Superior Facts
Every once in awhile I come across facts about Lake Superior. I’m not sure if it’s my memory or if there are just so many things I don’t know about the Great Lake but I learn something knew every time I read a list. So, in case you tend to forget these amazing things about the big lake I live so close to I’ll share with you another list.
� 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 .
� 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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