʻā. Source: Wikipedia: Lava
In soil liquefaction, what happens to wet ground during an earthquake?Answer: It behaves like a liquid. Source: Wikipedia: Soil liquefaction
The island of Surtsey rose out of the sea off Iceland in which decade?Answer: The 1960s. Source: Wikipedia: Surtsey
On the Volcanic Explosivity Index, what value have the largest eruptions in history been given?Answer: 8. Source: Wikipedia: Volcanic explosivity index
Pāhoehoe lava takes its name from a Hawaiian phrase meaning what?Answer: Smooth, unbroken lava. Source: Wikipedia: Lava
Pele's hair, thin strands of volcanic glass, is named after whom?Answer: The Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Source: Wikipedia: Pele's hair
What does the Modified Mercalli scale measure?Answer: The effects of an earthquake at one place. Source: Wikipedia: Modified Mercalli intensity scale
What is a pyroclastic flow?Answer: A fast current of hot gas and volcanic debris. Source: Wikipedia: Pyroclastic flow
What is an aftershock?Answer: A smaller quake after a bigger one nearby. Source: Wikipedia: Aftershock
What is the huge hollow called that forms when a volcano empties its magma chamber and the ground caves in?Answer: A caldera. Source: Wikipedia: Caldera
Weather and the sky 12
A haboob is an intense what?Answer: Dust storm. Source: Wikipedia: Haboob
The dew point is the temperature at which air becomes what?Answer: Saturated with water vapor. Source: Wikipedia: Dew point
The International Space Station orbits inside which layer of the atmosphere?Answer: The thermosphere. Source: Wikipedia: Thermosphere
Lenticular clouds are named for their likeness to what?Answer: A lens. Source: Wikipedia: Lenticular cloud
Noctilucent clouds can be seen only in twilight. What does their name roughly mean?Answer: Night shining. Source: Wikipedia: Noctilucent cloud
On a weather map, what does an isobar join?Answer: Places with the same air pressure. Source: Wikipedia: Contour line
On which side of a mountain range does a rain shadow lie?Answer: The side facing away from the wind. Source: Wikipedia: Rain shadow
The storm name derecho comes from a Spanish word meaning what?Answer: Straight. Source: Wikipedia: Derecho
Sun dogs, bright spots on each side of the Sun, are made by light passing through what?Answer: Ice crystals. Source: Wikipedia: Sun dog
What is the dry, warm wind that blows down the lee side of a mountain range called?Answer: A foehn. Source: Wikipedia: Foehn wind
What is virga?Answer: Rain or snow that evaporates before it lands. Source: Wikipedia: Virga
Which kind of precipitation is also called soft hail or snow pellets?Answer: Graupel. Source: Wikipedia: Graupel
Ice, rivers and landforms 12
A cirque is an amphitheatre-shaped valley carved by what?Answer: Glacial ice. Source: Wikipedia: Cirque
A drumlin, a hill shaped by glacial ice, is often compared to what?Answer: A half-buried egg. Source: Wikipedia: Drumlin
A moraine is a heap of rock and soil carried and left behind by what?Answer: A glacier. Source: Wikipedia: Moraine
An oxbow lake forms when what is cut off?Answer: A wide bend of a river. Source: Wikipedia: Oxbow lake
The flat-topped hill called a mesa takes its name from a Spanish word meaning what?Answer: Table. Source: Wikipedia: Mesa
Karst country, full of sinkholes and caves, forms where which kind of rock dissolves?Answer: Limestone. Source: Wikipedia: Karst
Loess is a fine, silty soil built up from what?Answer: Wind-blown dust. Source: Wikipedia: Loess
What is a crevasse?Answer: A deep crack in a glacier. Source: Wikipedia: Crevasse
What is a long, narrow sea inlet with steep sides, in a valley carved by a glacier, called?Answer: A fjord. Source: Wikipedia: Fjord
What is an esker?Answer: A long, winding ridge of sand and gravel. Source: Wikipedia: Esker
What is it called when chunks of ice break off the edge of a glacier?Answer: Calving. Source: Wikipedia: Ice calving
When a stalactite grows down and meets a stalagmite, what do they form?Answer: A column. Source: Wikipedia: Stalagmite
Deep time 12
A thin clay layer marks the end of the Cretaceous around the world. Which metal is it unusually rich in?Answer: Iridium. Source: Wikipedia: Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
About how much of plant and animal life died out in the extinction that ended the Cretaceous?Answer: About three-quarters. Source: Wikipedia: Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
How many formally defined eons are there?Answer: Four. Source: Wikipedia: Geologic time scale
The name of the Cenozoic era means what?Answer: New life. Source: Wikipedia: Geologic time scale
The name Phanerozoic comes from Greek words meaning what?Answer: Visible life. Source: Wikipedia: Phanerozoic
The oldest known material from Earth, zircon crystals about 4.4 billion years old, came from the Jack Hills in which country?Answer: Australia. Source: Wikipedia: Jack Hills
The Phanerozoic eon, the age of plentiful animal life, covers about how much of Earth's history?Answer: About 12%. Source: Wikipedia: Geologic time scale
Snowball Earth is most often linked to which period, named for the cold?Answer: The Cryogenian. Source: Wikipedia: Snowball Earth
What does the Snowball Earth hypothesis propose?Answer: Earth was once almost entirely frozen. Source: Wikipedia: Snowball Earth
When were the ice sheets of the last ice age at their greatest?Answer: 26,000 to 20,000 years ago. Source: Wikipedia: Last Glacial Maximum
Which is the largest unit of geologic time?Answer: The eon. Source: Wikipedia: Geologic time scale
Which Scottish geologist is often called the Father of Modern Geology?Answer: James Hutton. Source: Wikipedia: James Hutton
How this list was compiled: Written for this site; nothing was copied from another list. Questions and wrong choices are our own. Each explanation restates facts from the page named and linked beside it, in our own sentences; numbers and dates follow that page. Each answer was checked on 2026-09-24 against the page named and linked beside the question: the text of that English Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org) was fetched that day, and the passage that states the fact was read before the question was kept. Left out on purpose: facts other trivia sets on this site already ask, such as the three rock types, the layers inside the Earth, plate boundaries, Pangaea, the Richter scale, the ozone layer, cloud types, the age of the Earth, the dinosaurs' era and extinction date, the Great Dying, permafrost, the Holocene, the Chicxulub crater and the word monsoon. Levels are our estimate: easy is fair for any table, medium suits people who like the outdoors, hard will stump most tables. Each question also carries the date its page was read (checkedOn). Licence: own work