50 free The Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the only one of the five Great Lakes that lies entirely within the United States?
Michigan
The other four form the water boundary between the US and Canada; Michigan is also the largest lake by area that sits inside a single country.
Q 02Roughly what share of the world's surface fresh water do the Great Lakes contain?
21%
That is about six quadrillion US gallons; spread evenly across North America the water would stand five feet deep.
Q 03Which lake is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area?
Superior
By volume it ranks only third, 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
They sit at the same elevation, and geographers sometimes call the combined 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
Its western basin is so shallow that, as one account puts it, the slightest breeze can kick up lively waves.
Q 06Which Great Lake has the smallest surface area?
Ontario
Despite its small footprint it holds more water than Erie, and its Rochester Basin plunges to 802 feet.
Q 07The Great Lakes began to form at the end of the last glacial period as which ice sheet retreated?
Laurentide
The glaciers carved the basins and their meltwater filled them, creating vanished ancestors such as Lake Algonquin and Glacial Lake Iroquois along the way.
Q 08The name Superior comes from French explorers who called it 'lac supérieur'. What did they mean by it?
The upper lake
It was simply above Lake Huron in elevation on their route in; the Ojibwe name, Gichigami, means 'great water'.
Q 09Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha uses which name for Superior, borrowed from Ojibwe?
Gitche Gumee
It is a rendering of the Ojibwe Gichigami, 'great water'; the same spelling turns up in a famous 1976 folk ballad about a lost freighter.
Q 10Because of its huge volume, water entering Lake Superior stays there on average for roughly how long?
191 years
There is enough water in the lake to cover all of North and South America to a depth of about a foot.
Q 11The name Erie derives from an Iroquoian word meaning what?
Long tail
The Erie people who gave the lake its name were destroyed or absorbed by the Iroquois in the 17th century.
Q 12The word Michigan is believed to come from an Ojibwe word meaning what?
Great water
The word is 'mishigami'; the Straits of Mackinac take their name from Michilimackinac, understood to mean Place of the Great Turtle.
Q 13The Hurons, after whom Lake Huron is named, are also known by what name?
Wyandot
The French themselves often called the lake La Mer Douce, the fresh-water sea; a 1656 map labels it Karegnondi.
Q 21What cargo was the Edmund Fitzgerald carrying on her final voyage?
Iron ore pellets
For 17 years she hauled the iron-ore pellets from Minnesota's Iron Range to steel mills in Detroit and Toledo; loading took about four and a half hours.
Q 22What were the last words radioed by the Fitzgerald's captain, Ernest McSorley, before the ship vanished?
We are holding our own
He was answering the freighter Arthur M. Anderson, which was trailing behind and lost the Fitzgerald from radar minutes later.
Q 23Which Canadian singer turned the Fitzgerald's sinking into a hit ballad in 1976?
Gordon Lightfoot
Q 14The largest island in any inland body of water in the world sits in Lake Huron. What is it called?
Manitoulin
It is big enough to hold Lake Manitou, the world's largest lake on a freshwater island, which in turn holds islands of its own.
Q 15The largest island in Superior, and the second largest in the whole Great Lakes, is which national park?
Isle Royale
The park was established in 1940, has no permanent residents, and is famous for the long-running study of its wolves and moose.
Q 16Georgian Bay, sometimes called the 'sixth Great Lake', is an arm of which of the five?
Huron
Its 30,000 Islands inspired the Group of Seven painters, and Samuel de Champlain overwintered on its shores in 1615.
Q 17Which US state has the longest Great Lakes shoreline?
Michigan
Michigan touches four of the five lakes; walking every Great Lakes shoreline would be about the same as going halfway round the equator.
Q 18Le Griffon, the first known sailing ship on the upper Great Lakes, was built in 1679 for which explorer?
La Salle
It was also the first ship to sink in Lake Michigan, and rival wrecks found in 2004 and 2014 have both been claimed as the Griffon.
Q 19Which body of water briefly became America's official 'sixth Great Lake' in March 1998?
Champlain
The clause in a Sea Grant reauthorisation bill was signed by President Clinton and quietly reversed after Midwestern outrage.
Q 20The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Superior on November 10 of which year?
1975
All 29 crew were lost and no bodies were recovered; when launched in 1958 she was the largest ship on the lakes and remains the largest to have sunk there.
He wrote it after reading a Newsweek article titled 'The Cruelest Month'; the ship's bell, raised in 1995, is displayed at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
Q 24The stretch of Superior's shore between Grand Marais, Michigan and Whitefish Point is nicknamed what?
Graveyard of the Great Lakes
More ships have been lost around Whitefish Point than anywhere else on the lake, and the wrecks are now protected as an underwater preserve.
Q 25Roughly how many died in the November 1913 'White Hurricane', the deadliest storm in Great Lakes history?
More than 250
Nineteen ships were destroyed and nineteen more stranded, with Lake Huron taking the worst of it on November 9.
Q 26Niagara is a group of three waterfalls. Which is the largest?
Horseshoe
About 90% of the river's summer flow goes over Horseshoe, which straddles the border and is the most powerful waterfall in North America.
Q 27The Niagara River, which creates the falls, drains which of the Great Lakes into which?
Erie to Ontario
The drop is why Ontario sits far lower than the other four lakes and why a canal had to be dug to bypass the falls.
Q 28Who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, in October 1901?
A 63-year-old schoolteacher
Annie Edson Taylor sent her cat over first to test the barrel; she survived and told reporters 'No one ought ever do that again.'
Q 29The only recorded time Niagara Falls stopped flowing was caused by what, in March 1848?
An ice jam
The falls ran dry for hours; in 1969 engineers deliberately diverted the river away from the American Falls for months to study erosion.
Q 30The Soo Locks let ships pass between Superior and the lower lakes. On which waterway are they built?
St. Marys
The first locks opened in 1855; the Army Corps of Engineers runs them today and charges no toll.