115 Fun Facts About Lake

Which body of water is the world's largest lake, though it is usually called a sea?

Caspian Sea: it has features of both, and a 2018 treaty among its five shoreline nations treats it as legally neither fully a sea nor a lake.

Which US city lies along the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain?

New Orleans: in 2005 Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees holding back the lake, leaving about 80% of the city underwater.

Lake Baikal, often called the world's oldest lake, formed roughly how long ago?

25 million years ago: that great age and isolation gave the lake one of the world's most unusual sets of freshwater animals, many found nowhere else.

Lake Baikal in Siberia has its own species of which marine mammal, found nowhere else?

Seal: when the lake freezes over, Baikal seals use their claws to cut breathing holes in the ice.

Often called the highest navigable lake in the world, Titicaca sits on the border of which two countries?

Peru and Bolivia: though Bolivia lost its coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific, its navy patrols the lake.

The Uros people of Lake Titicaca build their floating islands out of what?

Totora reeds: the bottom layers rot away in the water, so islanders keep adding fresh reeds on top.

Which writer lived for two years in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond, a small Massachusetts lake?

Henry David Thoreau: midway through his stay there, he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax.

The freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a November 1975 storm on which lake?

Superior: all 29 men aboard died, and the mystery of the sinking inspired Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 hit song.

Which river is the natural outlet of the Great Lakes, carrying their water to the ocean?

St. Lawrence River: since its Seaway opened in 1959, ocean-going ships can sail up it from the Atlantic as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota.

Which is the only one of the Great Lakes located entirely within the United States?

Michigan: after sewage kept washing into the lake that supplied its drinking water, Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900.

Which city in New York State lies at the eastern end of Lake Erie, the shallowest Great Lake?

Buffalo: storm winds blowing along the shallow lake can pile its water up there by several feet, flooding the shore.

Lake Victoria shares its water among Tanzania, Uganda and which other country?

Kenya: the Nile perch, introduced into the lake in the 1950s, has greatly reduced its native cichlid fish.

Which African lake is the world's longest freshwater lake?

Tanganyika: in 1871 Henry Morton Stanley 'found' the explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji, on its eastern shore.

Which lake, home to hundreds of species of cichlids, has more species of fish than any other lake?

Malawi: cut off from other waters, its fish evolved into hundreds of species found nowhere else.

Which Scottish loch holds more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined?

Ness: its most famous monster photo, the 1934 'surgeon's photograph', was revealed in 1994 as a hoax using a toy submarine.

Which loch is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area?

Lomond: it lies across the Highland edge, so glaciers cut a deep, narrow trench in the hard northern rock but spread wide over the softer south.

Which is the largest lake in England, lying in the Lake District?

Windermere: in 1930 Sir Henry Segrave set a world water speed record on it, but died of injuries from the attempt.

Which poet, who settled at Grasmere in the Lake District, wrote 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'?

William Wordsworth: the poem grew from an 1802 walk with his sister Dorothy, who wrote in her journal of a long belt of daffodils along the lake shore.

Crater Lake fills a caldera left by the collapse of which volcano?

Mount Mazama: winds carried ash from its eruption as far as southern Canada.

Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States, is in which state?

Oregon: the lake's trout and salmon are not native; people stocked them there starting in 1888.

The Dead Sea, whose shores are the lowest land on Earth, lies between Israel and which country?

Jordan: human water use has sent the lake's level plunging, so the lowest land on Earth keeps getting lower.

Which clifftop fortress overlooking the Dead Sea was the Jewish rebels' last stand against Rome?

Masada: to break in, Roman troops built a siege ramp up to its walls, and that ramp still stands today.

Which vast Ice Age lake that covered much of Utah shares its name with a famous land speed racetrack?

Bonneville: its old shorelines still ring the surrounding foothills as flat benches, like bathtub rings.

Robert Smithson's 1970 land artwork Spiral Jetty coils into which body of water in the American West?

Great Salt Lake: soon after it was built the jetty sank beneath the water, reappearing for long only when drought lowered the lake decades later.

Lake Como in northern Italy has a shape that resembles which letter?

An inverted Y: in April 1945 partisans captured the fleeing dictator Benito Mussolini near Dongo, on its shore.

A holiday of ghost-story writing beside which lake produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

Geneva: the summer of 1816 was so cold and stormy that the friends stayed indoors, where Lord Byron proposed the contest.

Lake Constance, the Bodensee, borders Germany, Switzerland and which third country?

Austria: in 1900 the first Zeppelin airship made its maiden flight over the lake, from a floating hangar near Friedrichshafen.

Why did Central Asia's Aral Sea shrink to a fraction of its former size?

Soviet irrigation diverted its rivers: starved of that water, the sea shrank so far that it split into separate lakes.

A lake in the Sahel borders Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and which fourth country?

Chad: drought and heavy water use shrank the lake's open water from about 25,000 square km in the 1960s to about 1,500 by the early 2000s.

Lake Mead, the reservoir near Las Vegas, was created by which dam?

Hoover Dam: the rising lake behind it swallowed the town of St. Thomas, whose last resident left in 1938.

Which reservoir on the Zambezi River lies along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe?

Kariba: filling it drowned the Kariba Gorge and forced the valley's river dwellers to resettle.

Lake Volta, held back by the Akosombo Dam, lies entirely within which country?

Ghana: creating the lake flooded hundreds of villages and forced roughly 80,000 people to resettle.

A U-shaped pool left behind when a river meander is cut off is called what?

Oxbow: the lake is named for its curved shape, like the bow-shaped wooden collar of an ox's harness.

A kettle lake forms in a hollow left by what?

A buried block of ice: kettles deep enough to reach the water table hold lasting lakes, while shallower ones can dry out in summer.

Lake Vostok, hidden beneath nearly 4 km of ice, lies under which landmass?

Antarctica: Russian scientists drilling from Vostok Station above it finally broke through to the lake's water in 2012.

In 1986 Cameroon's Lake Nyos suddenly released a cloud of which gas, killing more than 1,700 people?

Carbon dioxide: it had built up under high pressure in the lake's deep water, and degassing pipes have since been installed to vent it.

Lake Kivu lies on the border between Rwanda and which country?

DR Congo: since 2016 a Rwandan plant has extracted methane from the lake's deep water to generate electricity.

Which ancient Egyptian temples were moved to higher ground in the 1960s to escape the rising waters of Lake Nasser?

Abu Simbel: engineers took both temples apart and rebuilt them about 60 metres higher than their original site.

Lake Retba, near Dakar in Senegal, is famous for water of which unusual colour?

Pink: microbes that thrive in its extremely salty water make a red pigment, and thousands of workers harvest its salt.

Lake Turkana, in the Great Rift Valley, is the world's largest lake of which kind?

Permanent desert: rivers such as the Omo flow in, but with no outlet the lake loses water only to evaporation, so it is brackish.

After the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, which US naval commander reported, 'We have met the enemy and they are ours'?

Oliver Hazard Perry: when his flagship was wrecked, he moved to the Niagara and sailed it straight into the British line to win.

Lake Toba in Indonesia is the world's largest lake of which type?

Volcanic: after its supervolcano's last great eruption about 74,000 years ago, the caldera floor slowly rose, forming the huge island of Samosir.

Which lake in northwestern Russia is the largest lake located entirely in Europe?

Ladoga: during the WWII siege of Leningrad, routes across the lake, including winter ice roads, were the city's lifeline.

Which lake in Hungary is the largest in Central Europe?

Balaton: during the Cold War, families split by the Berlin Wall often met on its shores, since both East and West Germans could holiday there.

Lake Bled, with its tiny church-topped island, is in which country?

Slovenia: visitors to the island church climb a long stone stairway and pull a bell to make a wish.

The Plitvice Lakes, a chain of lakes joined by waterfalls, form a national park in which country?

Croatia: minerals from the flowing water keep building natural tufa dams, so the lakes and waterfalls go on growing.

Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is famous for frequent night-time displays of what?

Lightning: the storms flash so reliably that people on the water have long used them like a lighthouse to find their way at night.

What was the US hockey team's 1980 Lake Placid upset called?

Miracle on Ice: that win did not decide the gold; two days later the US team beat Finland to clinch it.

The Salton Sea in southern California formed around 1905 when floodwater poured in from which river?

Colorado River: closing the break took until 1907, so for about two years the river kept flowing into the basin.

In 1980 Louisiana's Lake Peigneur drained after a Texaco rig drilled into what?

A salt mine: the lake drained into its tunnels, swallowing barges and the drilling rig, yet no one was killed.

Which British explorer reached Lake Victoria in 1858 and named it after his queen?

John Hanning Speke: he was hunting for the headwaters of the Nile, and the Nile does flow out of this lake.

Which drink is New York's Finger Lakes region especially noted for producing?

Wine: the lakes moderate the local climate, which helps the region's grapes grow.

Uyuni, high in the Andes, is a vast expanse of what kind of landscape?

Salt flat: the brine under its crust holds vast amounts of lithium, though getting that metal to market has proved difficult.

Lake Wobegon, a fictional small town in Minnesota, was created by which writer?

Garrison Keillor: he ended his radio show A Prairie Home Companion in 1987, but brought it back a few years later and hosted it until 2016.

In many Arthurian tales, what does the Lady of the Lake give King Arthur?

The sword Excalibur: in English tellings, as Arthur lay dying, Sir Bedivere cast it back into the water.

Which composer wrote the ballet Swan Lake, first performed by the Bolshoi in 1877?

Tchaikovsky: its first production was not a success, and the ballet won lasting popularity only after an 1895 revival in St. Petersburg.

The 1999 comedy-horror film Lake Placid features a giant what terrorising a Maine lake?

Crocodile: Betty White plays a lakeside widow who, it turns out, has been feeding it cows.

Stone from the old London Bridge was used to build a bridge in Arizona beside which lake?

Lake Havasu City's founder, Robert McCulloch, bought the bridge in 1968 on a hunch that the famous British landmark would draw people to his new town.

Lakes of liquid hydrocarbons have been photographed on the surface of which moon?

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a liquid cycle like Earth's water cycle: hydrocarbons rain from its clouds, fill its lakes and seas, and evaporate back into the sky.

A lake with no river or outlet draining it to the sea is described by which term?

Endorheic lakes lose water only by evaporation or seepage, so the minerals that inflowing water carries in stay behind and build up over time.

Which shark lives in freshwater Lake Nicaragua, reaching it from the Caribbean up the San Juan River?

Bull sharks were long presumed trapped in Lake Nicaragua, until tagging in the late 1960s showed them swimming between the lake and the sea.

Which is the largest lake lying entirely within Canada?

Great Bear Lake's Eldorado mine, shut by 1940, was secretly reopened in 1942 to extract uranium for the Allied war effort.

Which Canadian lake is the deepest in North America?

Great Slave Lake plunges 614 metres, and gold found on its north shore in the 1930s set off a mining rush there.

What is the cold, dense bottom layer of a thermally stratified lake called?

The hypolimnion gets too little sunlight for photosynthesis and stops mixing with the warm surface layer in summer, so no oxygen is made there and a long-stratified bottom can turn anoxic.

The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City, was built on an island in which lake?

Lake Texcoco held the island where, in Aztec legend, the wandering Mexica saw the sign promised for their new city: an eagle perched on a cactus.

Minnesota calls itself the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but which state has more than 400,000 natural lakes?

Alaska has more than 409,000 natural lakes of at least a hectare, yet only about 3,200 of them have official names.

Which East Coast state has no natural lakes at all, largely because Ice Age ice sheets never reached it?

Maryland's best-known lake, Deep Creek, is a reservoir completed in 1925 to drive a hydroelectric plant.

Which future traitor commanded the American fleet at the 1776 Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain?

Benedict Arnold lost most of his ships, but the fight held up the British advance so long that they withdrew north for the winter.

The Old Man of the Lake, bobbing upright in Crater Lake since at least 1896, is what kind of object?

A tree trunk about 30 feet tall, the Old Man floats vertically and wanders with the wind. In one 1938 study it travelled more than 60 miles.

Engineers reversed the flow of which city's river in 1900 to keep sewage out of its drinking water?

Chicago had been sending sewage into the lake it drank from, spreading diseases such as typhoid. Since 1900 its river has drained toward the Mississippi instead.

Which sport did Ralph Samuelson invent in 1922 on Lake Pepin, a wide stretch of the Mississippi River?

Water skiing began with a pair of boards for skis and a clothesline for a towrope. Samuelson then spent 15 years performing shows around the country.

The Corleone family's lakeside compound in The Godfather Part II was filmed at an estate on which lake?

Tahoe's Fleur de Lac estate hosted the scenes. Straddling California and Nevada, it is the largest alpine lake in North America.

Which rock and roll star played his final show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, in February 1959?

Buddy Holly left the ballroom for a chartered plane that crashed shortly after take-off, a night remembered as the Day the Music Died.

North Dakota's largest reservoir is named for which Native American woman who travelled with famous explorers?

Sacagawea, spelled Sakakawea on the map, joined Lewis and Clark. Her reservoir, filled behind Garrison Dam from 1953, is the third largest in the United States by volume.

Which island in Lake Huron has barred almost all motor vehicles since the 1890s, leaving horses and bicycles?

Mackinac Island acted after carriage drivers complained that the first automobiles startled their horses. Emergency and service vehicles and winter snowmobiles are the exceptions.

The Cuyahoga River famously caught fire in 1969 just before emptying into Lake Erie at which Ohio city?

Cleveland's river had caught fire at least a dozen times before. Coverage of the 1969 blaze helped bring about the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Which reservoir on the Utah–Arizona border, held back by Glen Canyon Dam, is named for a one-armed explorer?

Powell honours the Civil War major who lost an arm at Shiloh and in 1869 led the first official expedition through the Grand Canyon.

The Lake of the Ozarks, a serpentine reservoir with about 1,150 miles of shoreline, lies in which state?

Missouri's Bagnell Dam on the Osage River created the lake in 1931, and its twisting outline earned it a dragon nickname.

Which California lake is known for limestone tufa towers, exposed after Los Angeles began tapping its feeder streams?

Mono Lake's falling level stranded the towers, which had formed underwater. A citizens' committee later won a legal battle forcing the city to partly refill it.

Which doomed group of pioneers spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound beside a Sierra Nevada lake now named for them?

The Donner Party lost nearly half of its members that winter, and some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.

Which small lake in northern Minnesota is where the Mississippi River officially begins its journey?

Itasca is an invented name, coined by an explorer from the Latin phrase veritas caput, which he intended to mean 'true head'.

Jenny Lake and Jackson Lake lie at the foot of which jagged Wyoming mountains?

The Teton Range rises straight above both lakes, the only two in Grand Teton National Park where motorboats are allowed.

Niagara Falls sends the outflow of four Great Lakes plunging toward which lake, the last before the sea?

Ontario is the smallest Great Lake by surface area, yet it holds more than three times as much water as shallow Erie.

Which shallow, cypress-filled lake was formed when the ground sank during the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12?

Reelfoot filled a stretch of land that subsided during quakes so strong that the shocks were felt as far away as Quebec.

Which Massachusetts reservoir, built in the 1930s to supply Boston, required the flooding of four entire towns?

Quabbin displaced about 2,500 people and drowned the towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott; it then took until 1946 to fill.

Which five-letter word do schoolchildren use to remember the names of all five Great Lakes?

HOMES spells out the initials of the five lakes, which together hold about a fifth of the world's surface fresh water.

Which national park's namesake lake is the largest freshwater lake above 7,000 feet in North America?

Yellowstone Lake freezes over by early December under ice nearly three feet thick, except where shallow water lies over hot springs.

The reservoir behind Washington's Grand Coulee Dam is named for which US president, who championed the dam?

Franklin Roosevelt backed the legislation that created the dam, and the reservoir was renamed in his honour five days after his death in 1945.

The 1981 film On Golden Pond was shot on Squam Lake in which New England state?

New Hampshire supplied the lake, though the screenwriter had spent his own summers on Great Pond in Maine. The water was so low that the actors could have stood up in the scene where they cling to rocks.

Lake Lanier, a reservoir on the Chattahoochee River behind Buford Dam, lies in which state?

Georgia's lake began filling in 1956 and hosted the rowing events of the 1996 Summer Olympics; Alabama and Florida also hold rights to its water.

Which fort between Lake Champlain and Lake George did Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys seize in May 1775?

Ticonderoga's cannons were hauled to Boston that winter, where they helped force the British to evacuate the city in March 1776.

The 1889 collapse of the South Fork Dam emptied Lake Conemaugh, a millionaires' retreat, onto which steel town?

Johnstown lost 2,208 people to a surge that briefly matched the flow of the Mississippi. The lake's owners, a club of wealthy industrialists, were never held liable.

Which Atlantic fish invaded the Great Lakes, probably through shipping canals, and attacked their lake trout?

Sea lamprey are such efficient parasites that each one can kill about 40 pounds of fish during a feeding period of 12 to 18 months.

Which New Deal agency, created in 1933, made Norris Dam and its reservoir its first major project?

The Tennessee Valley Authority was set up to bring development and flood control to its region, and named the dam for Nebraska senator George Norris, a champion of public power.

Which dance film used the hotel at Virginia's Mountain Lake as Kellerman's, its Catskills holiday resort?

Dirty Dancing made the lake famous, but its water leaks away through its fissured bed: from 2008 to 2020 it shrank to little more than a muddy pit before refilling.

Which Prince film features a famous prank scene at a lakeside he falsely calls Lake Minnetonka?

Purple Rain gave the lake its best-known pop culture link. Prince himself had rented a house on its shore between 1979 and 1981.

Which valley in Yosemite National Park was dammed in 1923 to supply San Francisco, despite a long Sierra Club fight?

Hetch Hetchy was flooded after a seven-year struggle led by the naturalist Muir, who warned that the reservoir would leave an ugly 'bathtub ring' on the canyon walls.

Which port city sits at the westernmost point of the Great Lakes, farther inland than any other seaport?

Duluth, one of the Twin Ports along with its Wisconsin neighbour, has the largest and busiest port on the Great Lakes.

Which village at the foot of Otsego Lake in New York is home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame?

Cooperstown was founded by the father of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who grew up in the frontier village beside the lake.

Minnesota's Northwest Angle, the northernmost point of the lower 48 states, is cut off by which body of water?

Lake of the Woods holds more than 14,500 islands, and the Angle can be reached from the rest of the state only by crossing the water or driving through Canada.

Which island national park in the largest Great Lake is closed all winter and famous for its wolves and moose?

Isle Royale's wolves and moose have been tracked since 1958, the longest predator-prey study ever run. In winter the researchers are the only people on the island.

Which author set the climax of Their Eyes Were Watching God during the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane?

Zora Neale Hurston drew on a real storm whose surge pushed the lake out over hundreds of square miles, drowning at least 2,500 people.

Cornell University in Ithaca sits above the southern end of which of New York's Finger Lakes?

Cayuga is the longest of the Finger Lakes, though its neighbour Seneca is marginally larger in surface area.

Which California lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, dried up by 1899 but returned in 2023?

Tulare dried up as its tributaries were turned onto farmland, yet it has flooded back in the wettest years, including 1983 and 1997.

A floating bridge certified as the world's longest crosses Lake Washington to link which city with its eastern suburbs?

Seattle's record-setting span opened in 2016 on 77 concrete pontoons, and two more floating bridges cross the same lake.

Lady Bird Lake, a river-like reservoir named for a former First Lady, runs through the centre of which Texas city?

Austin created the lake in 1960 as a cooling pond for a new power plant, and many locals know it by its old name, Town Lake.

Lake McDonald, reached by the Going-to-the-Sun Road, is the largest lake in which national park?

Glacier's biggest lake is about 10 miles long and 472 feet deep, and is named for a fur trader who carved his name near its shore in 1878.

The Erie Triangle was sold by the federal government to give which state a freshwater port on Lake Erie?

Pennsylvania had only a strip of lake coast under four miles long, so in 1792 it bought the 300-square-mile Triangle from the federal government for about 75 cents an acre.

The US Navy tests submarine sonar in landlocked Lake Pend Oreille, in the panhandle of which state?

Idaho's largest lake is more than 1,100 feet deep, which gives it acoustic properties similar to the open ocean.

Which Ice Age lake in Montana repeatedly burst its ice dam, scouring the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington?

Missoula emptied and refilled dozens of times as the ice dam re-formed, sending floods down the Columbia River as far as the Willamette Valley.

Which adult-education movement of the late 1800s took its name from the New York lake where it began in 1874?

Chautauqua assemblies sprang up across North America within a decade, bringing speakers, musicians, showmen and preachers to whole communities.

Which lake at the foot of Mount St. Helens was left with a vast raft of floating logs by the 1980 eruption?

Spirit Lake was thrown from its bed by the eruption's landslide, and the wave ran as much as 850 feet up the slopes, sweeping the hillside forest back into the water.

Which US city, on the waterway linking Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, is named after the French word for strait?

Detroit began as a French fort in 1701, and its river was known in French as 'the strait of Lake Erie'.

Which Canadian singer-songwriter's 1976 hit ballad retold the sinking of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald?

Gordon Lightfoot drew on a Newsweek article published two weeks after the wreck, and the song peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Water spilling south from Lake Okeechobee in the wet season forms which vast, slow-moving Florida wetland?

Everglades water moves as a sheet 60 miles wide and more than 100 miles long, creeping south across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay.