65 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.