Lake Superior

Lake Superior is the planet’s largest body of fresh water by surface area.

A little east of the middle of North America, Lake Superior (or gichigami in Ojibwe) is an inland sea containing 3-quadrillion gallons of water. That’s:

• 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (11.4-quadrillion liters)
• Enough to submerge North and South America under 1 foot of fresh water
• 10% of the world’s fresh surface water
• Over half of the water contained in the Great Lakes

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and the third largest by volume. Scoured into its present form by the retreating glacial ice sheet covering the region during the last Ice Age (about 10,000 years ago), Superior’s cold waters are bounded by northern hardwood and conifer forests and buffeted by continental weather patterns. Three U.S. states and one Canadian province share Superior’s water prompting cooperative binational governance of human activities around the lake, which include managing:

Lake Superior is ultra-oligotrophic. This means it is very low in productivity (aquatic plant and algae production) compared to other lakes of the world. Its small watershed relative to its size and depth, geological “youth” (it is only roughly 10,000 years old, since the last ice age), and lack of well-developed soils all contribute to its low productivity. This means it cannot support as large or diverse a fish population as the other Great Lakes and is sensitive to changes caused by increased nutrients, invasive species, contaminants, and intensive land uses. Airborne contaminants such as mercury and toxaphere are proportionally more important in a lake like Superior, which receives less material from its watershed than many other lakes.