Europe Geography Quiz
Europe's map hides a desert, a split island and a river that crosses ten borders.
A Europe geography quiz with answers that skips capitals and flags. It explores rivers, seas, mountains and borders, and the natural forces that shaped the continent's map.
Did you know?
- The Netherlands' Delta Works, built after a flood in 1953, form one of the largest flood protection systems in the world. Their giant storm barriers can close when high tides threaten, and the Maeslantkering near Rotterdam has two moving arms that are each nearly as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall.
- Europe's largest lake is Lake Ladoga in north-western Russia, with an area of about 17,700 square kilometres. It freezes in winter, drains into the Neva River that flows through Saint Petersburg, and is home to a rare freshwater seal.
- The Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube between Serbia and Romania, was once one of Europe's most dangerous stretches for ships. Dams completed in 1972 raised the water level, submerged the rapids and created a large reservoir used for electricity.
How Europe's landscape was shaped
Europe is the second-smallest continent by area, yet it has an unusually long and broken coastline full of peninsulas, bays and islands. That shape brings the sea close to most of the continent and helps explain its mild climate in the west, where winds from the Atlantic are warmed by the North Atlantic Current. Mountains, rivers and ice ages then divided the land into the many regions and valleys that shaped its history.
Mountains and plates
The Alps, the Pyrenees and the Carpathians rose as the African plate pushed north into Europe over tens of millions of years. The same collision still causes earthquakes in Italy, Greece and Turkey and feeds volcanoes such as Etna and Vesuvius. In the far north-west, Iceland shows the opposite process: plates moving apart, with new crust forming along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Older, worn-down mountains run through Scandinavia and Scotland.
The work of ice
During the last ice age, thick ice sheets covered Scandinavia, much of Britain and the northern European plain. As they melted, they left thousands of lakes, carved deep valleys that the sea later filled as fjords, and dropped rock and sand across Germany, Poland and the Netherlands. The land in parts of Scandinavia is still rising slowly today, after being pressed down for thousands of years by the weight of the ice.
Rivers as highways
Europe's great rivers have carried people and goods for thousands of years. The Rhine links Switzerland to the North Sea, the Danube joins Central Europe to the Black Sea, and the Volga runs through Russia to the Caspian Sea. Canals connect many of them, so a barge can travel from the North Sea to the Black Sea through the Main-Danube Canal. Many cities grew where rivers could be crossed or where they met the sea.