CY Inbox: Lake Superior Facts
Aug 13, 2020
Why it’s called Lake Superior . . . Pretty amazing. Did you realize how big this lake is?
✔ 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 about 350 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.
✔ 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.
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