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 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, as it appears on a few maps but that name was never officially adopted.
· It contains as much water as all the other Great Lakes
combined, plus three extra Lake Eries .
· 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.
· There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North
and South America with water a 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.

Origins of Name: English translation of French term “lac supérieur

Surface area 31,820 sq mi (82,400 km2)
Water volume 2,900 cu mi (12,000 km3)
Elevation 600 ft (180 m)
Average depth 483 ft (147 m)
Maximum depth 1,332 ft (406 m)
Major settlements:
Duluth, MN
Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Sault Ste. Marie, MI
Thunder Bay, ON
Marquette, MI
Superior, WI