Five lakes holding a fifth of the world's fresh water
The five Great Lakes on the border of the United States and Canada, SUPERIOR, MICHIGAN, HURON, ERIE and ONTARIO, hold about a fifth of all the fresh water on the surface of the planet. Lake Superior alone is the largest freshwater lake by area in the world, and it holds enough water to cover the whole of North and South America about thirty centimetres deep. The lakes are so big that they make their own weather, dumping heavy snow on towns downwind, and have storms with waves over eight metres high. More than six thousand ships have been wrecked on them.
Michigan and Huron are really one lake, joined by a wide strait, and some geographers count them as the single largest lake. Minnesota, next door, calls itself the land of ten thousand lakes, and actually has more than eleven thousand.
The deepest and oldest lake
Lake BAIKAL in Siberia is the deepest lake in the world, over 1,600 metres at its deepest point, and one of the oldest, around 25 million years old. Because it is so deep, it holds more water than all five Great Lakes put together, about a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on Earth. It is home to thousands of species found nowhere else, including the nerpa, one of the only seals in the world that live entirely in fresh water. In winter it freezes so thick that people drive across it.
Baikal lies in a rift, a crack where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart, and so does Lake TANGANYIKA in Africa, the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest. Other lakes fill hollows scraped out by glaciers; Finland has around 188,000 of them. Crater lakes fill the tops of old volcanoes.
Islands made of reeds
Lake TITICACA, on the border of Peru and Bolivia, lies about 3,800 metres above sea level and is often called the highest navigable lake in the world. The Uros people live on floating islands they build from bundles of reeds, adding fresh layers on top as the bottom ones rot away.
The monster that was a toy
LOCH NESS in Scotland is long, narrow and very deep, and it holds more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined. Its famous monster became world news in 1934, when a newspaper printed a photograph of a long neck rising from the water. Sixty years later, one of the men involved admitted it had been a toy submarine with a model head. People still look for Nessie. The Caspian, the largest lake of all, is covered on our oceans page.
Lakes in the grid
Lake VICTORIA, the largest lake in Africa, feeds the White Nile. WINDERMERE is the largest natural lake in England, in the Lake District. Lake GENEVA, on the border of Switzerland and France, has a fountain that shoots water 140 metres into the air. COMO and GARDA are in the Italian Alps, and TAHOE, in the Sierra Nevada, is famous for water so clear you can see far down into it. A RESERVOIR is a lake made by damming a river. Each SHORE may have a PIER, a JETTY or a small INLET, and every RIPPLE on the FRESHWATER surface is made by wind.