Lake Superior (French: Lac Supérieur) is the largest of the Great Lakes of North America. The lake is shared by the province of Ontario to the north in Canada, the states of Minnesota to the west, Wisconsin and Michigan to the south in the United States. It is generally considered the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. It is the world's third-largest freshwater lake by volume and the largest by volume in North America.[6]
Name Edit
The Ojibwe call the lake gichi-gami (pronounced as gitchi-gami and kitchi-gami in other dialects),[7] meaning "be a great sea." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee" in The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". According to other sources the actual Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami ("Ojibwe's Great Sea") or Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea").[8] The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (reflecting Ojibwe Gichigami).[7] The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur. Properly translated, the expression means "Upper Lake," that is, the lake above Lake Huron. The lake was also called Lac Tracy (named for Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy) by 17th century Jesuit missionaries.[9] The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake's name to Superior, "on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent."[10]
Hydrography Edit
Lake Superior bathymetric map.[11][12][13] The deepest point, roughly off its southeastern shore, is marked with "×".[14] The deep trenches in its eastern part may have originated from tunnel valleys.[15][16]
Lake Superior empties into Lake Huron via the St. Marys River and the Soo Locks. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world in area (if Lakes Michigan and Huron are taken separately; see Lake Michigan–Huron), and the third largest in volume, behind Lake Baikal in Siberia and Lake Tanganyika in East Africa. The Caspian Sea, while larger than Lake Superior in both surface area and volume, is brackish; though presently isolated, prehistorically the Caspian has been repeatedly connected to and isolated from the Mediterranean via the Black Sea.
Lake Superior deepest point[14] on the bathymetric map.[11]
Lake Superior has a surface area of 31,700 square miles (82,103 km2),[1] which is approximately the size of South Carolina or Austria. It has a maximum length of 350 statute miles (560 km; 300 nmi) and maximum breadth of 160 statute miles (257 km; 139 nmi).[2] Its average depth is 80.5 fathoms (483 ft; 147 m) with a maximum depth of 222.17 fathoms (1,333 ft; 406 m).[1][2][3] Lake Superior contains 2,900 cubic miles (12,100 km³) of water.[1] There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entire land mass of North and South America to a depth of 30 centimetres (12 in).[17] The shoreline of the lake stretches 2,726 miles (4,387 km) (including islands).[1]
American limnologist J. Val Klump was the first person to reach the lowest depth of Lake Superior on July 30, 1985, as part of a scientific expedition, which at 122 fathoms 1 foot (733 ft or 223 m) below sea level is the lowest spot in the continental interior of the United States and the second-lowest spot in the interior of the North American continent after the deeper Great Slave Lake in Canada (1,503 feet [458 m] below sea level). (Though Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and deeper than Lake Superior, Crater Lake's elevation is higher and consequently its deepest point is 4,229 feet (1,289 m) above sea level.)
While the temperature of the surface of Lake Superior varies seasonally, the temperature below 110 fathoms (660 ft; 200 m) is an almo
