Lake Superior Facts
- Lake Superior contains ten percent of all the fresh water on the planet Earth.
- It covers 82,000 square kilometers or 31,700 square miles.
- The average depth is 147 meters or 483 feet.
- There have been 352 shipwrecks recorded in Lake Superior.
- Lake Superior is, by surface area, the largest lake in the world.
- A Jesuit priest in 1668 named it Lac Tracy, but that name was never officially adopted.
- It contains as much water as all the other Great Lakes combined, plus three extra Lake Erie's!!
- There is a small outflow from the lake at St. Mary's River (Sault Ste Marie) into Lake Huron, but it takes almost two centuries for the water to be completely replaced.
- There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with water one foot deep.
- Lake Superior was formed during the last glacial retreat, making it one of the earth's youngest major features at only about 10,000 years old.
- The deepest point in the lake is 405 meters or 1,333 feet.
- There are 78 different species of fish that call the big lake home.
- The maximum wave ever recorded on Lake Superior was 9.45 meters or 31 feet high.
- If you stretched the shoreline of Lake Superior out to a straight line, it would be long enough to reach from Duluth to the Bahamas .
- Over 300 streams and rivers empty into Lake Superior with the largest source being the Nipigon River
- The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is about 8 meters or 27 feet, making it the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes. Underwater visibility in some spots reaches 30 meters or 98 feet.
- In the summer, the sun sets more than 35 minutes later on the Western shore of Lake Superior than at its Southeastern edge.
- Some of the world's oldest rocks, formed about 2.7 billion years ago, can be found on the Ontario shore of Lake Superior.
- It very rarely freezes over completely, and then usually just for a few hours. Complete freezing occurred in 1962, 1979, 2003 and 2009.