The Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario
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100 free The Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free The Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario trivia questions with answers. The Great Lakes hold about a fifth of the planet's surface fresh water, and the stories piled up around them are just as deep: a ship that sank with all hands and became a folk ballad, a river that caught fire and launched the environmental movement, a canal that made New York City, and a lake that spent 18 days as an honorary Great Lake in 1998. This quiz starts easy (which lake is entirely inside the United States, what mnemonic spells the five names) and gets tough fast: how long water lingers in Lake Superior, which lake has the world's largest freshwater island, who first went over Niagara in a barrel, and what the Fitzgerald's captain said in his final radio message. It covers geology, geography, shipping, the Seaway and the Erie Canal, invasive species, lake-effect snow and the cities on the shores. Use it for a Midwest-themed pub quiz round, a geography lesson or a family car ride to the lake. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
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Q 01Which is the only one of the five Great Lakes that lies entirely within the United States?
Michigan
Michigan lies wholly in the US because the 1783 Treaty of Paris ran the new border through the middle of the other four lakes, leaving this one entirely on the American side.
Q 02Roughly what share of the world's surface fresh water do the Great Lakes contain?
21%
21% is the usual figure: about six quadrillion gallons, enough to cover the contiguous United States in more than nine feet of water.
Q 03Which lake is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, though only third by volume?
Superior
Superior ranks only third by volume, behind Baikal in Siberia and Tanganyika in East Africa; the Caspian Sea is bigger but brackish.
Q 04Which two Great Lakes are hydrologically a single body of water, joined at the Straits of Mackinac?
Michigan and Huron
Michigan and Huron sit at the same level, and geographers sometimes count them as one lake, Michigan-Huron, which by that reckoning is the world's largest freshwater lake by area.
Q 05Which Great Lake is the shallowest, the smallest by volume and the warmest?
Erie
Erie averages only about 60 feet deep, so it warms quickly in summer and freezes over more readily in winter than its deeper neighbours.
Q 06Which Great Lake has the smallest surface area?
Ontario
Ontario covers about 7,340 square miles, the least of the five, yet its 802-foot maximum depth lets it hold more than three times the water of the next-smallest lake.
Q 07The Great Lakes began to form at the end of the last glacial period, as which ice sheet receded?
Laurentide
The Laurentide Ice Sheet carved the basins and its meltwater filled them, creating vanished ancestors such as Lake Algonquin and Glacial Lake Iroquois.
Q 08French explorers named Superior 'lac supérieur', by which they meant what?
The upper lake
The upper lake: the French reached it by way of Lake Huron and named it for lying above that lake, and English speakers later borrowed the word as Superior.
Q 09Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha uses which name for Superior, borrowed from Ojibwe?
Gitche Gumee
Gitche Gumee is Longfellow's spelling of the Ojibwe Gichigami; he drew the poem's Ojibwe names and legends largely from the books of the Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Q 10Water that flows into Lake Superior stays there for roughly how long before draining out?
Two centuries
Two centuries is about right: Superior's retention time is 191 years, because the flow through its single outlet is tiny next to the lake's volume.
Q 11Lake Erie is named for the Erie people, the French 'Cat Nation'; their name, erielhonan, is usually translated as what?
Long tail
Long tail is the usual reading of erielhonan, though whether the animal meant was a cougar or a raccoon is disputed; the Erie themselves were broken up by the Iroquois in the 1650s.
Q 12The name Michigan is believed to come from the Ojibwe word mishigami, which means what?
Great water
Great water, or 'big lake', is the usual gloss of mishigami, though dictionaries hedge it with a 'perhaps'; the name belonged to the lake long before it passed to the state.
Q 13The Hurons, after whom Lake Huron is named, are also known by what name?
Wyandot
Q 21What cargo was the Edmund Fitzgerald carrying on her final voyage?
Iron ore pellets
Iron ore pellets, known as taconite, filled her hold; the Coast Guard's inquiry concluded that water got in through poorly sealed hatches and flooded that cargo hold until she sank.
Q 22What calm last message did Captain Ernest McSorley radio before the Edmund Fitzgerald vanished?
We are holding our own
'We are holding our own' answered the freighter Arthur M. Anderson, which was trailing behind and lost the Fitzgerald from radar minutes later.
Q 23Which Canadian singer-songwriter turned the sinking of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald into a hit 1976 ballad?
Gordon Lightfoot
Wyandot comes from Wendat, the people's own name; 'Huron' was a French label, and after Iroquois attacks broke up their confederacy around 1649, survivors regrouped as the Wyandot.
Q 14Which Lake Huron island is the largest island in any lake in the world?
Manitoulin
Manitoulin's eastern end, Wiikwemkoong, remains unceded land: its people refused to sign the 1862 treaty that opened the rest of the island to settlers.
Q 15Which island, a national park, is the largest in Superior and the second largest in the Great Lakes?
Isle Royale
Isle Royale became a national park in 1940; wolves reached it across an ice bridge from Canada in the late 1940s, and their struggle with its moose is now the longest-running predator-prey study anywhere.
Q 16Georgian Bay, sometimes called the 'sixth Great Lake', is an arm of which of the five?
Huron
Huron's Georgian Bay is nearly walled off from the main lake by the Bruce Peninsula and a chain of islands, which is why it can pass for a lake of its own.
Q 17Which US state borders both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario?
New York
New York is the only state on both lakes; neighbouring Pennsylvania reaches only Erie, on a wedge of shore it bought from the federal government in 1792 that holds its one Great Lakes port.
Q 18Le Griffon, the first known sailing ship on the upper Great Lakes, was built in 1679 for which explorer?
La Salle
René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle had the Griffon built near Niagara in 1679; she vanished that September on her return from Green Bay with a cargo of furs.
Q 19Which body of water briefly became America's official 'sixth Great Lake' in March 1998?
Champlain
Champlain got the status from one line in a Sea Grant funding bill that President Clinton signed on 6 March 1998; the definition let colleges on its shores apply for the programme's research money.
Q 20The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Superior on November 10 of which year?
1975
She went down on 10 November 1975 in a Superior gale about 17 miles from Whitefish Bay, taking all 29 crew; launched in 1958, she was then the largest ship on the lakes.
Gordon Lightfoot's ballad made the Fitzgerald the most famous wreck on the lakes; her bell, raised in 1995, now stands in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum as a memorial to the crew.
Q 24The stretch of Superior's shore between Grand Marais, Michigan and Whitefish Point is nicknamed what?
Graveyard of the Great Lakes
Graveyard of the Great Lakes is no exaggeration: storms, fog and heavy traffic meet here, and west of Whitefish Bay a ship caught in a gale has no natural harbour to run for.
Q 25What nickname was given to the November 1913 storm, the deadliest in Great Lakes history?
The White Hurricane
The White Hurricane caught the Weather Bureau off guard with its force; on Lake Huron alone, eight ships went down with every man aboard in a single day.
Q 26Niagara Falls is really three waterfalls; which one, straddling the US–Canada border, is the largest?
Horseshoe
Horseshoe Falls carries about 90% of the river's flow, and that force keeps cutting the cliff back: the falls now stand about seven miles upstream of where they began.
Q 27The Niagara River, which creates the falls, drains which of the Great Lakes into which?
Erie to Ontario
Erie to Ontario: the Niagara River runs north between them and drops more than 320 feet on the way, which is why Ontario lies so far below the other four lakes.
Q 28What was the day job of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to ride a barrel over Niagara Falls and live?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor made the plunge on her birthday in 1901 in search of fame and fortune; she survived, but the money she hoped for never came.
Q 29What reduced Niagara Falls to a trickle for more than a day in March 1848?
An ice jam
An ice jam upstream held back the river for more than a day; in 1969 engineers built a dam that left the American Falls dry for months while they studied the rock beneath.
Q 30The Soo Locks, which let ships pass between Superior and the lower lakes, are built on which river?
St. Marys
St. Marys River tumbles through rapids as it leaves the lake, so travellers long had to portage around them; the first modern lock, finished in 1855, let ships ride past instead.