07/11/2023
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22 AMAZING LAKE SUPERIOR FACTS
1. Lake Superior contains ten percent of all the fresh water on the planet Earth.
2. It covers 82,000 square kilometers or 31,700 square miles.
3. The average depth is 147 meters or 483 feet.
4. There have been about 350 shipwrecks recorded in Lake Superior.
5. Lake Superior is, by surface area, the largest lake in the world.
6. A Jesuit priest in 1668 named it
Lac Tracy, but that name was never officially adopted.
7. It contains as much water as all the other Great Lakes combined, plus three extra Lake Eries.
8. The Ojibwe name for Lake Superior is Gitchi-Gami which translates to “Great sea”.
9. The shoreline of Lake Superior is 2,726 miles (4,385 km) long.
10. There is a small outflow from the lake at St. Marys River (Sault Ste Marie) into Lake Huron but it takes almost two centuries for the water to be completely replaced.
11. There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with water a foot deep.
12. It takes 551 billion gallons of water to raise the water level one inch.
13. The deepest point in the lake is 405 meters or 1,333 feet.
14. There are 78 different species of fish that call the big lake home.
15. The largest waves ever recorded on Lake Superior were 28.8 feet (8.8 meters) high and were recorded in October of 2017.
16. 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.
17. Over 300 streams and rivers empty into Lake Superior with the largest source being the Nipigon River.
18. 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.
19. In the summer, the sun sets more than 35 minutes later on the western shore of Lake Superior than at its southeastern edge.
21. It is extremely rare for Lake Superior to 100% freeze over. The last time it came close was in 2014 when it had 91% ice coverage.
22. Lake Superior is the coldest of the Great Lakes with an average temperature of between 36 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit
Image credit NOAA - via Destination Duluth
