Cold Hard Lake Superior Facts:
- Surface Area: 31,700 sq. mi. (82,100 sq. km.)
- A.k.a. the World's Largest Freshwater Lake by surface area
- Roughly the size of the state of South Carolina
- Volume: 3,000,000,000,000,000 gal. (2,900 cubic mi. or 12,100 cubic km.)
- A.k.a. the World's Third Largest Freshwater Lake by volume
- That's enough water to fill the Grand Canyon over 2.5 times
- Average Depth: 483 ft. (147 m.)
- Deeper than the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza
- Maximum Depth: 1,322 ft. (406 m.)
- The Empire State Building isn't even that tall
- Length: 350 mi. (560 km.)
- About the same distance as a drive from Marquette to Chicago
- Width: 160 mi. (260 km.)
- As wide as the distance from Marquette to Mackinaw City
- Shoreline Length: 1,826 mi. (2,938 km.)
- The equivalent to a cross-country road trip from Marquette to Seattle
- Retention Time (the time to completely empty and refill the volume of the lake): 191 years
- That means that the average drop of water in Lake Superior has been around since Beethoven was composing music
- Alternative Names:
- gichigami (Ojibwe)
- Lac Superieur (French)
- Gitche Gumee (coined by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Song of Hiawatha and Gordon Lightfoot in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)
Information on Lake Superior from www.seagrant.umn.edu/superior/facts
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