The Seas & Oceans Quiz

Open water, gulfs and bays. Pin anywhere on the sea. This pack draws from 30 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

A sea is the biggest feature in the atlas, and its size is your handicap

This pack is feature-scored: a pin anywhere inside the drawn boundary of a sea measures zero kilometres, so the first reward is knowing the sea at all. The second is knowing how big it is, because the scoring scales the points down by the sea's extent. The Philippine Sea, the largest in the pack at over four thousand kilometres across, pays about half even for a correct hit. The Adriatic or the Aegean, comparatively compact, pay nearly full marks. So the famous seas are not the generous ones; the small enclosed ones are, and the pack quietly separates the player who knows the name from the one who knows the size.

The feature rule also means the pin goes on the open water, not on a coast. A click on Naples for a Tyrrhenian clue, if the Tyrrhenian were in this pack, scores the distance from the city to the nearest point of the polygon, which may be two hundred kilometres, so the habit to build is pushing the pin into the centre of the drawn shape, not onto a familiar shore.

Three habits that convert names into pins

Anchor on the bounding land. Every sea is defined by the land around it, so placing the shores places the water. The Mediterranean sits between Europe, Africa and Asia; the Caribbean between Central America and the Antilles; the Black Sea between Türkiye, the Balkans and the Caucasus. If you can name the landmasses the clue implies, the sea sits between them, and the pin goes on the enclosed water.

Sort the Asian seas. The South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea all sit on the western Pacific rim, but they are not interchangeable. The South China Sea sits between Southeast Asia and China; the East China Sea sits between China and Japan; the Sea of Japan sits between Japan and Korea; the Yellow Sea sits between China and Korea. They share a latitude band, so the longitude is the separator, and the habit is asking which coast a clue belongs to.

Use the Atlantic and Arctic gateways. The North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Labrador Sea, the Barents Sea and Hudson Bay all connect to the Atlantic or the Arctic, and they sort by latitude. The North Sea sits between Britain and the continent at about 56 degrees north; the Norwegian Sea sits between Norway and Iceland at about 65 degrees north; the Barents Sea sits above the Arctic Circle near Russia. Hudson Bay sits in the middle of Canada, opening to the Arctic. If a clue is cold-water and northern, the Arctic and North Atlantic are where the pin belongs, not in the tropics.

What makes a seas run hard

The pack's 30 places include genuine confusables. The Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal both sit in the northern Indian Ocean, but the Arabian Sea is west of India and the Bay of Bengal is east, so a pin on the wrong one is a two-thousand-kilometre miss. The Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico share a shape but sit on opposite sides of the world. The Coral Sea and the Tasman Sea both sit off Australia, but the Coral Sea is northeast, on the Great Barrier Reef side, while the Tasman Sea is southeast, between Australia and New Zealand. The Adriatic and the Aegean both sit in the Mediterranean, but the Adriatic is between Italy and the Balkans while the Aegean is between Greece and Türkiye. For how the feature rule prices a sea by its size, the feature rounds guide covers the scoring. For the broader skill of judging distance on a blank globe, How Far Is a Degree? turns latitude and longitude into kilometres.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

• Hudson Bay · Canada
• The Adriatic Sea · Italy / Balkans
• The Aegean Sea · Greece / Türkiye
• The Andaman Sea · Southeast Asia
• The Arabian Sea · Indian Ocean
• The Baltic Sea · Northern Europe
• The Barents Sea · Arctic Ocean
• The Bay of Bengal · Indian Ocean
• The Bay of Biscay · France / Spain
• The Black Sea · Europe / Asia

…and 20 more across the pack.

More terrain & water

• The Rivers quiz · Trace the great rivers. A pin anywhere along the water counts.
• The Lakes quiz · Inland seas and Great Lakes. Land on the water, anywhere on it.
• The Deserts quiz · The great sand seas and their edges. Anywhere inside counts.

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