Geography Quiz: Major Seas of the World

It is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, bounded by the Philippines on the west, Taiwan and Japan on the north and the Mariana Islands on the east, and it is the largest sea on earth; the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point of the ocean floor, lies…

This narrow passage between Spain in Europe and Morocco in Africa is the only natural opening of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, and it has carried the trade of three continents since antiquity.

Lying in the middle of the North Atlantic, it is bounded on all sides by the currents of the North Atlantic gyre rather than by any coast, and it takes its name from the floating Sargassum weed in which European and American eels breed.

Despite its name it has no outlet to any ocean and is therefore a lake, the largest enclosed water body on earth; it is bordered by five countries, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan, and is fed mainly by the Volga.

This strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, leads into the Gulf of Aden and so to the Arabian Sea, and together with the Suez Canal at the northern end it makes the Red Sea a link in the…

The Aral Sea is a landlocked salt lake of Central Asia that lost most of its water after the Soviet authorities diverted its two feeding rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton, leaving salt flats, stranded fishing boats and a ruined local climate; it is the…

It is a northern extension of the Black Sea, joined to it by the Kerch Strait, and its depth nowhere much exceeds a dozen metres, which makes it the shallowest sea on earth; the Don river empties into it.

The Dead Sea lies in the rift valley of the Jordan river, which flows into it and has no outlet, so dissolved salts have gone on accumulating until the water is several times as salty as the ocean and almost nothing lives in it; its shore is more than four…

It receives a very large river inflow from northern Europe, lies in a cool region where evaporation is slight, and exchanges water with the North Sea only through the narrow Danish straits, so its water is brackish rather than fully saline, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia.

The Bering Strait lies between the easternmost point of Asia and the westernmost point of North America and links the Bering Sea of the Pacific with the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean; the International Date Line runs through it, and the Diomede Islands within it belong one to Russia…