60 free Lake Superior trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free Lake Superior trivia questions with answers. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area, big enough to swallow Austria, and this quiz treats it as the world of its own that it is. You will cover the geography (how deep, how cold, how long water stays), the shipwrecks and storms that made the Whitefish Point coast infamous, the Edmund Fitzgerald in detail, and the towns and parks around the shore: Duluth, Thunder Bay, Marquette, the Keweenaw, Isle Royale, Pictured Rocks and the Apostle Islands. It is written for people who live on or visit the lake, for pub-quiz hosts in the Upper Midwest and Northern Ontario, and for anyone who has ever hummed the Gordon Lightfoot song. Questions run from easy to genuinely hard, so a table of mixed ages can play together. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question carries its source, so if a fact surprises you, you can go and read where it came from.
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Q 01Lake Superior drains east into which of the other Great Lakes?
Huron
The water then works its way through the lower lakes to the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. Superior sits highest of the five, which is where its French name came from.
Q 02Lake Superior is the world's largest freshwater lake by surface area. By volume, where does it rank?
Third
Only two lakes hold more fresh water, both of them far deeper rift lakes. The Caspian Sea beats it on both counts but is brackish, so it does not qualify.
Q 03Which two lakes hold more fresh water than Lake Superior?
Baikal and Tanganyika
Both are ancient rift-valley lakes more than a kilometre deep. Superior is huge but relatively shallow for its size, averaging under 500 feet.
Q 04The Ojibwe name for the lake, gichi-gami, which Longfellow wrote as 'Gitche Gumee', means what?
Great sea
Father Frederic Baraga's 1853 dictionary, the first for the Ojibwe language, recorded it as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami. Gordon Lightfoot borrowed the same spelling as Longfellow.
Q 05Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set which poem 'by the shining Big-Sea-Water' of Gitche Gumee?
The Song of Hiawatha
Longfellow never saw the lake; he built the poem largely from Henry Schoolcraft's writings on Ojibwe legends. Its galloping trochaic metre was borrowed from the Finnish Kalevala.
Q 06The 17th-century French name 'le lac supérieur' described the lake as what, relative to Lake Huron?
Upper
Some Jesuits preferred Lac Tracy, after a French official. The British kept 'Superior' after 1760 because, they said, it was superior in magnitude to any lake on the continent.
Q 07At about 31,700 square miles, Lake Superior's surface is roughly the size of which European country?
Austria
It is also about the size of South Carolina. Its shoreline, islands included, runs 2,726 miles.
Q 08What is Lake Superior's maximum depth?
1,333 ft
The deepest point lies more than 700 feet below sea level, the second-lowest spot in the interior of the continental United States. Limnologist J. Val Klump was the first person to reach it, in 1985.
Q 09How long does a drop of water stay in Lake Superior on average before flowing out?
191 years
That retention time is why pollutants linger and why the lake stays so clear and nutrient-poor. Lake Erie, by contrast, flushes in under three years.
Q 10Below about 660 feet, Lake Superior's water sits at an almost constant temperature of what?
39 °F (4 °C)
Twice a year the whole column reaches that same temperature and the lake fully mixes top to bottom, which is called being dimictic. Fresh water is densest at 4 °C, so the deep layer never gets colder.
Q 11There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America to what depth?
About 12 inches
That is roughly 2,900 cubic miles of water, about a tenth of the world's surface fresh water. Storm waves on it have topped 30 feet.
Q 12What is the largest island in Lake Superior?
Isle Royale
It is big enough to hold lakes of its own, some of which contain their own islands. Ryan Island in Siskiwit Lake is the largest island-in-a-lake-on-an-island in the lake.
Q 13The park on the lake's largest island is famous for a long study of which predator and prey?
Wolves and moose
Q 21A 9-foot statue outside Thunder Bay marks where which Canadian abandoned his 1980 cross-country run?
Terry Fox
He had run 143 days and more than 5,000 km on a prosthetic leg when his cancer returned. The lookout sits above the Trans-Canada Highway on the lake's north shore.
Q 22Which cinnamon-bun pastry with pink icing is a local invention of Thunder Bay?
The Persian
The city also claims the 'shag', a combined shower-and-stag party for engaged couples. Locals argue about whether the icing is raspberry or strawberry.
Q 23In what year did the first Soo Locks open at Sault Ste. Marie?
1855
The State Lock was run by Michigan before being handed to the federal government. Ships had previously been portaged around the rapids on rollers.
Neither animal lived there historically; the moose swam or walked over ice around 1900 and the wolves crossed an ice bridge in the late 1940s. It is the only known place the two coexist without bears.
Q 14In what year was the national park on Lake Superior's largest island established?
1940
Once it became a park, logging ended and small Scandinavian fishing communities were removed. Today it has no permanent inhabitants and closes completely for the winter.
Q 15Duluth, Minnesota, is named after which French explorer?
Sieur du Lhut
Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, explored the western end of the lake in 1679. His name was anglicized several ways before the city settled on its spelling.
Q 16Duluth's Aerial Bridge, built in 1905, was the first of what kind of bridge in the United States?
Transporter
A gondola hanging from the span ferried up to 350 people, streetcars and wagons across the ship canal. It was rebuilt as a vertical-lift bridge in 1929-1930, which is how it works today.
Q 17Which musician was born in Duluth in 1941?
Bob Dylan
He grew up down the road in Hibbing on the Iron Range. The Broadway musical Girl from the North Country sets his songs in Depression-era Duluth.
Q 18The Port of Duluth is the world's farthest inland port that can be reached by what?
Oceangoing ships
Ships reach it via the St. Lawrence Seaway, more than 2,300 miles from the Atlantic. It is also the busiest port on the Great Lakes.
Q 19Thunder Bay, Ontario, was created on 1 January 1970 by merging Fort William with which other city?
Port Arthur
The two towns had feuded since the railway arrived, and the new name was chosen by referendum in 1969. Picking the name caused more argument than the merger itself.
Q 20Ojibwe legend identifies the Sleeping Giant on the Sibley Peninsula as which figure turned to stone?
Nanabozho
The legend says he was petrified when the location of the Silver Islet mine was revealed to white men. Canadians voted the Giant seventh in the CBC's Seven Wonders of Canada, ahead of Niagara Falls.
Q 24The Soo Locks lift ships across roughly what height difference between Lake Superior and the lake below?
25 ft
The drop happens over the rapids of the St. Marys River. The Poe Lock, rebuilt in 1968, is the only one able to take the largest 1,000-foot lakers.
Q 25More ships have been lost near Whitefish Bay than anywhere else on Lake Superior. What is that shore nicknamed?
Graveyard of the Great Lakes
The wrecks there are now protected as an underwater preserve for divers. Storms in November 1905 and November 1913 each claimed multiple ships.
Q 26The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank on November 10, 1975, about 15 nautical miles from which cape?
Whitefish Point
The cape is now home to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and a bird observatory. The wreck lies in about 530 feet of water, broken in two.
Q 27How many crew members died when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down?
29
No bodies were recovered. Mariners' Church in Detroit rang its bell once for each man the next day, and rang it once more when Gordon Lightfoot died in 2023.
Q 28What cargo was the Edmund Fitzgerald carrying on its final voyage from Superior, Wisconsin?
Taconite pellets
She had hauled the iron-ore pellets from Minnesota's Iron Range to steel mills for 17 years. Loading took about four and a half hours; unloading took 14.
Q 29Which singer-songwriter recorded 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'?
Gordon Lightfoot
He wrote it after reading a Newsweek article about the sinking and later changed a lyric when the cause was reassessed. Its line about the lake never giving up her dead is literally true.
Q 30In 1995 divers in an atmospheric suit recovered what from the Edmund Fitzgerald, leaving a replica in its place?
The ship's bell
Canadian engineer Phil Nuytten's Newtsuit did the job. The replica is engraved with the names of the 29 crew, and the diver also left a beer can in the pilothouse.