Radio Country: There are fewer Great Lakes than you think

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

There are fewer Great Lakes than you think


	December 4, 2024

Original photo by halbergman/ iStock

There are technically only four (not five) Great Lakes.

Anyone familiar with the Great Lakes can tell you there are five of them: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. But actually, there aren't, quite. Lakes Michigan and Huron are technically one body of water, as the Straits of Mackinac connect them to form a single hydrologic system. At 3.5 miles wide and just 295 feet deep at its deepest point, the waterway is easy to miss on a map when studying the whole system of Great Lakes. The lakes span a total of 94,250 square miles across eight U.S. states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), plus Ontario, Canada.

When taken together, Lake Michigan-Huron is the world's largest freshwater lake by area. Even the smallest Great Lake, Ontario, is still the 13th-largest lake in the world. More than 90% of America's surface fresh water is found in the Great Lakes, which are the primary water source for some 40 million people as well as the largest freshwater system in the world.

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Lake Michigan has its own Bermuda Triangle.

Tales of the Bermuda Triangle have unsettled and mystified travelers for decades, but less well known is the Lake Michigan Triangle, whose three points touch two cities in Michigan (Ludington and Benton Harbor) and one in Wisconsin (Manitowoc). It was first mentioned in the 1977 book The Great Lakes Triangle, which claims the Great Lakes "account for more unexplained disappearances per unit area than the Bermuda Triangle." This includes a number of disappearances, shipwrecks, and plane crashes that have occurred in the Great Lakes, with Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 being among the most notable (and inexplicable). Everything from the Great Lakes' strange size to electromagnetic oddities have been cited as theories for these strange phenomena, whose true nature will likely be debated for some time to come.