Lake Superior Research Paper

Lake Superior by its surface area it is the world’s largest freshwater lake. Out of the Great Lakes it is the deepest lake of them all. Lake Superior also contains 10% of all the freshwater supply on the earth. Lake Superior also contains more water that all the other great lakes by a lot.There also is enough water to flood North & South America by a depth of 1 foot. Over 300 streams and rivers empty into Lake Superior. The average elevation of Lake Superior is about 602 feet above sea level. The Lake Superior watershed region ranges in size from 160 miles inland near Wabakimi Provincial Park to only 5 miles inland from Pictured Rocks National Seashore. The Lake Superior shoreline, if straightened out, could connect Duluth and the Bahama Islands.

By comparison, the earth 's second largest lake (by surface area, and largest by volume), Lake Baikal in Russia, is 25 million years old. Fifty-eight orchid species are native to the Lake Superior basin. In North America, only Florida has more native orchid species. Lake Superior produces the greatest lake effect snows on earth. (Significant lake effect snows are a rare phenomenon, occurring--besides on the Great Lakes--only on the east shore of Hudson Bay and the west coasts of two Japanese islands.) Lake effect snows extend 20 to 30 miles inland, primarily on the Ontario shore southeast of Marathon, and from Sault Ste. Marie to the Wisconsin-Michigan border. Average annual snowfall in Michigan 's Keweenaw exceeds 200 inches in places. Lake Superior has been at its modern elevation for only about 2,000 years, when elevations of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron dropped, creating a rapids at Sault Ste. Marie. Lake Superior has its origins in the North American Mid-Continent Rift of 1.1 to 1.2 billion years ago, which produced a huge plume of hot mantle where the present lake sits. The crust tore apart, leaving an arc-shaped scar stretching form Kansas through Minnesota, then down to Michigan. Within its borders, Lake Superior has both the thickest, and nearly the thinnest, crust found anywhere in North America.When European explorers visited Lake