Washington, D.C.This week, over 100 young people gathered at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., to do mental battle at the 2019 Geo Championships.

The competitions, which climaxed on Wednesday afternoon, consisted of the National Geographic GeoBee, a geography-based bee that tests students’ knowledge of Earth, and the inaugural National Geographic GeoChallenge, where teams present projects that offer solutions to some aspect of the global plastic pollution problem.

In the GeoBee event, the two finalists stood quietly at their podiums at the front of a packed auditorium. Legs and hands jittering, they waited to hear the final question. Whoever answered it correctly would be the winner.

“More than one-third of Norway’s northernmost county is located on what plateau?” asked Mo